Synecdoche Trope
Synecdoche Trope's JournalOfficials: New Trump travel ban removes Iraq from list
Source: Associated Press
Mar. 1, 2017 4:00 AM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's new immigration order will remove Iraq from the list of countries whose citizens face a temporary U.S. travel ban, U.S. officials say, citing the latest draft in circulation. Trump is expected to sign the executive order in the coming days.
Four officials told The Associated Press that the decision followed pressure from the Pentagon and State Department, which had urged the White House to reconsider Iraq's inclusion on the list given its key role in fighting the Islamic State group.
Citizens of six other predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — will remain on the travel ban list, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the order before it is signed. Those bans are effective for 90 days.
The new order includes other changes as well. The officials said the 12-page document no longer singles out Syrian refugees for an indefinite ban and instead includes them as part of a general, 120-day suspension of new refugee admissions.
Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/20101cf0709745e3813815359086dcb1/officials-new-trump-travel-man-removes-iraq-list
Something tells me the real reason for taking Iraq off this list is that Donnie just found out he does have a business there, after all.
State Senator Slams Trump After Son's JCC Pre-K Gets Bomb Threats
Source: Rolling Stone
By Tessa Stuart
9 hours ago
On Monday morning, the Levine Jewish Community Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, received its third bomb threat in two months. This time, administrators were used to the drill. They didn't even evacuate – just had law enforcement sweep the premises and went along with their day. State Sen. Jeff Jackson, whose son Owen is enrolled in pre-K at Levine JCC, learned about the newest threat on Twitter while in line for lunch at Chipotle.
That's how routine bomb threats have become at Jewish Community Centers and the preschools many of them house; more than 100 such threats have been received at JCCs around the country since President Trump took office.
"We've had three bomb threats in the last five years, and they've all happened in the last 60 days," {Sen. Jeff} Jackson, a Democrat who represents North Carolina's 37th district, tells Rolling Stone. "Find me the person who thinks that's a coincidence."
He places the blame squarely at Trump's feet. "Only one big thing has changed in American society in the last 60 days that would have any connection to this whatsoever," he says.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/state-senator-slams-trump-after-sons-jcc-pre-k-gets-bomb-threats-w469638
But hey, it was just Jews toppling their own headstones "to make people – or to make others – look bad," as our Great Orange Leader hath proclaimed, right? Right?
Sydney weather: Summer confirmed as city's hottest for days and nights in 157 years
Source: The Sydney Morming Herald (AU)
March 1 2017 - 4:02PM
Peter Hannam
Sydney's record-breaking weather juggernaut rolls on, with summer confirmed as the city's hottest for both days and nights over records stretching back 157 years.
The average of days and nights in the Harbour City was 2.8 degrees warmer than the norm, beating the summer of 1990-91 as Sydney's warmest, the Bureau of Meteorology said in its seasonal report.
The record warm summer included the hottest ever month, in January, and built on Sydney's hottest year set in 2016. Of the other summer months, December was the city's second-warmest and February equal-second warmest, the bureau said.
Summer was marked by "both the lack of cold during the season and several significant heatwaves", said Acacia Pepler, a bureau climatologist, noting the pattern fitted in with climate change.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/sydney-weather-summer-confirmed-as-citys-hottest-for-days-and-nights-in-157-years-20170228-gunqxk.html
I can't remember whether it's Turnbull or Abbott who's the denier.
Donald Trump accuses Obama of orchestrating protests and leaks against him
Source: The Guardian
Lauren Gambino
Tuesday 28 February 2017 07.13 GMT
Donald Trump has accused former president Barack Obama and his “people” of organizing the demonstrations that have roiled city streets, airports and town halls during the first weeks of his presidency.
In an interview with Fox and Friends, which will air on Tuesday morning in the US, he also suggested Obama and his allies were behind the leaks of classified information from the White House to the press.
There is no evidence that the former president has had any hand in either activity.
Trump was asked by the Fox interviewer whether he believes Obama is involved in organizing protests, including the recent spate of raucous Republican town hall meetings, and “if he is, is that a violation of the so-called unsaid president’s code?”
“No, I think he is behind it. I also think it’s just politics. That’s just the way it is,” Trump said in the pre-taped interview, a portion of which was released on Monday night.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/28/donald-trump-accuses-barack-obama-orchestrating-protests-leaks
Bill Maher nailed it: Whiny Little Bitch!
Iranians welcome Farhadi's Oscar for best foreign film
Source: Associated Press
By NASSER KARIMI
Feb. 27, 2017 4:13 AM EST
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranians on Monday cheered the choice of one of their own for best foreign film Oscar, lauding director Asghar Farhadi's boycott of the Hollywood ceremony for his film "The Salesman" as an act of defiance against the Trump administration's executive order.
