Fun4U

Thursday, 28 November 2019

Trump claims he'd 'love' for top aides to testify, but won't allow it

“I would love to have Mike Pompeo, Rick Perry, Mick Mulvaney and many others testify,” the president tweeted after a federal judge ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to appear before Congress. The Justice Department is appealing the ruling.

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'Sleepwalking toward climate catastrophe:' World must slash emissions immediately, UN report says

The world's nations must make steep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions immediately or risk missing the targets they’ve agreed on, a U.N. report says.

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Iran supreme leader says 'very dangerous' plot foiled

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said his sanctions-hit country had foiled a "very dangerous" plot after violent demonstrations triggered by a fuel price hike. New York-based Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, accused Tehran of "deliberately covering up" more than 100 deaths and thousands of arrests during the crackdown.

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Tears and prayers as Vietnam village mourns cousins killed in UK truck tragedy

Relatives have waited weeks for their bodies to come home, after they were discovered lifeless in a refrigerated container in Essex, east of London, last month. Hoang Van Tiep, 18, and his 33-year-old cousin Nguyen Van Hung were among 39 people found in the truck, a tragedy that has paralysed communities with grief across central Vietnam, where most of the victims came from. In a tucked-away corner of Dien Chau district in central Nghe An province, hundreds of relatives, friends and villagers gathered to greet the bodies of the two cousins.

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Epstein Suicide: Guards Say They're Scapegoats for a Broken System

NEW YORK -- Two jail guards who were on duty when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself browsed the internet and napped during the night before his body was found, instead of checking on him every half-hour as they were required to do, prosecutors have said. The guards then lied, prosecutors said, on official logs, indicating that they had made the rounds when they had not.Attorney General William Barr said last week that Epstein's death resulted from "a perfect storm of screw-ups."But lawyers for the guards, who have been criminally charged, suggested in court Monday that their clients were being made into scapegoats for larger problems in the federal prison system that contributed to Epstein's death.The Manhattan jail where Epstein hanged himself has long been plagued by staff shortages and the two guards, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel, had already done several tours of overtime that week.In addition, Epstein was left alone without a cellmate that night and morning, even though he had tried to take his own life about three weeks earlier."Unfortunately, the decisions that led to the death of Mr. Epstein were not only because of what my client did or did not do," Montell Figgins, the lawyer for Thomas, said. "It was because of a system that failed completely.""Where are the supervisors?" Figgins added. "Where are the people who make the policy decisions? Why didn't Mr. Epstein have a cellmate at the time that this happened?"Figgins made his remarks outside U.S. District Court in Manhattan after a hearing at which Judge Analisa Torres set a trial date of April 20 for Thomas and Noel, who face charges that include making false records and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Both have pleaded not guilty.Noel's lawyer, Jason E. Foy, said that he had not seen the evidence against his client, but he vowed to investigate her case vigorously. He said he believed there were "outside circumstances that are driving this prosecution."Foy, who also spoke after the hearing, said the charges did not "sound like your regular false-document case," an apparent reference to the unusual circumstances and high-profile nature of Epstein's death.The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan and the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on the lawyers' assertions.The indictment charging the two guards highlighted lapses in the operation of a high-security unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where Epstein, a financier, was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges when he died.The indictment also offered the first official narrative of the events preceding his death. It said that security cameras did not show anyone entering the cell block where Epstein was housed, suggesting that despite the conjecture and conspiracy theories swirling around Epstein and his connections to powerful people, his death was a suicide as New York City's chief medical examiner ruled.At the hearing Monday, a prosecutor, Rebekah A. Donaleski, told Torres that the discovery materials the government would provide to defense lawyers included hundreds of hours of video recordings from inside the jail.Although Donaleski did not elaborate on the recordings' contents, the indictment said that video obtained from the jail's internal video surveillance system confirmed that no one visited the tier where Epstein was being held after about 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 9."This was the last time anyone, including any correctional officer, walked up to, let alone entered, the only entrance to the tier in which Epstein was housed until approximately 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 10," when his body was found, the indictment said.The defense lawyers said in court that they wanted prosecutors to provide them with additional evidence that might be used at trial. Figgins cited an internal investigation by the Justice Department inspector general's office into the circumstances surrounding Epstein's death. The results of that inquiry will not be made public, officials have said.Outside the courthouse, Figgins said that there had been an unfair "rush to judgment" in the case and that the two guards were being made to pay for the problems of an entire system."Does anyone think that throughout the United States that these are the only two guards that may have taken a nap overnight on their shift?" he said. "I highly doubt it."The attention that Epstein's suicide has brought to prison conditions, inmate supervision and mental health issues around the country was reinforced Sunday with a letter published in The New York Times by Richard M. Berman, the federal judge in Manhattan who presided in Epstein's criminal case before his suicide.Berman wrote that the indictment of the two guards was not the "full accounting" to which Epstein's alleged victims, the public and his family were entitled."We all agree that it is unthinkable that any detainee, let alone a high-profile detainee like Mr. Epstein, would die unnoticed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center," the judge wrote.He said it would be "a tragic and costly missed opportunity" for the Bureau of Prisons and the attorney general "to fail to undertake -- and to make public -- an in-depth evaluation of prison conditions (not only at the MCC) and to carry out appropriate reforms."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

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US weather forecast: Powerful storms to bring heavy snow and high winds, causing Thanksgiving travel chaos

Millions of Americans are bracing for two "powerful" storms expected to dump heavy blankets of snow and force road closures and flight delays as families prepare for a busy week of travel during the Thanksgiving holiday.A snowy weather system could linger through the rest of the week and into the weekend as it moves east, potentially bringing snow to New England and delivering a wintry coast-to-coast blow to the holiday weekend.

