"what once seemed unthinkable — that Mr. Trump could win the Republican nomination — is being treated by many within the Republican establishment as a serious possibility."
The rule changes, which were intended to hasten the nominating process, have failed to narrow a sprawling field while potentially aiding Donald J. Trump’s chances.
No employer in Los Angeles County's unincorporated areas will be exempt from paying the county's new minimum wage, the supervisors decided Tuesday.
Supervisors Don Knabe and Michael Antonovich had proposed exemptions for nonprofit organizations and companies that hired seasonal or transitional workers, but the proposals were rejected by a majority of the board.
"You're fired" is about to be replaced with "you're terminated."
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking over as host of NBC's "The Celebrity Apprentice" for the 2016-17 season, after the network axed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump this summer following his incendiary comments about Mexican immigrants.
"You may have recently seen that after Trump said the Bible is his favorite book, he couldn’t name a single Bible verse or passage that meant something to him. And we all know why, because it’s all just a show, and he hasn’t ever read the Bible. But you know why he hasn’t read the Bible? Because he’s not in it."
You may have recently seen that after Trump said the Bible is his favorite book, he couldn’t name a single Bible verse or passage that meant something to him. And we all know why, because it’s all just a show, and he hasn’t ever read the Bible. But you know why he hasn’t read the Bible? Because he’s not in it.
Nic, plan on traffic on the west side being extra-fucked-up that day.
Donald Trump, the celebrity GOP presidential candidate who has stumped campaign pundits by drawing huge crowds and maintaining a steady lead in the polls, will speak Sept. 15 at the Battleship USS Iowa in San Pedro.
Trump is expected to draw a crowd of 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to the sponsors of the event, Veterans for a Strong America.
I still recall the days of preschool for my oldest daughter. I remember wanting to desperately enrich her life in any way possible – to give her an edge before she even got to formal schooling. I put her in a preschool that was academic in nature – the focus on pre-reading, writing, and math skills. At home, I bought her special puzzles, set up organized play dates with children her age, read to her every night, signed her up for music lessons, put her in dance, and drove her to local museums. My friends and I even did “enrichment classes” with our kids to practice sorting, coloring, counting, numbers, letters, and yes….even to practice sitting! We thought this would help prepare them for kindergarten.
Like many other American parents, I had an obsession: academic success for my child. Only, I was going about it completely wrong. Yes, my daughter would later go on to test above average with her academic skills, but she was missing important life skills. Skills that should have been in place and nurtured during the preschool years. My wake-up call was when the preschool teacher came up to me and said, “Your daughter is doing well academically. In fact, I’d say she exceeds expectations in these areas. But she is having trouble with basic social skills like sharing and taking turns.” Not only that, but my daughter was also having trouble controlling her emotions, developed anxiety and sensory issues, and had trouble simply playing by herself!
Little did I know at the time, but my daughter was far from being the only one struggling with social and sensory issues at such a young age. This was becoming a growing epidemic. A few years ago, I interviewed a highly respected director of a progressive preschool. She had been teaching preschoolers for about 40 years and had seen major changes in the social and physical development of children in the past few generations.
“Kids are just different,” she started to say. When I asked her to clarify, she said, “They are more easily frustrated – often crying at the drop of a hat.” She had also observed that children were frequently falling out of their seats “at least three times a day,” less attentive, and running into each other and even the walls. “It is so strange. You never saw these issues in the past.”
She went on to complain that even though her school was considered highly progressive, they were still feeling the pressure to limit free play more than she would like in order to meet the growing demands for academic readiness that was expected before children entered kindergarten.
Research continues to point out that young children learn best through meaningful play experiences, yet many preschools are transitioning from play-based learning to becoming more academic in nature. A preschool teacher recently wrote to me: “I have preschoolers and even I feel pressure to push them at this young age. On top of that, teachers have so much pressure to document and justify what they do and why they do it, the relaxed playful environment is compromised. We continue to do the best we can for the kid’s sake, while trying to fit into the ever-growing restraints we must work within.”
As parents and teachers strive to provide increasingly organized learning experiences for children (as I had once done), the opportunities for free play – especially outdoors is becoming less of a priority. Ironically, it is through active free play outdoors where children start to build many of the foundational life skills they need in order to be successful for years to come.
In fact, it is before the age of 7 years — ages traditionally known as “pre-academic” — when children desperately need to have a multitude of whole-body sensory experiences on a daily basis in order to develop strong bodies and minds. This is best done outside where the senses are fully ignited and young bodies are challenged by the uneven and unpredictable, ever-changing terrain.
Preschool years are not only optimal for children to learn through play, but also a critical developmental period. If children are not given enough natural movement and play experiences, they start their academic careers with a disadvantage. They are more likely to be clumsy, have difficulty paying attention, trouble controlling their emotions, utilize poor problem-solving methods, and demonstrate difficulties with social interactions. We are consistently seeing sensory, motor, and cognitive issues pop up more and more in later childhood, partly because of inadequate opportunities to move and play at an early age.
What is our natural instinct as adults when issues arise? To try and fix the problem that could have been prevented in the first place. When children reach elementary school, we practice special breathing techniques, coping skills, run social skill groups, and utilize special exercises in an attempt to “teach” children how to be still and to improve focus.
