Russia has 'playbook' for covert influence in Eastern Europe: study
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia has mounted a campaign of covert economic and political measures to manipulate five countries in central and eastern Europe, discredit the West's liberal democratic model, and undermine trans-Atlantic ties, a report by a private U.S. research group said.
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to musician Bob Dylan for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
An international human rights group says that the Saudi-led coalition’s bombing of a packed funeral in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, this week constitutes an apparent war crime and that the remnants of missiles found at the site of the attack showed that they were American made.
The son of former Polish president Lech Walesa says his father, a longtime adversary of Poland’s current leadership, no longer has state protection when he travels abroad.
What happened long before Russia hacked the DNC's emails.
Read the whole story
· · ·
Legislative Council member Jeremy Buckingham put forward a three-part motion, the Australian Associated Press (AAP) reported.
The first part condemned Trump’s “misogynistic hateful comments” made to “women and minorities, including the remarks revealed over the weekend that clearly describe sexual assault.”
Next, the motion asked the council to reflect upon “the divisive, destructive impacts that hate speech from political candidates and members of elected office has on our community.”
Finally, lawmakers were asked to agree with those “who have described Donald Trump as a revolting slug unfit for office.”
The vote was carried unanimously.
“It’s clear that all reasonable and decent people find Donald Trump’s behavior obnoxious and that the world is hoping American voters reject his politics of hate,” Buckingham said, according to AAP.
[AAP]
Read the whole story
· ·
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 8
By Karl Vick |Photographs by Lisette Poole
The shortest route from Cuba to the U.S. is 90 miles. But that’s across the Florida Straits, and Liset Barrios gets nervous on a boat. So on May 13, she boards Copa Airlines Flight 295, setting off the long way around—the really long way. The journey covered 8,000 miles, took 51 days and, along the way, illuminated an obscure byway in this historic wave of human migration. The U.N. says some 244 million people live outside their home countries, most as legal guest workers in nearby nations. About 21 million are refugees fleeing war or persecution. Several million more—no one knows the precise number—make their way underground, “irregular migrants” trying to stay out of sight en route from a poor place with scant opportunities to a richer one, with more.
Liset and her neighbor Marta Amaro, who traveled with her, are in a semiprivileged subset of irregulars. Since they are Cubans presumed by U.S. law to be suffering under the yoke of communism, they would actually be welcomed in America when they arrive—provided they come by land. The problem is that none of the countries close to the U.S. allows a Cuban to enter without a visa.
The Journey from havana
So it is that Liset, Marta and the photojournalist Lisette Poole land at 1:39 p.m. in Georgetown, the capital of the tiny South American country of Guyana, the nearest country open to Cubans. Their plan is to get a hotel and scout around for a smuggler, but they don’t even have to leave the airport. While disembarking, another Cuban tells them he has a smuggler waiting outside. “It’s something that’s already there,” Liset says, of the river of migrants the women enter at that moment. “And you have to have the luck of being there at the right moment to get into it so that everything flows.”
That very night, they ride in a van 18 hours to Brazil—the more direct route toward the U.S., northwest across Venezuela, having been ruled out because the country is wildly dangerous. (The migrant river follows the path of least resistance.) They cross the border into Brazil by canoe, then make their way to Manaus, deep in the heart of the rain forest. There they board a plane to southwest Brazil, saving 22 hours overland, and hire a taxi to the border of Bolivia, a remote corner of which they cross en route to Peru.
The bus over the Andes to Lima is $150. Thus far, each has spent $2,300 of the nearly $8,000 the journey will end up costing per person. Most of the way, Liset, 25, pays for Marta. The younger woman has a boyfriend in Chicago, who fell for Liset during a visit to Havana. In Cuba, tourists use a special peso worth 26 times the currency used by ordinary Cubans.
By befriending male tourists with money to spend—an arrangement that often shifted from girlfriend to escort—Liset managed to live relatively well, after once living in a shipping container. Marta, 53, made $5 a day working in cafeterias, hospitals and, for a time, an asylum. Both women wanted a better life, and then the boyfriend offered to bring Liset north. “Our plan was to help each other,” Marta says.
In the way of modern migrants, the women travel with smartphones, touching base with family when they get wi-fi, which the hostel in Lima has. At dusk that day they board a bus toward Ecuador, where Liset talks their way past immigration agents. The first bus in Ecuador is crowded with Haitians, who after the 2010 earthquake also got a temporary dispensation to enter the U.S. There are even Bangladeshis, who began their journey nearly 11,000 miles away.
They cross into Colombia on horseback, negotiate past a military patrol and walk up a hill to a chicken restaurant, where the next coyote—Latin American slang for people smuggler—is waiting. Every move the migrants make is at the instruction of coyotes, who text photos of the next smuggler to the migrants so they know whom to look for at the next stop. “In every country, they would tell you to hide,” Liset says, “but I think it was their way to scare you, so you would feel afraid if you were out of their hands.”
