Gregory Cheadle took no offense when on Friday during a rally, Donald Trump singled him out and asked, “Look at my African-American over here!”

At the Friday rally, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was in the middle of describing a past campaign event, at which he said a black supporter “slugged” protesters who were dressed in a “Ku Klux Klan outfit.”

“I want to find out what’s going on with him,” Trump said of the supporter at the previous rally. He then appeared to spot a black person in the audience of Friday’s event at Redding Municipal Airport.

“Oh, look at my African-American over here,” an excited Trump said, while pointing into the crowd. “Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about? OK!”

Cheadle, a Republican from Happy Valley in the running for the 1st Congressional District, said he was beaming.

http://www.redding.com/news/politics/election-2016/Cheadle-Im-Trumps-African-American-381831551.html

While many Americans got a tiny — or no — pay raise this past year, some lucky workers got pay bumps that were triple or more the national average.

Even as the job market improves — the government’s jobs report released Friday puts unemployment at just 4.7%, the lowest level since the month before the Great Recession began in December 2007 — workers aren’t getting big raises. For the past few years, the average pay raise has hovered at around 3%, and that won’t change much this year: “U.S. employees can expect an average base salary increase of 3.1% in 2016, up only slightly, if at all, from the raises they received this year,” according to the Society of Human Resource Management.

But there were some jobs where raises were much higher, according to a report released in April by staffing and HR services firm Randstad US. The report examined salary and other data from roughly 565,000 organizations from compensation research firm Economic Research Institute, as well as its own proprietary data.

Here are the 10 positions that saw the largest pay raises in the past year. (Note: Raises are rounded.)

1. Electromechanical technician: 9.3%

2. Electronics/computer engineer: 8.3%

3. Assistant plant manager in the manufacturing/logistics field: 8%

4. Mechanical engineer: 7.4%

5. Quality engineer: 7.4%

6. Network engineer: 7.2%

7. Office manager: 6.7%

8. Maintenance manager in the manufacturing/logistics field: 6.7%

9. Software engineer: 5.5%

10. Call center representative: 4.6%

Electromechanical technicians — who do things like operate, test and maintain robots and other automated equipment — saw a more than 9% raise, the highest among the thousands of jobs examined. This may be thanks, in part, to the fact that the manufacturing sector is increasingly becoming automated — in 2015, orders and shipments for robots in North America jumped 14% and hit new records, according to the Robotic Industries Association, an industry trade group — upping the demand for workers who have these skills.

Many of the other jobs in the top 10 list were engineering jobs. This may be due to the fact that some engineering jobs are in high demand, including jobs like network engineer (thanks to a heightened focus on security) and software engineer (as more mobile apps are being created), and there are often not enough graduates to fill them at a time when boomers are leaving the workforce, says Dino Grigorakakis, the vice president of recruiting at Randstad Technologies.

These aren’t necessarily the jobs with the best growth potential. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that electromechanical technicians will experience a 1% increase in job growth from 2014 to 2024. And, of course, you aren’t guaranteed a raise by working in these fields, and may, in fact get a bigger bump by switching industries or jobs.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-jobs-with-the-biggest-pay-raises-2016-04-08

Subject: Surgeons

Three Toronto surgeons were playing golf together and discussing surgeries they had performed..

One of them said, "I'm the best surgeon in Ontario. In my favorite case, a concert pianist lost seven fingers in an accident; i reattached them, and 8 months later he performed a private concert for the Queen of England.

The second surgeon said.. "That's nothing. A young man lost an arm and both legs in an accident; I reattached them, and 2 years later he won a gold Medal in track and field events in the Olympics.

The third surgeon said, "You guys are amateurs”. Several years ago a man was high on cocaine and marijuana and he rode a horse head-on into a train traveling 80 miles an hour. All I had left to work with was the man's blonde hair and the Horse's ass. I was able to put them together and now he's running for President of the U.S.A!"

When it comes to ISIS, the average westerner wants to know one thing: "Are they in our country right now, planning to murder us? If not, when will they be here? Tomorrow? Thursday?"

But, in some parts of the world, ISIS isn't this looming threat beyond the horizon -- it's the actual horde of screaming guys right in front of them, lobbing rockets. To find out what that's like, I went to the frontlines in Northern Iraq. No, really -- my photographer took this photo, that town on the horizon is ISIS territory:



And here I am about 90 minutes from the ISIS's regional capital of Mosul:



That's me drinking in a biergarden in the part of Iraq known as Kurdistan. The Kurds run their own separate pseudo-state inside of Iraq, where women are guaranteed 30% of the seats in parliament (our Congress is 20% female), the cell phone data coverage is exceptional, and a journalist like me can get drunk at mid-day without judgement. The only thing keeping this island of decency safe from ISIS are the Peshmerga, Kurdistan's native fighting force and the only standing army in Iraq to consistently beat back the suicide soldiers of the Islamic State.

I sat down with a bunch of these guys to find out what it's like fighting the world's most notorious group of assholes, and they said ...
http://www.cracked.com/feature/x-things-we-learned-talking-to-men-fighting-isis/