However, these skills shouldn’t have to be taught, but something that was developed at a young age in the most natural sense — through meaningful play experiences.
If children were given ample opportunities to play outdoors every day with peers, there would be no need for specialized exercises or meditation techniques for the youngest of our society. They would simply develop these skills through play. That’s it. Something that doesn’t need to cost a lot of money or require much thought. Children just need the time, the space, and the permission to be kids.
Let the adult-directed learning experiences come later. Preschool children need to play!
I like politics and I like watching television, so naturally I love TV shows about Washington. The sentimental favorite, of course, is The West Wing, a show in which politics is about the Big Ideas and Big Issues that brought most of us to DC in the first place. The most exciting is House of Cards, where plots and intrigues keep you bingeing to the end. But the most realistic, by far, is HBO's Veep, which, though broad in its satirical arcs, correctly catches the absurdity and triviality that dominates the daily lives of the most important people in government.
The treasure trove of Hillary Clinton emails that have been dribbling out this year show just how profoundly right Armando Iannucci's show gets Washington.
The case of the gefilte fish
This missive prompted much guffawing and speculation from Jewish media Twitter on Monday night, as dreams of Clinton shopping for Seder dinner danced before our eyes. The reference is to a minor contretemps in which Clinton, at the behest of former Illinois Rep. Don Manzullo, was trying to get the Israeli ambassador to intercede with the Israeli government in order to allow a shipment of frozen carp to enter Israel for processing into gefilte fish balls before Passover.
Neither Ambassador Michael Oren nor Hillary Clinton thought this was an important issue worth spending time on, and yet both were inexorably sucked into a petty dispute of no actual significance.
Meanwhile, the capital of Ukraine has traditionally been spelled Kiev, but there's been a push more recently to spell it Kyiv, which is more a transliteration of the Ukrainian (as opposed to Russian) Cyrillic characters. Getting this wrong is exactly the sort of thing that could cause a pointless international controversy (see gefilte fish, above), so spelling it Kyev — which is wrong according to everyone — works as a nice compromise.
Making travel plans is hard
In this lengthy exchange, Secretary Clinton tries and fails to change her flight to New York.
Hillary can't Google
Veteran DC principals get so hooked on staff that they for some reason find it easier to send emails asking people to look things up for them than to simply Google the title of Human Rights Watch reports (or TV show start times) for themselves.
The IT department ruins everything
Here we see Clinton's devious plan to use an off-label email address and server essentially foiled by a lowly help desk employee who is confused by the whole thing.
Of course, this is not to say that nothing dark and conspiratorial ever happens in Washington.
Clinton did, after all, genuinely cook up a complicated scheme to circumvent the State Department's email procedures and route her work onto a private server. But while the House of Cards version of the email caper would have led to a secret backchannel communications path to some shadow operators, the Veep-y reality is that it completely backfired. Clinton, like most people, didn't want a lot of folks rifling through her emails. And yet for the past 12 hours that's exactly what every reporter in Washington has been doing — in part because there's no real news happening this week, but also because the cloak-and-dagger setup makes the emails themselves seem more interesting than they perhaps really are.
Kanye West gave a long rant at the MTV Video Music Awards as he apologized to Taylor Swift for taking her microphone in 2009, admitting "I don't understand awards shows" and claiming he would run for president in 2020.
Swift presented West with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award on Sunday night at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
THERE are many unspoken postulates in literary criticism, one being that the more one writes, the less remarkable one’s work is apt to be. Joyce Carol Oates, the author of more than 50 novels (not counting the 11 written under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), understands perfectly how little use critics have for prolific writers. In one of her journals she wrote that she seemed to create “more, certainly, than the literary world allows for a ‘serious’ writer.”
As with most postulates dealing with subjective perceptions, the idea that prolific writing equals bad writing must be treated with caution. Mostly, it seems to be true. Certainly no one is going to induct the mystery novelist John Creasey, author of 564 novels under 21 different pseudonyms, into the Literary Hall of Heroes; both he and his creations (the Toff, Inspector Roger West, Sexton Blake, etc.) have largely been forgotten.
The same is true of the British novelist Ursula Bloom (over 500 published works, under many pseudonyms), Barbara Cartland (over 700) and a host of others. One is reminded of Truman Capote’s famous bon mot about Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Stephen King is taking readers’ questions about writing and creativity. You can ask him a question in the comments with this article or on the Times Opinion Facebook page.
Yet some prolific writers have made a deep impression on the public consciousness. Consider Agatha Christie, arguably the most popular writer of the 20th century, whose entire oeuvre remains in print. She wrote 91 novels, 82 under her own name and nine under a nom de plume — Mary Westmacott — or her married name, Agatha Christie Mallowan.
Those novels may not be literary, but they are far above the porridge turned out by John Creasey, and some of them are strikingly good. Christie gave us two characters — Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot — who have achieved a kind of immortality. Add to this the stylistic and thematic unity of Christie’s novels (the cozy warmth of the settings and the British stereotypes, placed within the context of her surprisingly cold appraisal of human nature), and one must view those many books in a different light.