Colombia, riven by both corruption and conflict, is notoriously difficult, yet the migrants flow on. That night, after a day in a “stash house,” Liset and Marta join a dozen others under the tarp of a truck loaded with potatoes. The photographer Poole rides up front with the driver and a coyote. “They swap migrant stories like camp counselors,” she writes in her notes.
At a motel, the travelers are grouped by nationality. They take a bus to Medellín, wait days, then board an overnight bus toward Panama, tension rising as South America narrows toward the isthmus. They ride motorcycles to a boat, cross an inlet in a two-hour trip, switch to a horse and buggy and shower in a preschool before reaching a camp, where they meet Cubans who were on the jet from Havana.
The trek is brutal, running over steep hills called Goodbye My City and Hill of Death. “I wanted the earth to swallow me,” says Marta, who hurt her leg the first day. “I didn’t think I was going to make it.”
They travel due west, crossing the same curving river again and again. The women are separated, and Poole moves with a group of 50 others. That night the rain washes away her things. Reunited, the three end up, on the sixth day, presenting themselves to Panamanian officials, who check their fingerprints against terrorism and criminal databases then allow everyone to move on.
The Central American leg feels even more chaotic. The coyote in Costa Rica has green hair and laughs as she blows past officers. Marta leaves the group after a quarrel about money. She’ll make it to the U.S. herself, 12 days behind Liset and Poole—who enter Nicaragua on horseback, then hike another jungle trail marked by red ribbons on teak trees; people drink water from puddles and sleep standing up. They end up crowded in an SUV with only a narrow band cut in the window tinting, cross a river into Honduras on foot, then enter Guatemala the same way. Mexico is reached on a raft.
The next day, Liset takes a flight to Mexico City, then another to Matamoros, Texas, where she presents herself to the U.S. agents at the border. There she is given a permit. A day later, July 3, she lands at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the beginning of her American journey.
The boyfriend is late.
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej Dies Aged 88by Feliz Solomon / Bangkok
Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej died at Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital Thursday, the palace has announced. He was 88.
His reign lasted 70 years, making him the world’s longest-serving monarch. During that time he was seen as a unifying force in the country, and truly revered by the people of Thailand.
Bhumibol’s body will rest in Bangkok’s Grand Palace for an official grieving period forecast to be 999 days.
On Sunday, the palace said Bhumibol was in an “unstable condition” following hemodialysis treatment, used to treat kidney failure. On Wednesday, the palace announced the King had received dialysis treatment but there were problems with his kidneys and liver.
Shortly before the palace’s announcement on Wednesday, senior members of the royal family, including the Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn and Princess Sirindhor reportedly visited the hospital. Junta leader Prauth Chan-ocha also flew back to the Thai capital Wednesday, cutting short an official appointment in the neighboring province of Chonburi for an audience with the Crown Prince.
As the King’s health has declined in recent years, the subject of succession has become increasingly sensitive. His only living son, Vajiralongkorn, is poised to assume the throne, but the country’s broadly applied lèse majesté law (which prevents anyone from defaming or insulting members of the royal family) means that discussion of the monarch’s health and the line of succession is heavily curtailed.
In the days leading up to his death, Thais gathered at temples and held vigil outside the hospital offering wishes of good health. Many had donned pink shirts to express their hopes of health for the King. The color first became associated with the King a few years ago when an astrologer said it would promote his well-being. In recent days, messages have been shared on social media urging Thais to wear pink, reported the Bangkok Post.
The King has spent much of the past year at Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital. Since 2009, he had been in and out of hospital for a variety of ailments, most recently for a chest infection and hydrocephalus (or water on the brain.)
Read the whole story
· · ·
Donald Trump reiterates his assertion that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton should be imprisoned over her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. Speaking at a rally in Florida on Wednesday, the Republican presidential candidate says: ‘She has to go to jail.’ The crowd erupts in support
Continue reading...
Russia's state-run oil firm Rosneft bought a majority stake in Bashneft for $5.2 billion, providing a major cash infusion to fill deficits in the Kremlin's budget.
Vladimir Putin simultaneously wants to be Leonid Brezhnev and avoid being Leonid Brezhnev.
Russia's Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin tells the BBC that the Russian military is "careful about selecting targets" in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 9
PARIS (Reuters) - French accusations that the bombing of Aleppo amounts to war crimes are rhetoric, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with French television TF1 aired on Wednesday.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Thursday that his country's only hope was that a rapprochement between Russia and Turkey would allow Moscow to change Ankara's policy towards Syria.
LONDON (Reuters) - British foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday it was not "entirely right" to talk about a new Cold War with Russia because Moscow did not pose as much of a threat to global stability as the former Soviet Union had.
STOCKHOLM (AP) -- Bob Dylan was named the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday in a stunning announcement that for the first time bestowed the prestigious award to someone primarily seen as a musician....