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Wednesday, 27 November 2019

How much! Why are service station snacks so expensive?

A bottle of water costs four times more on the motorway than in a supermarket, mystery shoppers say.

from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/2OLHCue

TikTok Blocks Teen Who Posted About China’s Detention Camps

By BY RAYMOND ZHONG from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2XQVtUa

What $30 Million Gets in TV Ads

By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/2OLkA6B

Pete Buttigieg Responds to Uproar Over Past Comments on Minority Students

By BY REID J. EPSTEIN AND SYDNEY EMBER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/34qlpZd

After Trump's intervention, Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher returns to work, for now

Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL at the center of a controversy in a case that President Trump intervened in, went to work Monday, unsure of what lay ahead.

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The son of a deputy from a neighboring county has been charged with the murder of Alabama Sheriff 'Big John' Williams

William Chase Johnson, the suspect in the killing of Alabama Sheriff "Big John" Williams, is the son of a sheriff's deputy in a neighboring county.

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Elizabeth Warren tumbles 14 points in Democratic primary poll

The latest Democratic primary poll released Tuesday by Quinnipiac University did not come bearing good tidings for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).Warren, one of the presidential primary's frontrunners, had been leading the poll for the past several months, surging ahead of former Vice President Joe Biden. But she appeared to be in free fall this time around, dropping 14 points. Biden took back the lead and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg jumped up 6 points into second place.> New Q-poll has good news for Biden/Buttigieg, terrible news for Warren, flat for others. > > Biden: 24% (+3)⁰ > Buttigieg: 16% (+6) > Warren: 14% (-14) ⁰ > ⁰Sanders: 13% (-2)⁰ > Harris: 3% (-2) ⁰ > Klobuchar: 3% (-)⁰ > Yang: 2% (+1)⁰ > Booker: 2% (+1) > ⁰Castro: 2% (+1)⁰ > Gabbard: 1% (-)> > -- Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 26, 2019The good news for Warren is that she's still in third place and is one of only four candidates to reach double figures. Of course, the poll itself seems pretty malleable at this point, considering she fell drastically after a steady rise. But, regardless, it's tough to imagine there's anything confidence-boosting about the numbers.The poll was conducted over the phone by Quinnipiac University which surveyed 1,355 registered U.S. voters between Nov. 21-25. The margin of error was 3.2 percentage points. Read the full results here.More stories from theweek.com Fox News guest: 'Why the hell does Tucker Carlson still have a job here' David Axelrod calls Biden's polling resilience 'the strangest thing I've ever seen in politics' Trump wonders why the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage wasn't celebrated 'a long time ago'

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Two rockets fired from Gaza at Israel: army

Militants in the Gaza Strip fired two rockets at Israel on Tuesday, one of which was intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system, the army said. "Two (rocket) launches were identified from territory in the Gaza Strip towards Israeli territory," the Israeli army said in a statement, adding that one of the projectiles was intercepted. It did not say what happened to the second rocket.

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More secrets of China's Xinjiang camps leaked to foreign media

Classified Chinese government documents made public by an international group of journalists describe the repressive inner workings of detention camps in Xinjiang, in a second rare leak in days of secret files concerning the troubled western region. The publication on Sunday of the documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) follows a New York Times report on Nov. 16 based on a cache of secret papers revealing details of China's clamp-down on ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in the region. United Nations experts and activists say at least 1 million Uighurs and members of other largely Muslim minority groups have been detained in camps in Xinjiang.

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A teen says she wouldn't have tried Juul's e-cigarettes had she known they contained nicotine, and is now considering a lawsuit

Bailey Legacki, now aged 18, told the New York Times she was taken in by Juul's advertising but did not realise there was nicotine in Juul's products.

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Why It's Really Hard to Sink An Aircraft Carrier

They're built to take it.

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'You've jailed kids and celebrated corruption': AOC hits back at Trump with list of accomplishments after 'Do Nothing Democrats' insult

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has hit back at Donald Trump, after the president attempted to deflect attention from the ongoing impeachment probe by branding her and others in her party as “Do Nothing Democrats”.The freshman politician listed a litany of issues she's had success on during her short time in Congress — from pushing to make the anti-HIV drug PrEP generic a year early, to taking on general corruption — in spite of Mr Trump's line of attack, which he has deployed with increased frequency as he tries to paint the impeachment probe as a distraction from what he calls “important” issues.

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