The same can be said of the prolific, mid-20th-century writer John D. MacDonald. His Travis McGee novels now seem embarrassingly dated, and many of his over 40 stand-alone novels are an indigestible mix of Ernest Hemingway and John O’Hara, but when MacDonald forgot about his literary heroes and wrote strictly for himself, he did striking work. The best of his novels, “The End of the Night” and “The Last One Left,” rise to the level of that shape-shifting beast we call American literature.
No one in his or her right mind would argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes me as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.
Then consider the other end of the spectrum. Donna Tartt, one of the best American novelists to emerge in the last 50 years, has published just three novels since 1992. Jonathan Franzen, the only American novelist who is her equal, has published five (his latest, “Purity,” will appear on Tuesday).
It is easy to look at those few books, each of extraordinary quality, and conclude that the fewer the better. Perhaps: The recently retired Philip Roth wrote multiples more than the two of them combined, and “Our Gang” was pretty awful. But then, “American Pastoral” seems to me a much finer novel than either Ms. Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” or Mr. Franzen’s “Freedom.”
I’m a recovering alcoholic, haven’t had a drink in almost 27 years, and these days the thought of drinking rarely crosses my mind. Yet when I think about those eight novels by Ms. Tartt and Mr. Franzen — not enough to fill even a quarter of a library bookshelf — I’m reminded of a lunch I had with my wife not too long after I sobered up.
There were two older ladies at a nearby table. They were conversing with great animation over their meals, while their half-finished glasses of white wine stood forgotten in the middle of the table. I felt a strong urge to rise from my place and speak to them. Only that’s not right. I felt an urge to actually hector them. To say, “Why don’t you drink your wine? It’s sitting right there, for Christ’s sake. Some of us can’t drink wine, we don’t have that privilege, but you can, so why the heck don’t you do it?”
As far as I'm concerned, Stephen King, you could never be too productive! I would love another novel from you along the order of the Stand...
JPGeerlofs
Given the current market, I have to assume that like me, most writers of fiction are compelled to write, to be in a story, a parallel world,...
JBC
Authors should write when they feel they cannot help but do so. Whether those works get published and find an audience is out of their...
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The long gaps between books from such gifted writers make me similarly crazy. I understand that each one of us works at a different speed, and has a slightly different process. I understand that these writers are painstaking, wanting each sentence — each word — to carry weight (or, to borrow the title of one of Jonathan Franzen’s finest novels, to have strong motion). I know it’s not laziness, but respect for the work, and I understand from my own work that haste makes waste.
But I also understand that life is short, and that in the end, none of us is prolific. The creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn’t produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.
This is not a roundabout way of justifying my own prolificacy. Yes, I’ve published more than 55 novels. Yes, I have employed a pseudonym (Richard Bachman). Yes, I once published four books in one year (shades of James Patterson … except mine were longer, and written without the aid of a collaborator). And yes, I once wrote a novel (“The Running Man”) in a single week. But I can say, with complete honesty, that I never had any choice.
As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled “Fire!” and everyone scrambles for the exits at once. I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter. There were days — I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating — when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane. Back then, in my 20s and early 30s, I thought often of the John Keats poem that begins, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain …”
I imagine it was that way with Frederick Schiller Faust, better known as Max Brand (and best known as the creator of Dr. Kildare). He wrote at least 450 novels, a feat rendered more remarkable by his ill health and premature death at the age of 51. Alexandre Dumas wrote “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers” — and some 250 other novels. And there’s Isaac Asimov, who sold his first short story at 19, hammered out more than 500 books, and revolutionized science fiction.
My thesis here is a modest one: that prolificacy is sometimes inevitable, and has its place. The accepted definition — “producing much fruit, or foliage, or many offspring” — has an optimistic ring, at least to my ear.
Not everyone feels that way. I remember a party where some self-appointed arbiter of literary taste joked that Joyce Carol Oates was like the old lady who lived in a shoe, and had so many children she didn’t know what to do. In truth, Ms. Oates knows exactly what she is doing, and why she is doing it. “I have more stories to tell,” she writes in her journals, and “more novels.” I’m glad of that, because I want to read them.
Stephen King is the author, most recently, of “Finders Keepers,” the second volume in the Bill Hodges trilogy.
A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2015, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Can a Novelist Be Too Prolific?. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Los Angeles: out to prove that it's way dumber than Boston.
A City Council committee gave its support Friday to a possible city bid to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles.
Council President Herb Wesson said a vote by the full council would likely come on Tuesday to approve a legally binding contract, called a joinder, with the U.S. Olympic Committee that would allow Los Angeles to be chosen as the USOC's bid city.
- Hoping to settle the debate once and for all at a rally in South Carolina, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump asked a supporter to tell the crowd that his hair is real. ()
- Hoping to settle the debate once and for all at a rally in South Carolina, Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump asked a supporter to tell the crowd that his hair is real. ()
Trump invites supporter onstage to do hair 'inspection' (1:21)
Anybody who's been following closer than me able to briefly recap the argument for the other side on this?
I'm normally a huge fan of most things Obama does, and I'm no neo-con, but I gotta say that this deal sounds like an awful idea to me (24-day notice of inspections? Seriously?).
The purpose of war, military or economic, is to get your enemy to do something it would rather not do. Over the past several years the United States and other Western powers have engaged in an economic, clandestine and political war against Iran to force it to give up its nuclear program.