J. S. Bach - The Art Of Fugue, BWV 1080 by Classical Music
Performer: Herbert Tachezi
Year: 1977
The Art of the Fugue; BWV 1080 (Organ)
Year: 1977
The Art of the Fugue; BWV 1080 (Organ)
The Art of Fugue (or The Art of the Fugue; German: Die Kunst der Fuge), BWV 1080, is an incomplete work of unspecified instrumentation by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Written in the last decade of his life, The Art of Fugue is the culmination of Bach's experimentation with monothematic instrumental works.
This work consists of 14 fugues and 4 canons in D minor, each using some variation of a single principal subject, and generally ordered to increase in complexity. "The governing idea of the work", as put by Bach specialist Christoph Wolff, "was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject." The word "contrapunctus" is often used for each fugue.
Simple fugues:
0:00 Contrapunctus I
3:11 Contrapunctus II
6:22 Contrapunctus III
9:18 Contrapunctus IV
0:00 Contrapunctus I
3:11 Contrapunctus II
6:22 Contrapunctus III
9:18 Contrapunctus IV
Counter-fugues:
14:36 Contrapunctus V
17:51 Contrapunctus VI
22:00 Contrapunctus VII
14:36 Contrapunctus V
17:51 Contrapunctus VI
22:00 Contrapunctus VII
Double and triple fugues:
26:00 Contrapunctus VIII
32:01 Contrapunctus IX
35:00 Contrapunctus X
39:23 Contrapunctus XI
26:00 Contrapunctus VIII
32:01 Contrapunctus IX
35:00 Contrapunctus X
39:23 Contrapunctus XI
Cannons:
46:33 Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu
49:27 Canon alla Ottava: Canon in imitation at the octave
51:43 Canon alla Decima in Contrapunto alla Terza
56:26 Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quinta
46:33 Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu
49:27 Canon alla Ottava: Canon in imitation at the octave
51:43 Canon alla Decima in Contrapunto alla Terza
56:26 Canon alla Duodecima in Contrapunto alla Quinta
Mirror fugues:
1:00:57 Contrapunctus [à 3-rectus]
1:03:48 Contrapunctus [à 3-inversus]
1:06:46 Contrapunctus [à 4-rectus]
1:09:38 Contrapunctus [à 4-inversus]
1:00:57 Contrapunctus [à 3-rectus]
1:03:48 Contrapunctus [à 3-inversus]
1:06:46 Contrapunctus [à 4-rectus]
1:09:38 Contrapunctus [à 4-inversus]
Read the whole story
· ·
Wall Street Journal |
Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded to Bob Dylan
Wall Street Journal The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to musician Bob Dylan for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Write to Anna Russell at anna.russell@wsj.com and Matthias Verbergt at Matthias.Verbergt@wsj.com. |
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 10
Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize in literature
SFGate STOCKHOLM (AP) — Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize in literature. Today's Deals. Powered by. Camellia Bonsai Tree for $24 · SHOP NOW · Camellia Bonsai Tree for $24 + pickup at Walmart. WalmartPosted 16 hr 36 min ago. Walmart Summer Clearance Sale. |
The Guardian |
Bob Dylan wins Nobel prize in literature 2016 – live
The Guardian Bob Dylan wins Nobel prize in literature 2016 – live. The 2016 Nobel prize in literature will be announced today at 1pm CET (that's midday in the UK). Follow the build up and all the reaction after the announcement here. LIVE Updated 2m ago ... Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016The Independent Will Don DeLillo win the Nobel Prize in literature?Los Angeles Times all 121 news articles » |
Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images
Before Donald J. Trump came on the electoral scene, not a lot of people had heard of the Goldwater Rule. By now many surely have. The eponymous rule was established by the American Psychiatric Association, my own guild organization. It stipulated that no psychiatrist should make a diagnosis of a person he or she has not examined face-to-face and who has not given consent to discuss his mental health publicly.
While do-it-yourself diagnosing of a certain presidential candidate has become a cottage industry in this election—the consensus about Donald Trump is that he might have a severe case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder—psychiatrists have been understandably reluctant to weigh in, even as people have clamored to say that they deserve to know everything possible about a potential president’s mental fitness.
How did the rule come to be? In the lead up to the 1964 election, Fact magazine surveyed over 12,000 psychiatrists about the personality traits of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee. Only a modest percentage of the psychiatrists responded but of those that did, almost half felt the candidate was psychologically unfit to be president.
They savaged Goldwater, judging him “warped,” “narcissistic,” “impulsive” and a “paranoid schizophrenic” who harbored unconscious hatred of his Jewish father and was scarred by his rigid toilet training. One respondent saw him as “a frightened person who sees himself as weak and threatened by strong virile power around him—and that his call for aggressiveness and the need for individual strength and prerogatives is an attempt to defend himself against and to deny his feelings of weakness and danger.” Even his supporters came in for unfavorable psychoanalysis.
In the aftermath, two things happened. First, Goldwater, who lost the presidency in a landslide, suedFact for libel and was awarded $75,000 in punitive damages. He deserved to win the suit. The psychiatrists’ intra-psychic assessments were deeply intrusive, disrespectful, and basically meaningless. Warmed-over Freudianism is no way to foretell one’s actions in office. Second, the APA issued the Goldwater Rule, which meant to prohibit such distant assessment.
