Zorro
Zorro's JournalVenezuela to expel Al Jazeera journalists
Venezuela on Tuesday was set to expel a crew of Al Jazeera journalists who were intending to cover an opposition march against President Nicolas Maduro, the country's union of journalists said.
With Venezuela in the throes of severe economic and political crises, the opposition has called for a march on Caracas on Thursday to press its constitutionally sanctioned demand for a referendum to remove Maduro.
The authorities detained three employees of the Qatar-based channel when they arrived Monday at Maiquetia international airport outside Caracas, the National Union of Press Workers (SNTP) said on Twitter.
"Teresa Bo, correspondent, Lagmi Chavez, producer, and a cameraman (from) @AlJazeera were detained in Maiquetia," the SNTP tweeted, saying their equipment was confiscated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-expel-al-jazeera-journalists-104612145.html
The revolution will not be televised. Isn't that what some people say?
Venezuela accuses US, opposition of planning coup
Venezuela is accusing the United States and the country's political opposition of planning a coup for Thursday, the day that government opponents have called for a march to demand a recall vote against President Nicolas Maduro.
The Foreign Ministry's North America agency issued a statement Monday protesting U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby's call for the release of the jailed former mayor of San Cristobal, Daniel Ceballos, who was taken from his home early Saturday by state intelligence agents and moved back to prison in central Guarico state. He had been under house arrest.
The socialist government said Ceballos was planning to flee before the Thursday protest in Caracas and carry out violent acts to destabilize the country. But the move alarmed the opposition, Washington and human rights groups who consider him a political prisoner.
"The brand and authorship of the coup being planned for September 1, 2016, in Venezuela, in collusion with the anti-democratic opposition and international right, has become clear...," said a North America office statement published on the Foreign Ministry's website. It said President Barack Obama's government "is seeking to destabilize Venezuela and the region in its final days to legitimize its imperial plans against peace and the development of the people."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-accuses-us-opposition-planning-coup-202838006.html
Looks like it's coup Thursday this week. Probably coup Monday next week.
FARC sets permanent cease-fire under Colombia peace deal
Source: AP
The commander of Colombia's biggest rebel movement said Sunday its fighters will permanently cease hostilities with the government beginning with the first minute of Monday, as a result of their peace accord ending one of the world's longest-running conflicts.
Rodrigo Londono, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, made the announcement in Havana, where the two sides negotiated for four years before announcing the peace deal Wednesday.
"Never again will parents be burying their sons and daughters killed in the war," said Londono, who also known as Timoshenko. "All rivalries and grudges will remain in the past."
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced on Friday that his military would cease attacks on the FARC beginning Monday.
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/farc-sets-permanent-cease-fire-under-colombia-peace-211411339.html
It appears that Plan Colombia may have contributed to this success after all.
A literary guide to hating Barack Obama
Secret Muslim. Socialist. Amateur. Anti-American. Criminal.
Throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, and even before it, a chorus of writers has stood stage right, reinterpreting the era but mainly eviscerating the man. Obama, initially little known, became a literary subgenre and publishing obsession, with countless volumes attacking the president, promising to unmask who he really is, what he really thinks and why he does the things he does. And for a while, at least, the books sold well.
Selecting a representative set among dozens and dozens of titles in the Obama hatred literature is not easy. Do you go with “Impeachable Offenses” or “The Manchurian President”? “Divider-in-Chief” or “The Obama Nation”? “Culture of Corruption” or “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”? A sample of such books, spanning 2008 to 2016, shows that, while the anti-Obama canon can be predictable, it is by no means static. The aversion to the president is always growing, and the nature of that aversion is always evolving toward harsher conclusions.
In the beginning, there was ignorance, and the void of our Obama knowledge was filled with speculation, bits of autobiography and family lore. The senator from Illinois was deemed dangerous for all that he might be: distant, unfamiliar, foreign in so many ways. Once he sat in the Oval Office, however, the attacks shifted, and the president became that most recognizable of political creatures: unprincipled, corrupt, Chicago. As conservative disdain intensified throughout his first term, Obama came to be seen as a bungler, in over his head (think the Libya intervention or Operation Fast and Furious). Yet soon he was redefined once more, this time as a brilliant subversive: It’s not that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing but that he knows all too well. That leads, inevitably, to the final and most damning judgment — that this president is a criminal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/08/25/a-literary-guide-to-hating-barack-obama/
Colombian peace deal could mark rare victory for U.S. diplomacy
In an era of frustrating, if not failed, U.S. policy interventions abroad, the Colombian peace deal announced last week offers the possibility of a rare victory for American diplomacy.
It would be a validation of Plan Colombia, the U.S. counternarcotics and security-aid package that has sent roughly $10 billion to Bogota since 2000, tipping the government’s fight against the Marxist FARC insurgents. The accord finalized Wednesday would convert the rebels from one of the world’s most powerful drug-trafficking groups to a legal political party with a sworn commitment to ending both the 52-year war and its narcotics trade.
More broadly, the deal would be a bookend to the long, bloody history of armed insurgency in Latin America, affirming democracy as the only viable political system in the region. The agreement was forged in Cuba, of all places, the site of Fidel Castro’s leftist revolution, which was imitated by so many others.