Over the course of this siege, American policy makers have been very explicit about their goals. Foremost, to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Second, as John Kerry has said, to force it to dismantle a large part of its nuclear infrastructure. Third, to take away its power to enrich uranium.
Fourth, as President Obama has said, to close the Fordo enrichment facility. Fifth, as the chief American negotiator, Wendy Sherman, recently testified, to force Iran to come clean on all past nuclear activities by the Iranian military. Sixth, to shut down Iran’s ballistic missile program. Seventh, to have “anywhere, anytime 24/7” access to any nuclear facilities Iran retains. Eighth, as Kerry put it, to not phase down sanctions until after Iran ends its nuclear bomb-making capabilities.
As a report from the Foreign Policy Initiative exhaustively details, the U.S. has not fully achieved any of these objectives. The agreement delays but does not end Iran’s nuclear program. It legitimizes Iran’s status as a nuclear state. Iran will mothball some of its centrifuges, but it will not dismantle or close any of its nuclear facilities. Nuclear research and development will continue.
Iran wins the right to enrich uranium. The agreement does not include “anywhere, anytime” inspections; some inspections would require a 24-day waiting period, giving the Iranians plenty of time to clean things up. After eight years, all restrictions on ballistic missiles are lifted. Sanctions are lifted once Iran has taken its initial actions.
Wars, military or economic, are measured by whether you achieved your stated objectives. By this standard the U.S. and its allies lost the war against Iran, but we were able to negotiate terms that gave only our partial surrender, which forces Iran to at least delay its victory. There have now been three big U.S. strategic defeats over the past several decades: Vietnam, Iraq and now Iran.
The big question is, Why did we lose? Why did the combined powers of the Western world lose to a ragtag regime with a crippled economy and without much popular support?
The first big answer is that the Iranians just wanted victory more than we did. They were willing to withstand the kind of punishment we were prepared to mete out.
Further, the Iranians were confident in their power, while the Obama administration emphasized the limits of America’s ability to influence other nations. It’s striking how little President Obama thought of the tools at his disposal. He effectively took the military option off the table. He didn’t believe much in economic sanctions. “Nothing we know about the Iranian government suggests that it would simply capitulate under that kind of pressure,” he argued.
The president concluded early on that Iran would simply not budge on fundamental things. As he argued in his highhanded and counterproductive speech Wednesday, Iran was never going to compromise its sovereignty (which is the whole point of military or economic warfare).
“The president hoped that a deal would change the moral nature of the regime, so he had an extra incentive to reach a deal.”Here we are...
Dan Stewart
"Iran will use its $150 billion windfall to spread terror around the region and exert its power. ...
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The president hoped that a deal would change the moral nature of the regime, so he had an extra incentive to reach a deal. And the Western, Russian and Chinese sanctions regime was fragile while the Iranians were able to hang together.
This administration has given us a choice between two terrible options: accept the partial-surrender agreement that was negotiated or reject it and slide immediately into what is in effect our total surrender — a collapsed sanctions regime and a booming Iranian nuclear program.
Many members of Congress will be tempted to accept the terms of our partial surrender as the least bad option in the wake of our defeat. I get that. But in voting for this deal they may be affixing their names to an arrangement that will increase the chance of more comprehensive war further down the road.
Iran is a fanatical, hegemonic, hate-filled regime. If you think its radicalism is going to be softened by a few global trade opportunities, you really haven’t been paying attention to the Middle East over the past four decades.
Iran will use its $150 billion windfall to spread terror around the region and exert its power. It will incrementally but dangerously cheat on the accord. Armed with money, ballistic weapons and an eventual nuclear breakout, it will become more aggressive. As the end of the nuclear delay comes into view, the 45th or 46th president will decide that action must be taken.
Economic and political defeats can be as bad as military ones. Sometimes when you surrender to a tyranny you lay the groundwork for a more cataclysmic conflict to come.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, gestures while he makes way with European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, center, for a round of talks, in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, July 28, 2015.
By
GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press
Published: Aug 19, 2015 at 10:15 AM PDT
VIENNA (AP) - Iran, in an unusual arrangement, will be allowed to use its own experts to inspect a site it allegedly used to develop nuclear arms under a secret agreement with the U.N. agency that normally carries out such work, according to a document seen by The Associated Press.
The revelation is sure to roil American and Israeli critics of the main Iran deal signed by the U.S., Iran and five world powers in July. Those critics have complained that the deal is built on trust of the Iranians, a claim the U.S. has denied.
The investigation of the Parchin nuclear site by the International Atomic Energy Agency is linked to a broader probe of allegations that Iran has worked on atomic weapons. That investigation is part of the overarching nuclear deal.
The Parchin deal is a separate, side agreement worked out between the IAEA and Iran. The United States and the five other world powers that signed the Iran nuclear deal were not party to this agreement but were briefed on it by the IAEA and endorsed it as part of the larger package.
Without divulging its contents, the Obama administration has described the document as nothing more than a routine technical arrangement between Iran and the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency on the particulars of inspecting the site.
Any IAEA member country must give the agency some insight into its nuclear program. Some countries are required to do no more than give a yearly accounting of the nuclear material they possess. But nations- like Iran - suspected of possible proliferation are under greater scrutiny that can include stringent inspections.