The American Psychiatric Association still stands by the Goldwater Rule and no psychiatrist can go wrong by following it. Of course, many can easily skirt around it—it’s thanks to the rule that modern-day assessments of celebrities’ mental health are couched with the “I have not personally examined this person, but … ”
It goes without saying that any clinical encounter with a nonpsychotic or imminently dangerous person is strictly confidential unless the subject gives permission to reveal the findings to anyone else. But I think there are conditions under which psychiatrists should have more latitude in making determinations from a distance.
To me, the reason why it can be responsible to profile a patient without examining him or her (in other words, to circumvent the Goldwater Rule), has to do with the way diagnoses are made today compared to the way they were made then. I’m referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition, which many consider the gold standard for evaluating mental disorders.
The diagnostic entities contained in the current DSM are based on signs (what clinicians observe) and symptoms (what patients report). But in Goldwater’s time, Freudian theory dominated American psychiatry and pathology: Even severe depression and schizophrenia were tied to psychoanalytic formulations. Symptoms such as mood or hallucinations or obsessions were almost irrelevant—instead, diagnosis relied almost entirely on what internal conflicts or stalled developmental stages a patient had experienced in his or her lifetime. This required a deep understanding of the patient’s life. None of the psychiatrists quoted by Fact had access to that full picture of information. Thus, not only were their opinions ill-informed, they were based on certain theories of mental health that are now considered highly questionable by many in the field.
But the assessment of mental disorders changed to a more objective system of taxonomy in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III. A number of diagnoses are now made largely on a person’s observable behavior or what can reasonably be inferred from it.
So it is now possible to make a psychological assessment from afar. The question remains of whether it is appropriate. One of the biggest concerns about armchair diagnosing is that it’s a drive-by affair: Quick pronouncements are made based on a single transgression or a glimpse of erratic behavior. But even when a clinician conducts a formal interview it may not pick up a lot. In an hourlong interview, a savvy politician could easily present as better adjusted than he or she actually is—in some cases, such impression management might go undetected, even by experienced examiners.
In a long interview, a savvy politician could easily present as better adjusted than he or she actually is.
What’s more, as we have seen, some politicians, like Trump in particular, can run circles around most interviewers, and it’s doubtful that even trained psychiatrists could get much more information from them in a direct examination. Thus, a formal clinical interview with him might not shed much light.
In contrast, a political campaign for president offers an abundance of unfiltered observable behavior. Indeed, voters have been inundated—they have watched the candidates on a near daily basis for many months. And for these two candidates in particular, the volumes of documentation go back decades: we have books, articles, and interviews with people who have known them. In this case, the public actually has more “data” than many psychiatric evaluators have to go on when they see certain patients in certain settings.
Research supports the importance of extensive exposure to a subject’s behavior. According to psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, a personality researcher and professor at Emory University, research has demonstrated that informal, unstructured interviews of the kinds typically conducted in direct examinations of psychiatric patients are often not especially reliable–that is, consistent across different mental health professionals. “What’s more,” Lilienfeld says, “informant reports from those who know the person well are often more predictive of people’s behavior than are self-reports, which are much of what obtains from a direct interview.” More broadly, he says, assessments of personality are most likely to be valid when multiple sources of information are integrated.
There is still one huge technical catch to diagnosing at arms’ length. The DSM requires that a diagnosis must include the presence of "significant impairments in self (identity or self-direction) and interpersonal (empathy or intimacy) functioning." The first part of that diagnosis is hard, if not impossible, to make without a private interview, especially in someone who has succeeded at a high level based in part on these traits. So, while I believe it is occasionally appropriate to speculate, any assessment should be considered just that—an assessment, not a diagnosis.
This brings us to Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is most often invoked by his detractors to describe Donald Trump.
Here are the nine diagnostic criteria for NPD in DSM-V. (These criteria go far beyond what we usually mean when we casually refer to someone as a narcissist.) Five are needed to be eligible for the diagnosis:
- A grandiose logic of self-importance
- A fixation with fantasies of infinite success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love
- A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions
- A desire for unwarranted admiration
- A sense of entitlement
- Interpersonally oppressive behavior
- No form of empathy
- Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
- A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes
Sure, it seems obvious that Trump could qualify—perhaps he is even a severe case. But keep in mind that some would easily attribute these traits to Hillary Clinton, too. And herein lies the real virtue of the Goldwater Rule: Allowing psychiatrists to diagnose or assess at a distance would open a floodgate of efforts, many of which will be inaccurate, slanted, or politically motivated. The Goldwater Rule attempts to keep these gates closed. The DSM cannot become a political instrument.