Farhadi refused to attend the Academy Awards, announcing after the temporary U.S. travel ban was initially imposed last month for citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries that he would not attend the ceremony — even if an exception was made for him. Iran was one of the seven countries affected by the measure, which has since been blocked from being carried out by a federal court ruling.
"The Saleman" — about a couple performing Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and their attempts to find peace and justice after the wife is attacked at their Tehran apartment — had become a rallying cry for immigrant rights after the travel ban.
The six nominated directors in the foreign language category had put out a joint statement ahead of the award decrying what they called the climate of "fanaticism" in the United States and dedicating the award to the promotion of "unity and understanding" regardless of who won.
It was the second Oscar for Farhadi. His film "A Separation" won in the same category for 2012.
Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fe776fac6d5c46d48a201f62df970434/foreign-minister-welcomes-iran-oscar-best-foreign-film
A two-time Oscar winner? Well, we certainly can't allow people like that coming into the country!
Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War
Do you remember the movie Independence Day?
Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War
On April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active measures”—aktivniye meropriyatiya—against the reëlection campaign of President Ronald Reagan. Unlike classic espionage, which involves the collection of foreign secrets, active measures aim at influencing events—at undermining a rival power with forgeries, front groups, and countless other techniques honed during the Cold War. The Soviet leadership considered Reagan an implacable militarist. According to extensive notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin, a high-ranking K.G.B. officer and archivist who later defected to Great Britain, Soviet intelligence tried to infiltrate the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees, popularize the slogan “Reagan Means War!,” and discredit the President as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex. The effort had no evident effect. Reagan won forty-nine of fifty states.
Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold War. In the nineteen-sixties, Soviet intelligence officers spread a rumor that the U.S. government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the eighties, they spread the rumor that American intelligence had “created” the AIDS virus, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. They regularly lent support to leftist parties and insurgencies. The C.I.A., for its part, worked to overthrow regimes in Iran, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Chile, and Panama. It used cash payments, propaganda, and sometimes violent measures to sway elections away from leftist parties in Italy, Guatemala, Indonesia, South Vietnam, and Nicaragua. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early nineties, the C.I.A. asked Russia to abandon active measures to spread disinformation that could harm the U.S. Russia promised to do so. But when Sergey Tretyakov, the station chief for Russian intelligence in New York, defected, in 2000, he revealed that Moscow’s active measures had never subsided. “Nothing has changed,” he wrote, in 2008. “Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U.S.”
Vladimir Putin, who is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy, frequently points to this history. He sees a straight line from the West’s support of the anti-Moscow “color revolutions,” in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, which deposed corrupt, Soviet-era leaders, to its endorsement of the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Five years ago, he blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square. “She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal,” Putin said. “They heard this and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work.” (No evidence was provided for the accusation.) He considers nongovernmental agencies and civil-society groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the election-monitoring group Golos to be barely disguised instruments of regime change.
The U.S. officials who administer the system that Putin sees as such an existential danger to his own reject his rhetoric as “whataboutism,” a strategy of false moral equivalences. Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser under President Obama, is among those who reject Putin’s logic, but he said, “Putin is not entirely wrong,” adding that, in the past, “we engaged in regime change around the world. There is just enough rope for him to hang us.”*
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
It's a very long article, but definitely worth reading in its entirety!
Kyrgyz opposition leader detained ahead of presidential campaign
Source: Reuters
Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:42am EST
Kyrgyzstan's state security service said it detained opposition politician Omurbek Tekebayev on Sunday on charges of corruption and fraud, a move that may eliminate him as a contender for presidency in the upcoming election.
Tekebayev, 58, leads the Ata Meken (Fatherland) party's parliamentary faction and is one of the most outspoken critics of President Almazbek Atambayev, whose term ends this year.
The ex-Soviet Central Asian nation will hold a presidential election on Nov. 19.
The state security service said in a statement it had detained him at an airport upon arrival from Turkey.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-kyrgyzstan-opposition-idUSKBN16505E?il=0
I know Trump's awake at this time, but--as a Faux Fanatic--he probably won't read this. I hope.
Bernie Sanders Just Shut Down Trump With A Brutal Reality Check
02/25/2017 02:52 pm ET
If President Donald Trump is in need of an ego boost on Saturday, Twitter may not be the place to find it.
The president was slapped with a scalding reality check, compliments of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), after suggesting his supporters have their own rally.
“It would be the biggest of them all!” Trump proclaimed on Twitter Saturday.
Exciting idea, except that Trump had a rally just last month, for Inauguration Day, as Sanders reminded him.
“They did. It wasn’t,” Sanders smartly snapped.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-just-shut-down-trump-in-the-most-hilarious-way_us_58b1c462e4b060480e0879c5?rjhecdq8vurjgiudi&
BAM!
(You'll need to click the link to see the actual tweets, cuz me knot no how too skreengarb.)
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