But the agreement diverges from normal inspection procedures between the IAEA and a member country by essentially ceding the agency's investigative authority to Iran. It allows Tehran to employ its own experts and equipment in the search for evidence for activities that it has consistently denied - trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Evidence of that concession, as outlined in the document, is sure to increase pressure from U.S. congressional opponents as they review the July 14 Iran nuclear deal and vote on a resolution of disapproval in early September. If the resolution passed and President Barack Obama vetoed it, opponents would need a two-thirds majority to override it. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has suggested opponents will likely lose.
The White House has denied claims by critics that a secret "side deal" favorable to Tehran exists. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said the Parchin document is like other routine arrangements between the agency and individual IAEA member nations, while IAEA chief Yukiya Amano told Republican senators last week that he is obligated to keep the document confidential.
But Republican critics are bound to harshly criticize any document that cedes to Iran the right to look for the very nuclear wrongdoing that it has denied committing. Olli Heinonen, who was in charge of the Iran probe as deputy IAEA director general from 2005 to 2010 ,said he can think of no instance where a country being probed was allowed to do its own investigation.
Iran has refused access to Parchin for years and has denied any interest in - or work on - nuclear weapons. Based on U.S., Israeli and other intelligence and its own research, the IAEA suspects that the Islamic Republic may have experimented with high-explosive detonators for nuclear arms at that military facility and other weapons-related work elsewhere.
The IAEA has repeatedly cited evidence, based on satellite images, of possible attempts to sanitize the site since the alleged work stopped more than a decade ago.
The document seen by the AP is a draft that one official familiar with its contents said doesn't differ substantially from the final version. He demanded anonymity because he isn't authorized to discuss the issue.
It is labeled "separate arrangement II," indicating there is another confidential agreement between Iran and the IAEA governing the agency's probe of the nuclear weapons allegations.
The document suggests that instead of carrying out their own probe, IAEA staff will be reduced to monitoring Iranian personnel as these inspect the Parchin site.
Iran will provide agency experts with photos and videos of locations the IAEA says are linked to the alleged weapons work, "taking into account military concerns."
That wording suggests that - beyond being barred from physically visiting the site - the agency won't even get photo or video information from areas Iran says are off-limits because they have military significance.
IAEA experts would normally take environmental samples for evidence of any weapons development work, but the agreement stipulates that Iranian technicians will do the sampling.
The sampling is also limited to only seven samples inside the building where the experiments allegedly took place. Additional ones will be allowed only outside of the Parchin site, in an area still to be determined.
"Activities will be carried out using Iran's authenticated equipment consistent with technical specifications provided by the agency," the agreement says. While the document says that the IAEA "will ensure the technical authenticity" of Iran's inspection, it does not say how.
The draft is unsigned but the signatory for Iran is listed as Ali Hoseini Tash, deputy secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for Strategic Affairs instead of an official of Iran's nuclear agency. That reflects the significance Tehran attaches to the agreement.
Iranian diplomats in Vienna were unavailable for comment, while IAEA spokesman Serge Gas said the agency had no immediate comment.
The main focus of the July 14 deal between Iran and six world powers is curbing Iran's present nuclear program that could be used to make weapons. But a subsidiary element obligates Tehran to cooperate with the IAEA in its probe of the allegations.
The investigation has been essentially deadlocked for years, with Tehran asserting the allegations are based on false intelligence from the U.S., Israel and other adversaries. But Iran and the U.N. agency agreed last month to wrap up the investigation by December, when the IAEA plans to issue a final assessment on the allegations.
Both Iran and the IAEA were upbeat when announcing the agreement last month. But Western diplomats from IAEA member nations who are familiar with the probe are doubtful that Tehran will diverge from claiming that all its nuclear activities are - and were - peaceful, despite what they say is evidence to the contrary.
They say the agency will be able to report in December. But that assessment is unlikely to be unequivocal because chances are slim that Iran will present all the evidence the agency wants or give it the total freedom of movement it needs to follow up the allegations.
Still, the report is expected to be approved by the IAEA's board, which includes the United States and other powerful nations that negotiated the July 14 agreement. They do not want to upend their July 14 deal, and will see the December report as closing the books on the issue.
Senate Appropriations Committee subcommittee chairman Lindsay Graham, a Republican presidential hopeful, last week asked for "any and all copies of side agreements between Iran and the IAEA associated with the Iran nuclear deal." He threatened to cut off U.S. funding for the U.N. agency otherwise.
">• Governor Bobby Jindal: "I realize that the best way to make news is to mention Donald Trump. ... So, I've decided to randomly put his name into my remarks at various points, thereby ensuring that the news media will cover what I have to say." "
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
President Obama's "agreement" with Iran looks very much like "the emperor's new clothes." We are supposed to pretend there is something there, when there is nothing there that will stop, or even slow down, Iran's development of a nuclear bomb.
The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact that most Americans are NOT the descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants. Millions of immigrants from Europe had to stop at Ellis Island, and had to meet medical and other criteria before being allowed to go any further.
Gov. Bobby Jindal: "I realize that the best way to make news is to mention Donald Trump. ... So I've decided to randomly put his name into my remarks at various points, thereby ensuring that the news media will cover what I have to say." Jindal's outstanding record in Louisiana should have gotten him far more attention from the media than Trump's bombast.