But we shouldn’t. So what if a candidate appears to meet criteria for NPD? It is no secret that many of the DSM criteria listed above are manifest in Trump. But even a clinically authentic diagnosis (which has not been made, or at least surfaced publicly) would not mean, prima facie, that he should not run for president, or that he would necessarily be a bad one if elected. Surely, there have been people with NPD who have held positions of power and achieved good and great things. There are also plenty of people who don’t have the disorder who have held positions of power and failed.
We are too caught up in diagnosis. Even if Trump were to be officially diagnosed with this disorder, it would do little to sway voters from either supporting or reviling him.
After all, the enduring traits that many find so problematic in Mr. Trump–and that his supporters fail to see, dismiss, or downplay because other aspects of his candidacy appeal so strongly to them—are not ones that necessarily indicate a formal mental condition. I’m referring, of course, to variousdispositions, such as a lack of interest in learning about the governing process or world affairs, a tendency to ignore advisers, impulsive and crude modes of retaliation, a reflexive instinct toscapegoat others, and so on. One does not need to be a specialist of the mind to understand why many would not want to vote for such a person, or why others might fear being governed by such a man.
So, I am a minority view within my profession because I do not believe it is necessarily an ethical lapse for a psychiatrist to venture an assessment of a public figure—especially because the “evidence” in this election has been so widely accessible and formal assessment is often made on the basis of that very evidence.
But in this case, I don’t think a diagnosis would actually provide any new insight into the choice we have to make about who we should elect president. It does not matter whether Trump might have NPD.
That’s because diagnoses do not allow us to predict future actions with great certainty. Past behavior and enduring character traits, on the other hand, do—and we have seen more than enough to understand what Trump’s (and Clinton’s) are.
Read the whole story
· · · · · · ·
The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice, with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling <a href="http://FoxNews.com" rel="nofollow">FoxNews.com</a> that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.
The source, who spoke to <a href="http://FoxNews.com" rel="nofollow">FoxNews.com</a> on the condition of anonymity, said FBI Director James Comey’s dramatic July 5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General’s office that the former secretary of state be charged left members of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys from the DOJ’s National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.
“No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute -- it was a top-down decision,” said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by <a href="http://FoxNews.com" rel="nofollow">FoxNews.com</a>.
A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, “It was unanimous that we all wanted her [Clinton’s] security clearance yanked.”
“It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted,” the senior FBI official told Fox News. “We were floored while listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said ‘but we are doing nothing,’ which made no sense to us.”
Andrew Napolitano, former judge and senior judicial analyst for Fox News Channel, said many law enforcement agents involved with the Clinton email investigation have similar beliefs.
See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map →
“It is well known that the FBI agents on the ground, the human beings who did the investigative work, had built an extremely strong case against Hillary Clinton and were furious when the case did not move forward,” said Napolitano. “They believe the decision not to prosecute came from The White House.”
The claim also is backed up by a report in the New York Post this week, which quotes a number of veteran FBI agents saying FBI Director James Comey “has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his cowardly whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private email server.”
“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time. I hold Director Comey responsible,” Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer investigations unit, told the Post. Retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello added to the report, saying, “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.”
Especially angering the team, which painstakingly pieced together deleted emails and interviewed witnesses to prove that sensitive information was left unprotected, was the fact that Comey based his decision on a conclusion that a recommendation to charge would not be followed by DOJ prosecutors, even though the bureau’s role was merely to advise, Fox News was told.
“Basically, James Comey hijacked the DOJ’s role by saying ‘no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case,’” the Fox News source said. “The FBI does not decide who to prosecute and when, that is the sole province of a prosecutor -- that never happens.
“I know zero prosecutors in the DOJ’s National Security Division who would not have taken the case to a grand jury,” the source added. “One was never even convened.”
Napolitano agreed, saying the FBI investigation was hampered from the beginning, because there was no grand jury, and no search warrants or subpoenas issued.
“The FBI could not seize anything related to the investigation, only request things. As an example, in order to get the laptop, they had to agree to grant immunity,” Napolitano said.
In early 2015, it was revealed that Clinton had used a private email server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home to conduct government business while serving from 2009-2013. The emails on the private server included thousands of messages that would later be marked classified by the State Department retroactively. Federal law makes it a crime for a government employee to possess classified information in an unsecure manner, and the relevant statute does not require a finding of intent.
Although Comey found that Clinton was “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” he said “no charges are appropriate in this case.”
Well before Comey’s announcement, which came days after Bill Clinton met in secret with Comey’s boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, there were signs the investigation would go nowhere, the source told <a href="http://FoxNews.com" rel="nofollow">FoxNews.com</a>. One was the fact that the FBI forced its agents and analysts involved in the case to sign non-disclosure agreements.
“This is unheard of, because of the stifling nature it has on the investigative process,” the source said.
Another oddity was the five so-called immunity agreements granted to Clinton’s State Department aides and IT experts.
Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff, along with two other State Department staffers, John Bentel and Heather Samuelson, were afforded immunity agreements, as was Bryan Pagliano, Clinton's former IT aide, and Paul Combetta, an employee at Platte River networks, the firm hired to manage her server after she left the State Department.