“This is a transformational moment for our hemisphere,” Bernard Aronson, the U.S. envoy to the peace talks, said in an interview. “It is a final repudiation of political violence as a means of changing governments.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/colombian-peace-deal-marks-rare-victory-for-us-diplomacy/2016/08/27/0d0ac8aa-6ad7-11e6-91cb-ecb5418830e9_story.html
Inside debate prep: Clinton’s careful case vs. Trump’s ‘WrestleMania’
Hillary Clinton is methodically preparing for the presidential debates as a veteran lawyer would approach her biggest trial. She pores over briefing books thick with policy arcana and opposition research. She internalizes tips from the most seasoned debate coaches in her party. And she rehearses, over and over again, to perfect the pacing and substance of her presentation.
Donald Trump is taking a different approach. He summons his informal band of counselors — including former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, talk-radio host Laura Ingraham and ousted Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes — to his New Jersey golf course for Sunday chats. Over bacon cheeseburgers, hot dogs and glasses of Coca-Cola, they test out zingers and chew over ways to refine the Republican nominee’s pitch.
Trump’s aides have put together briefing books, not that the candidate is devoting much time to reading them. Trump is not holding any mock debates, proudly boasting that a performer with his talents does not need that sort of prepping. Should Trump submit to traditional rehearsals, some associates are talking about casting Ingraham, an adversarial chronicler of Clinton scandals, to play the Democratic nominee.
“Donald Trump is the unpredictable X-factor and Hillary Clinton is the scripted statist,” said Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s new campaign manager, in an interview. “I fully understand why Team Clinton feels the need to drown her in briefing books and Hollywood consulting.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-debate-prep-clintons-careful-case-vs-trumps-wrestlemania/2016/08/27/ce05291c-6bbb-11e6-99bf-f0cf3a6449a6_story.html
PENCE RECAPTURED AFTER FLEEING TRUMP CAMPAIGN BUS
VIRGINIA (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it a “scary moment” and a “close call,” Donald Trump’s campaign officials confirmed that they had recaptured Mike Pence after the Indiana governor attempted to flee the campaign bus in the early hours of Friday morning.
According to the campaign, Pence had asked to stop at a McDonald’s in rural Virginia so that he could use the bathroom, but aides grew concerned when the governor failed to reappear after twenty minutes.
After determining that Pence had given them the slip, Trump staffers fanned out across the Virginia backcountry, where the governor was believed to have fled.
News that Pence had vanished touched off a panic in Indiana, where residents feared that he might return to resume his political career.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/pence-recaptured-after-fleeing-trump-campaign-bus
California Votes to Cut Greenhouse Gases 40 Percent By 2030
Building on top of some of the strictest existing environmental laws in the nation, the legislature of California has voted to implement a measure to cut greenhouse gases in the state a further 40 percent beyond the current target by the year 2030.
The state currently is on track to meet its current goal, which seeks to reduce emissions that can hold in heat to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The new bill, approved by the state Senate on Wednesday, would lower greenhouse gases a further 40 percent below that in the following decade. A linked bill in the state Assembly was approved several hours earlier; Governor Jerry Brown has stated that he will sign both bills when they land on his desk.
"It's about the world in which we live becoming decarbonized and sustainable," Brown said during a press conference, according to Reuters. "These regulations will work to achieve that goal."
The bills will give the state legislature additional control over the California Air Resources Board, which, among other duties, sets emissions limits for vehicles sold in the state. In spite of being a state agency, it exerts a national influence; 11 other states have chosen to abide by CARB’s aggressive pollution controls, and the agency has been known to work with the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation on fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-votes-cut-greenhouse-gases-201500896.html
Thousands march over dissolved Ecuador teacher union
Thousands of demonstrators marched in Quito and other Ecuadoran cities Thursday against the socialist government of Rafael Correa and its dissolution of a public teachers' guild.
Labor union members and teachers turned out in Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca to denounce the Ministry of Education dissolving the National Union of Educators (UNE), which was created in 1950.
The ministry opted to break up the union, which says it has 100,000 teachers, for failing to register itself since 2013, in violation of regulations.
Teachers marched under the slogan "The UNE lives, Correa goes away," and carried posters that read "No more dismissals of union leaders, no more persecution of teachers."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-march-over-dissolved-ecuador-teacher-union-081053458.html
Diehard Trump Voters Confirm Rest Of Nation Should Stop Wasting Time Trying To Reach Them
WASHINGTON—Saying it should be very clear by now that absolutely nothing can change their position on the matter, steadfast supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told the rest of the nation Wednesday that it really shouldn’t bother trying to persuade them not to vote for him.
The announcement, which was issued by millions of the candidate’s staunchest proponents across the country, emphasized that if widespread condemnations of Trump’s temperament, denouncements of his racially charged rhetoric, and technical critiques of his sweeping immigration plan were going to sway their opinion, it would have happened already.
“You can keep writing editorials, running ads, and arguing with us at the dinner table or online, but honestly, at this point, it won’t make a bit of difference,” said diehard Trump supporter Bryan Gallagher, 66, who remarked that it had been “a complete waste of time” when 50 top GOP foreign policy experts published an open letter earlier this month suggesting a Trump presidency would gravely endanger national security, noting that he and everyone else who currently backs Trump is “in it for the long haul.” “You really have no chance of winning us over. You could bring out every living four-star general and have them list all the ways Trump would harm our country’s well-being, and we still wouldn’t budge.”
“Do you really think you’re going to come up with some new criticism of his policies or his preparedness that will finally make us reconsider our votes?” Gallagher continued. “Please, you should all just save yourself the effort.”
http://www.theonion.com/article/diehard-trump-voters-confirm-rest-nation-should-st-53585
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