In her book, "Adios, America!" Ann Coulter says, "If Romney had won 71% of the Hispanic vote in 2012, instead of 27%, he still would have lost. On the other hand, had he won just 4% more of the white vote, he would have won."
Despite an old saying that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, an absolute majority of the record-breaking tax money collected by the federal government today is simply transferred by politicians from people who are not likely to vote for them to people who are likelier to vote for them.
Do the people who are always demanding that there be more "training" for police ever say that the hoodlums that the police have to deal with should have had more training by their parents, instead of being allowed to grow wild, like weeds?
Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in.
There are so many conservative Republican candidates for the party's presidential nomination that they may once again split the conservative vote so many ways as to guarantee that the nomination will go to some mushy moderate.
Barack Obama wrote a book titled "The Audacity of Hope." His own career, however, might more accurately be titled "The Mendacity of Hype."
With all its staggering horrors and insanities, World War II may yet turn out to have been just a dress rehearsal for the ultimate catastrophe of a nuclear-armed terrorist nation like Iran. We seem oblivious to the possibility that we may be leaving our children and grandchildren at the mercy of people who have demonstrated repeatedly that they have no mercy.
No matter how many laws Hillary Clinton may have violated by using her own personal email account to do her work as secretary of state, she is unlikely to face any legal consequences. President Obama can pardon her, as he can pardon Lois Lerner or the head of the Internal Revenue Service or others who may have violated federal laws during his administration.
When Jeb Bush allowed hecklers shouting "black lives matter" to drive him off the stage in Las Vegas, he may have given us a clue as to what kind of president he would be. We ignored too many clues about Obama before putting him in the White House. There is no excuse for ignoring clues about another candidate now. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan letting hecklers drive him off the stage?
Donald Trump has credited his political donations with getting Hillary Clinton to come to his wedding. What kind of man would want her at his wedding, much less boast of having her there?
A salute to Bill O'Reilly for being one of the few people in the media to talk plain common sense about the disintegration of the black family, and the resulting social problems that followed.
Ronald Reagan won two landslide victories with the help of "Reagan Democrats." These were voters who usually voted for Democrats but were now voting for Reagan. He got these voters by winning them over to his policy agenda — not by adjusting his policy agenda to them, as the Republican establishment today seems to think is the way to expand its constituency.
Let Hellary know that you 'care' about all the thousands of emails on her personal servers.
Let her know you are very angry that she handled federal government classified materials in such an irresponsibile way, putting our nation's security at risk!
Share with her you believe she should be criminally prosecuted and held accountable and responsible for breaking our nation's laws!
CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Wednesday, August 20, 2014 2:11PM EDT
CTV’s Los Angeles Bureau Chief Tom Walters was among several journalists arrested Tuesday night in Ferguson, Missouri.
Walters was detained after trying to ask a question of Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol. Walters’s arrest was captured on video camera by CTV News cameraman Liam Hyland.
The veteran journalist was released Wednesday morning without being charged.
A reporter from Turkish television was also among the journalists arrested Tuesday night.
A number of journalists have been detained while covering the protests in Ferguson, the first being a reporter from the Washington Post last Wednesday.
In a discussion about their exchange afterwards, Trump told CNN’s Don Lemon: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” a comment that many understood to be him trying to insult Kelly by suggesting she was challenging him because she was on her period.
“I was going to say, nose, and/or ears. Because that’s a very common statement,” he said. “Blood flowing out of somebody’s nose, and remember she had great anger when she was questioning me.”
But his claims have done little to quell the social media users currently tweeting at Trump with details about where they are in their cycle to prove that menstruation can never be used as an insult against a woman.
In typical Trump fashion, he also branded the right wing blogger who cancelled an upcoming performance over his perception that Trump was referring to periods a “total loser”. He has yet to reply to the new #periodsarenotinsults campaign, launched by Femsplain founder Amber Gorden, although his Twitter track record suggests we won't have to wait long for a response.
"“Trump’s base is more the people who used to have season tickets to the Roman Coliseum,” Mr. McQuaid wrote. “Not sure that they vote in great numbers, but they like blood sport.”"
Hi folks,
I just got back from three weeks in Maine. Time to go onto TOR and click the "mark all as read" button.
Joel
Donald J. Trump’s suggestion that a Fox News journalist had forcefully questioned him at the Republican presidential debate because she was menstruating cost him a speaking slot Saturday night at an influential gathering of conservatives in Atlanta. It also raised new questions about how much longer Republican Party leaders would have to contend with Mr. Trump’s disruptive presence in the primary field.
With Mr. Trump at center stage, the event Thursday shattered television viewership records for primary debates: Nearly 24 million people watched. But any hopes that he would try to reinvent himself inside the Cleveland arena as a sober-minded statesman, or that he would collapse under scrutiny and tough questions, vaporized in the opening minutes.
By the weekend, as Mr. Trump’s latest eruption rippled through Republican circles, the conversation had turned to whether the party, and his rival presidential contenders, should continue to accommodate his candidacy, quietly hoping that this would be the moment he burned out — or should try to run him out on a rail.