As Fox News has reported, Combetta utilized the computer program “Bleachbit” to destroy Clinton’s records, despite an order from Congress to preserve them, and Samuelson also destroyed Clinton’s emails. Pagliano established the system that illegally transferred classified and top secret information to Clinton’s private server. Mills disclosed classified information to the Clinton’s family foundation in the process, breaking federal laws.
None should have been granted immunity if no charges were being brought, the source said.
“[Immunity] is issued because you know someone possesses evidence you need to charge the target, and you almost always know what it is they possess,” the source said. “That's why you give immunity.”
Mills and Samuelson also received immunity for what was found on their computers, which were then destroyed as a part of negotiations with the FBI.
“Mills and Samuelson receiving immunity with the agreement their laptops would be destroyed by the FBI afterwards is, in itself, illegal,” the source said. “We know those laptops contained classified information. That's also illegal, and they got a pass.”
Mills’ dual role as Clinton’s attorney and a witness in her own right should never have been tolerated either.
“Mills was allowed to sit in on the interview of Clinton as her lawyer. That's absurd. Someone who is supposedly cooperating against the target of an investigation [being] permitted to sit by the target as counsel violates any semblance of ethical responsibility,” the source said.
“Every agent and attorney I have spoken to is embarrassed and has lost total respect for James Comey and Loretta Lynch,” the source said. “The bar for DOJ is whether the evidence supports a case for charges -- it did here. It should have been taken to the grand jury.”
Also infuriating agents, the New York Post reported, was the fact that Clinton’s interview spanned just 3½ hours with no follow-up questioning, despite her “40 bouts of amnesia,” and then, three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.
Many FBI and DOJ staffers believe Comey and Lynch were motivated by ambition, and not justice, the source said.
“Loretta Lynch simply wants to stay on as Attorney General under Clinton, so there is no way she would indict,” the source said. “James Comey thought his position [excoriating Clinton even as he let her off the hook] gave himself cover to remain on as director regardless of who wins.”
The decision by Comey and Lynch not to prosecute has renewed FBI agents’ belief that the agency should be autonomous.
“This is why so many agents believe the FBI needs to be an entity by itself to truly be effective,” the senior FBI official told Fox News. “We all feel very strongly about it -- and the need to be objective. But that truly cannot be done when the AG is appointed by a president and attends daily briefings.”
Adding to the controversy, WikiLeaks released internal Clinton communication records this week that show the Department of Justice kept Clinton’s campaign and her staff informed about the progress of its investigation.
Leaked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s gmail account show the Clinton campaign was contacted by the DOJ on May 19, 2015.
“DOJ folks inform me there is a status hearing in this case this morning, so we could have a window into the judge’s thinking about this proposed production schedule as quickly as today,” Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon wrote in relation to the email documentation the State Department would be required to turn over to the Justice Department.
Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, who previously served in the U.S. Treasury Department in the Office of Chief Counsel for the IRS, where he was responsible for litigation in the U.S. Tax Court, said it was clear from the start that the FBI never intended to prosecute.
“This was a fake, false investigation from the outset,” Sekulow said.
Adam Housley joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 2001 and currently serves as a Los Angeles-based senior correspondent.
Read the whole story
· · · · · · ·
It’s possible that the experience of being, say, an infectious disease physician, who treats a lot of drug addicts with hepatitis C, might make a young physician more likely to align herself with Democratic candidates who support a social safety net. But it’s also possible that the differences resulted from some initial sorting by medical students as they were choosing their fields.
Dr. Ron Ackermann, the director of the institute for public health and medicine at Northwestern University, says he remembers his experience rotating through the specialties when he was in medical school. “You’ll be on a team that’s psychiatry, and a month later you’re on general surgery, and the culture is extraordinarily different,” he said. “It’s just sort of a feeling of whether you’re comfortable or not. At the end, most students have a strong feeling of where they want to gravitate.”
Dr. Ackermann, who trained as an internist, helped conduct a survey of physicians on the idea of a single-payer health care system, a liberal policy goal, in 2008. His work found similar trends of support and opposition clustering in certain specialties. (A co-author of that study is Aaron Carroll, an Indiana University medical school professor and an Upshot contributor.)
There is no way to know exactly why certain medical specialties attract Democrats or Republicans. But researchers who have studied the politics of physicians offered a few theories.
One explanation could be money. Doctors tend to earn very high salaries compared with average Americans, but the highest-paid doctors earn many times as much as those in the lower-paying specialties. The fields with higher average salaries tended to contain more doctors who were Republican, while the comparatively lower-paying fields were more popular among Democrats. That matches with national data, which show that, for people with a given level of education, richer ones are more likely to lean Republican (possibly because of a concern over the liberal policy goal of taxing the wealthiest at a higher rate).
Cause or effect? On average, the specialties with the highest salaries tend to have the most Republicans.
