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/

An anti-gay preacher carrying a “you deserve rape” sign, has been attacked with a baseball bat.
Brother Dean Saxton, who lives in Glendale, Arizona, was hit with the bat while he stood outside a school with the “you deserve rape” sign.
Known for spreading hate speech, Saxton often preaches anti-gay sermons, and is seen in this particular video outside the Valley high school.
Saxton is seen in a video published on YouTube saying: “The Bible says it’s not okay to be gay”.
He goes on to say: “You need to stop looking up naughty, nasty things on the Internet.”
As he makes the hate speech, various students and teachers approach him and denounce what he is saying, peacefully challenging him on his views.
One teacher says: “I think you’re a disgrace to Christianity. Why don’t you go and preach it to somebody who really wants to hear your message, like Westboro Baptist Church?”
Then a student attacks Saxton while he is still on camera.
Students and staff nearby are seen celebrating as Saxton is clearly dazed by the blow.
He is later seen walking away with blood dripping from his head
Tabitha Brubaker, 19, was arrested and charged with felony assault and marijuana possession after the attack.
After the attack, Saxton denied that he was responsible for the attack by inciting the violence. He called the attacker an “LGBT monster”.

MISSION TRIP GROUPS POUR INTO HAITI EACH WEEK, BUT THE GROUPS OFTEN AVOID A KEY PART OF HELPING HAITI: SPENDING MONEY.

GRAND GOAVE, Haiti - The mission trip groups pour into Haiti's Port-au-Prince airport each week, adorned in colorful matching T-shirts identifying their causes. They've come to this mountainous island - plagued in recent years by earthquakes, cholera and political unrest - to hand out food, paint houses and even perform eye surgery.

They are here to help. But the groups often avoid a crucial component of stimulating the Haitian economy: spending money. Typically, the groups stay within a mission campus, sleep in bunk dorms, eat food they brought and work on their project, rarely venturing out to taste the island nation's cuisine and explore its culture.

It's an issue that the Franklin-based Hands and Feet Project recognized as its founders looked for ways to help the abandoned children they cared for in the towns of Jacmel and Grand Goave transition to adulthood. The group has overhauled the mission trip model to encourage U.S. visitors to eat at local restaurants, employ Haitians as trip guides, pay for hotel-like accommodations and buy goods made in the communities they visited.

The Hands and Feet Project vision is for Haitian teenagers and young adults to take visitors hiking along the green mountain ridges, paddleboarding and snorkeling in the clear ocean water or on day trips to the artist community in Jacmel.

President Obama signed bill H.R.4238 “modernizing terms relating to minorities” into law on Friday.



As the country begins to reconcile its sometimes inglorious past, as with Confederate statues and heroes being swept into the dustbin of history, President Barack Obama signed a bill taking racially offensive words such as “negro” and “Oriental” out of all Federal laws, reports Mediate.

Sponsored by Congresswoman Grace Meng and co-sponsored by all 51 members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, bill H.R.4238 will strike words such as “Negro, American Indian, Eskimo, Oriental, or Aleut or a Spanish speaking individual of Spanish descent” and replace them with “Asian American, Native Hawaiian, a Pacific Islander, African American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Native American, or an Alaska Native.”

There has been a lot of controversy lately about how “ethnic” groups in the U.S. are referred to, especially with racially-charged words such as “r--skins,” the “n-word” and “Oriental,” and so this bill is just one more way that people of color can and will define themselves with words they find acceptable.

Rep. Meng, who is Chinese-American and from Queens, N.Y., said that she is especially happy that the word Oriental is going the way of the covered wagon.

“Many Americans may not be aware that the word ‘Oriental’ is derogatory,” says Meng. “But it is an insulting term that needed to be removed from the books, and I am extremely pleased that my legislation to do that is now the law of the land.”

William Weld Teams Up With Gary Johnson, Boosting Libertarians
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/05/18/william-weld-teams-up-with-gary-johnson-boosting-libertarians/




Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is teaming up with former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, hoping to offer dissatisfied voters an alternative to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“We got together and shook hands on it,” Mr. Johnson told the Associated Press, which first reported the news. “It brings an enormous amount of credibility to what it is I’m doing. I’m unbelievably flattered by this and humbled.”

Joe Hunter, communications director to Mr. Johnson, confirmed that the two men had agreed to work together as a ticket. Mr. Weld will seek the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nomination, while Mr. Johnson is considered the front-runner to win the Libertarian presidential nomination.

Both men will still need to win the nominations at the Libertarian convention in Orlando next week. Together, they would form a third-party ticket composed of two popular two-term Republican governors, putting the Libertarian ticket in a stronger position in November.