If party leaders saw danger in provoking a breakup — and no small advantage to be seized from the ratings bonanza Mr. Trump showed himself capable of delivering — there were signs that other influential Republicans would tolerate only so much in the way of provocations from Mr. Trump.
His escalating barrage at Megyn Kelly of Fox News — who, at the debate, invoked the Democratic accusation of a Republican “war on women” in grilling him about sexist, and sexually suggestive, insults he had publicly directed at women — prompted Erick Erickson, the leader of RedState, a prominent group of conservative activists, to disinvite Mr. Trump from the group’s forum.
Friday night on CNN, Mr. Trump complained of Ms. Kelly’s disposition toward him at the debate, saying, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
Just before midnight, Mr. Erickson — an author with his own track record of inflammatory remarks, sometimes about women — wrote on the RedState website that he admired Mr. Trump for his bluntness and for connecting with “so much of the anger in the Republican base.”
“But there are even lines blunt talkers and unprofessional politicians should not cross,” he wrote. “Decency is one of those lines.” He added, “I just don’t want someone on stage who gets a hostile question from a lady and his first inclination is to imply it was hormonal.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign shot back at Mr. Erickson, calling him a “weak and pathetic leader” and his decision “another example of weakness through being politically correct.”
Other Republican contenders, who had mainly shied away from taking Mr. Trump on in the debate, seemed to be grappling with how strongly to respond to an inflammatory attack on a popular anchor at a network beloved by conservatives.
Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive who delivered perhaps the most assertive turn in Thursday’s debate among the candidates trailing in the polls, expressed support for Ms. Kelly late Friday and posted on Twitter: “Mr. Trump: There. Is. No. Excuse.”
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went further, saying, “Enough already with Mr. Trump.”
“As a party, we are better to risk losing without Donald Trump than trying to win with him,” said Mr. Graham, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics.
Yet in a sign of the lingering reluctance among some in the field to anger Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, spoke glowingly about Ms. Kelly at the RedState gathering Saturday morning but avoided criticizing Mr. Trump or saying whether he was bad for the Republican Party.
In an interview Friday afternoon, before he went on CNN, Mr. Trump sent conflicting signals about his intentions, saying he was irritated by the debate moderators’ questions about a third-party candidacy but reiterating his threat to mount one if he is unhappy with his treatment by Republican leaders.
An independent candidacy would be complicated and costly, he said, but “if you’re rich, it’s doable.”
Some Republicans were trying to determine just who was rallying to Mr. Trump’s side, and how damaging it would be if they left the party’s fold.
“Trump isn’t and wasn’t going to get the conservative vote,” Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of the Union Leader newspaper in New Hampshire, said in an email. “Conservative Republicans are worried about their party, but it’s still their party. Trump isn’t philosophically a conservative, and that will come out.”
“Trump’s base is more the people who used to have season tickets to the Roman Coliseum,” Mr. McQuaid wrote. “Not sure that they vote in great numbers, but they like blood sport.”
But others on the right said the disaffected voters rallying to Mr. Trump represented a constituency that Republicans would be foolish not to pay heed to.
“People have to get their minds wrapped around the fact that the seething fury at the leadership of the Republican Party is real, and it’s going to bubble over somehow with somebody, and right now it’s with Trump,” said the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, noting that there were “a lot of ticked-off people out there who are willing to throw both parties into the fire.”
Mr. Erickson himself got a taste of Mr. Trump’s die-hard loyalists, recounting in a speech at the conference Saturday that he had received a vitriolic response to his decision to bar Mr. Trump.
“We will not gain the White House,” said Mr. Erickson about the inflammatory messages he had received, “if we’re screaming at people, calling them whores and queer and the N-word.”
Even before Friday night, prominent Republican women said they were worried about how female voters would respond to Mr. Trump’s prominence on the debate stage, where he defended imprecations like “fat pigs” and “bimbo” to describe women — and his rivals did not chide him.
But Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Ms. Kelly had been harsh with him because she was menstruating caused a new bout of consternation among senior Republican leaders, who saw it as the latest evidence that they would not be able to fully conduct a primary campaign as long as he was overwhelming the race.
“We need to nominate somebody who can win, somebody who is substantive and somebody who knows how to govern,” said former Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. “But we can’t have that debate in the full jacket as long as we’re sidetracked off on this Trump exercise. It does undermine our ability to have a substantive debate. All the substantive arguments are being muted by his persona.”
Still, Mr. Gregg said that while RedState was wise to bar him from its event, the party would only “make him an even larger figure” by trying to keep him out of future debates. “He’d love that,” Mr. Gregg said. “He loves when institutional forces take him on. That’s part of his shtick.”
He added: “The campaign is serious, but his campaign isn’t. It’s entertainment. What’s the line of decency in the entertainment world? It’s pretty far out there.”
Some in the party have mused privately about using Mr. Trump’s refusal to rule out an independent bid as grounds to bar him from future debates, but there is deep concern that such a heavy-handed effort would only prod him into pursuing such a run.
It also appeared unlikely that any network could be persuaded to exclude him. As Mr. Trump crowed Friday in a telephone interview, “I’m a ratings machine.”
At the RedState gathering in Atlanta, there was resignation to the likelihood that Mr. Trump would continue to draw support from voters looking to rage against the political establishment. But some of the grass-roots activists in attendance described him as a jester, not a threat.