The sorting may also reflect the changing demographics of medicine. As more women have become doctors in recent years, they have tended to cluster in certain specialties more than others. The data showed that female physicians were more likely to be Democrats than their male peers, mirroring another trend in the larger American population. So as women enter fields like pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology and psychiatry, they may be making those fields more liberal.
Over all, the partisanship of doctors looks very different from a generation ago, when most physicians identified as Republicans. The influx of women may help explain that change, too. The researchers Adam Bonica, Howard Rosenthal and David Rothman compared political donations by doctors in 1991 with those in 2011 and 2012. The study found that doctors had become substantially more likely to give to Democrats.
The trend can be explained, partly, by an increasing share of female physicians, who are more likely to be Democrats.
New doctors can’t explain all of the change, though. Even older doctors in the new data look close to evenly split between the parties. It’s likely that many older doctors have switched parties over the year. That’s true broadly for well-educated professionals in the United States, who have become increasingly Democratic in recent years.
The shift reflects how the practice of medicine has been changing, too. Doctors used to essentially be small-business owners. As such, they may have been more attracted to Republican aims of low taxes and limited regulation. These days, more and more doctors are employees of large companies or hospitals.
Should you care if your doctor is a Democrat or a Republican? Maybe. Professor Hersh and Dr. Goldenberg used their data on doctors’ partisan identification to conduct a study of primary care physicians, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
They asked the doctors to consider a group of hypothetical patients: one who smoked, one who drank, one who was overweight, and so on. They found that doctors viewed most of their patients’ health with similar seriousness and would advise similar responses. But for three of the hypothetical patients, they found differences. Those patients were devised to have health problems closely tied to hot-button political issues: One used marijuana, one owned guns, and one had a history of abortions. For those patients, Republican and Democratic doctors registered different levels of concern and said they would respond differently.
When it came to the patient with a history of abortions, doctors who were Republican said they would be more likely to encourage the patient to seek counseling and express concern about mental health consequences; they also said they would be more likely to discourage the patient from seeking future abortions. For the patient who used marijuana, Republican doctors said they’d be more likely to ask the patient to cut back and to discuss legal risks of using the drug, which is banned under federal and most state laws. For the patient with guns, doctors who were Democrats indicated they’d be more likely to tell the patient not to keep guns at home. Republican doctors, on the other hand, would be more likely to discuss safe storage options.
“These findings suggest you are going to get different care,” Professor Hersh said, adding that the differences might not matter much for the average patient. But they might for patients whose needs were closely related to politically divisive subjects, like reproductive health, with issues like contraception, abortion and prenatal screening; or H.I.V. prevention, with risk factors that include sex and intravenous drug use.
Primary care doctors and obstetrician-gynecologists, the doctors most likely to consider such issues, were among the most evenly split in the study sample. That means that patients probably can’t guess the political leanings of their doctor without asking (or checking the voter file data). The current study is only a survey, but Professor Hersh said he hopes the research spurs more examinations of how ideology shapes medical practice.
Professor Hersh and Dr. Goldenberg constructed the data set by assembling a large sample of doctors from the federal government’s National Provider Index, a file of every physician in the United States who either bills insurance or shares data digitally. There are very few doctors who are not included in this file.
They then matched each physician to data from state voter files maintained by Catalist LLC, a political data vendor. The researchers searched for doctors with matching names, living within a small geographic radius from their practice address. Not every doctor matched. Some had moved; some were not registered to vote; some had changed their names; some had common names that made it hard to make a definitive match; some lived nearby in states where the voter file does not include political information; and there may have been some mistakes in each file. But over all, the researchers were able to collect complete data for more than 55,000 physicians living in the 29 states where voter files include party registration. (Those states contain about 60 percent of the population, and are roughly, but not perfectly, representative of the country.)
For many of the measures in this article, we looked only at the percentage of “partisan” doctors, that is, doctors who recorded a political party. There was a substantial fraction of the physicians with no political affiliation, and there was a small fraction who were registered with smaller political parties. Altogether, the analysis looks at just over 36,000 doctors.
There are many more medical specialties than are included in our charts. With advice from Professor Hersh and Dr. Goldenberg, we combined many small subspecialties to form large specialties, such as “surgery.”
Correction: October 6, 2016
An earlier version of a chart with this article misstated the surname of a co-author on a study of how partisanship influences physician behavior. He is Matthew Goldenberg, not Rosenberg.
An earlier version of a chart with this article misstated the surname of a co-author on a study of how partisanship influences physician behavior. He is Matthew Goldenberg, not Rosenberg.