David Pettigrew, a retiree from Milledgeville, Ga., said he knew many conservatives who regretted voting for Ross Perot in 1992 out of frustration with President George Bush. (Mr. Perot’s third-party candidacy is widely believed to have helped tilt the election to Bill Clinton.) But he said he doubted Mr. Trump could win over enough disgruntled Republicans to undermine the party’s nominee.
“Hell, if he wants to run as a third party, have at it,” Mr. Pettigrew said.
Mr. Trump, for his part, fired off a defiant salute to the RedState crowd on Twitter Saturday morning: “I miss you all, and thanks for all of your support. Political correctness is killing our country.”
He added in a word what he thought of his critics: “weakness.”
Saw this headline and thought it was a Trump article, then saw it wasn't. Sad.
The historic gardener's cottage that housed the Yuge family for nearly a century remains empty and the grounds surrounding it remain untouched.
Sunday marked 30 days since the four Japanese American sisters moved their late parents' belongings from their ancestral home, which is situated on the southwest portion of the Pasadena Waldorf School campus in Altadena.
Sure everyone knows this already. Sharing to ask, has anybody chased down an RSS feed for the new strips? I go onto Facebook very intermittently, so I'm hoping to read it on TOR.
Did a quick google search and the first page of results was just articles like this one about the strip coming back. I could have done more extensive googling, but asking TOR friends to do it for me sounds way easier.
Feel free to post a LMGTFY.com link if my laziness deterred me from some super-easy googling.
Welcome back to "Bloom County," Berkeley Breathed!
After 25 years, Berkeley Breathed is returning to his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, "Bloom County." Breathed announced the new incarnation of the politically-minded strip via a post on Facebook that featured him working on a new comic with the words "Bloom County 2015" at the top.
"Bloom County" originally ran from December 1980 until 1989, just two years after he won the Pulitzer. The characters, such as Bill the Cat, Opus the Penguin, Hodge-Podge the Rabbit, Milo Bloom, and Cutter John, lived on in the Sunday-only strip "Outland" from 1989 to 1995, as well as "Opus" from 2003 to 2008. When "Opus'" run ended, Breathed said he was stepping away from strips entirely and began focusing on writing children's books. At the time, he said the political climate in the country had grown too bitter for him to continue taking a light tone on things, and he wanted to get out before things got too tough.
However, with the 2016 presidential campaign season heating up, it seems that Breathed has found something funny to talk about again:
Find Breathed's announcement post, from which the above exchange originates, below:
Sea levels, warming of the surface and upper layer of the oceans, greenhouse gases and land temperatures all hit a record high in 2014. In addition to this, glacier melt and tropical storms were also at a high, while sea ice loss continued.
This is REALLY clever of United. Aside from the fact that they're a standard-issue evil airline, this makes me like them.
In this Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013, file photo, travelers check in at the United Airlines ticket counter at Terminal 1 in O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. United in May started rewarding hackers who discovered and reported software defects in the airline's system with miles of free air travel. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
What would you do with 1 million frequent flyer miles?
Two hackers are about to find out. United Airlines confirmed Thursday it had rewarded two people with 1 million free miles of air travel each for discovering and disclosing software defects through the airlines "bug bounty" program. (With those 1 million miles, they could fly from the continental United States to Europe 33 times.)
The "bug bounty" program -- so named because it offers bounties for the detection of software defects -- is the first of its kind in the transportation industry, United claims.
Such programs have become increasing popular with technology companies. Finding a problem with Facebook's site will net you a minimum reward of $500, while Twitter will hand over at least $250.
Now security experts say as companies grow increasingly automate critical functions and the risks of cyber breaches grows, the practice is spreading outside the tech field.
"I think software is being increasingly built into things we use in our daily lives," said Harlan Yu, principal at technology firm Upturn. "As things get increasingly automated all around us, software is all around us and software bugs are all around us."
United, the nation's second-largest airline, began the program just weeks before software glitches grounded the airline's fleet twice. On June 2, 150 United flights were delayed for nearly an hour because of a problem with the airline's flight dispatching system.
On July 8, the same day unrelated technical problems caused the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading and the Wall Street Journal's Web site to crash, United's reservation system malfunctioned for two hours and did not allow passengers to check in for their flights.
Trade organization Airlines for America said in a statement it was not aware of other airlines seeking help from the public for their cyber security needs.
“Airlines take their customers’ privacy seriously and take all necessary precautions to keep passenger data secure," it said in the statement. "Most, if not all, airlines have internal programs whereby they continuously check their systems and have teams that conduct intrusion systems checks."
United Airlines announced its program in May, pledging to give hackers between 50,000 and 1 million miles of free air travel for identifying and reporting bugs within the company's software. (Tips or questions about the program can be sent to bugbounty@united.com.)
"We are committed to protecting our customers' privacy and the personal data we receive from them," United said in a statement posted on its Web site. "We believe that this [bounty] program will further bolster our security and allow us to continue to provide excellent service."
United declined to release the names of the two people who earned 1-million-mile rewards.
But Jordan Wiens, a researcher with cyber security firm Velocity35, tweeted last week that United granted him the largest bug bounty reward.
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