Read the whole story
· · · · ·
Fox News |
FBI, DOJ roiled by Comey, Lynch decision to let Clinton slide by on emails, says insider
Fox News The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice, with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the ... James Comey and Loretta Lynch Should Be Impeached for Whitewashing Clinton'sCrimesObserver all 26 news articles » |
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 11
New York Magazine |
Donald Trump's poll denialism
CNNMoney "Even the polls are crooked," he said at a Monday night rally, expressing disbelief that he is losing to Clinton in Pennsylvania. "Look, we're in a rigged system." Trump has only topped Clinton in one scientifically conducted poll in Pennsylvania since ... Trump's ridiculous claim that he won 'every poll' on the second presidential debateWashington Post Trump Getting Thumped in Post-Tape-Gate PollsNew York Magazine New Ohio poll puts Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by 9 points after news of Trump's vulgar talkcleveland.com The Daily Dot -International Business Times -Reuters -Washington Post all 14,565 news articles » |
New York Times |
Politics|Some in GOP Who Deserted Donald Trump Over Video Are Returning
New York Times Donald J. Trump spoke to supporters at a rally in Panama City Beach, Fla., on Tuesday night. Some Republicans have renewed their support. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times. Republicans were fleeing Donald J. Trump after a video of him ... Trump's ghost will haunt the GOP -- and possibly kill itCNN all 55 news articles » |
New York Times |
Politics|Some in GOP Who Deserted Donald Trump Over Video Are Returning
New York Times Republicans were fleeing Donald J. Trump after a video of him demeaning women was made public last Friday, but less than a week later some are already starting to come back to the Republican presidential nominee. Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican ... and more » |
Top Secret Writers |
Does Assange Really Have an October Surprise for Clinton?
Top Secret Writers Will WikiLeaks and its founder really release the information that could potentially indict Hillary Clinton or, as the Daily Mail (4) puts it: “Destroy Clinton's campaign”? Or is WikiLeaksattempting to stir up trouble with an alleged 'October Surprise ... How Julian Assange turned WikiLeaks into Donald Trump's best friendFinancial Express all 12 news articles » |
Fox News |
Missile fired at US ship from Yemeni rebel-held territory for 2nd time in 4 days
Fox News A U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea was targeted by at least one missile fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen on Wednesday for the second time in just four days, a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News. The cruise missile was fired from a coastal area ... As Yemen's War Worsens, Questions Grow About The US RoleNPR US Navy destroyer again targeted by missiles from Yemen: US officialsReuters Activist: Yemen War Not 'Forgotten' but 'Ignored'Voice of America Washington Post -BBC News -NBCNews.com -USNI News all 180 news articles » |
NPR |
What's In The Latest WikiLeaks Dump of Clinton Campaign Emails
NPR Comic book fans are familiar with the idea of the multiverse: alternate worlds very similar to ours but different enough for plots to come and go without affecting long-term story arcs. Well, on the Earth-3 where Hillary Clinton is running for ... Email chain allegedly shows Clinton aide mocking Catholics, EvangelicalsTheBlaze.com Meet Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorable anti-Christian bigotsFox News Catholic group calls for Clinton spokeswoman's resignation after anti-Catholic comments in emailsWashington Times all 64 news articles » |
Next Page of Stories
Loading...
Page 12
Business Insider |
TRUMP: If Clinton wins, ISIS will 'take over this country'
Business Insider Donald Trump offered a stark warning Wednesday for voters considering backing Hillary Clinton: If she wins, he alleged, the terror group ISIS will take over the US. The Republican presidential nominee, the day after proclaiming himself "unshackled ... and more » |
Wall Street Journal |
'Those police officers walked into a trap': Suspect in Palm Springs police killings charged with murder
Los Angeles Times The man accused of shooting and killing two Palm Springs police officers had set a trap and ambushed his victims as they stood outside his door Saturday, according to the Riverside County district attorney, who announced the filing of capital murder ... Murder Charges Filed Against Man Accused of Killing Palm Springs Officers in 'Ambush' Shooting: DAKTLA Man charged with murder in deaths of 2 Palm Springs officersChicago Tribune Man charged in deaths of 2 Palm Springs police officers, attempted killing of 3 othersPress-Enterprise KABC-TV -89.3 KPCC -Wall Street Journal -NBC Southern California all 107 news articles » |
Western Journalism |
ALERT: Hillary Email Investigation Insider Drops MASSIVE Comey Bombshell We All Feared
Western Journalism When FBI Director James Comey took to national television in July to announce his findings on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, he made a point of saying no one in the Justice Department or other level of government knew what he was going to relate. Investigator Says 'No Agent Working The Case' Agreed With Comey's Decision to Let Clinton Off HookLawNewz Trump: A Hillary presidency means the destruction of AmericaCainTV all 4 news articles » |
Russian president Vladimir Putin says the scandal that has erupted in the United States over allegations Russia hacked Democratic Party emails has not been in Moscow's interests and that both sides in the U.S. election campaign are just using Russia to score points. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).
Subscribe: http://smarturl.it/reuterssubscribe
More updates and breaking news: http://smarturl.it/BreakingNews
More updates and breaking news: http://smarturl.it/BreakingNews
Reuters tells the world's stories like no one else. As the largest international multimedia news provider, Reuters provides coverage around the globe and across topics including business, financial, national, and international news. For over 160 years, Reuters has maintained its reputation for speed, accuracy, and impact while providing exclusives, incisive commentary and forward-looking analysis.
- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
Comments
Post a Comment