demmiblue
demmiblue's JournalA 5-year-old boy's entire kindergarten class showed up for his adoption hearing
Five-year-old Michael's entire kindergarten class sat in the audience behind him waving big red hearts mounted on wooden sticks to show their support.
Michael's adoptive father told CNN his favorite part was when the judge asked everyone present in the room to explain what Michael means to them.
The kindergartners offered the most touching answers, standing up and telling the court, "I love Michael" or "Michael's my best friend," his father said.
He added that the judge said it was the first time she'd ever hosted a whole kindergarten class for a hearing in her courtroom.
https://twitter.com/JocelynBenson/status/1202948932646703105
Former NYC Mayor @MikeBloomberg tells @GayleKing "nobody asked" him about stop & frisk until...
"I'm sorry. I apologize. Let's go fight the NRA and find other ways to stop the murders and incarceration. Those are things that I'm committed to do."
https://twitter.com/CBSThisMorning/status/1202927131510157312
https://twitter.com/AlxThomp/status/1202944640820883457
How much would giving up meat help the environment?
IT IS NO secret that steaks and chops are delicious. But guzzling them incurs high costs for both carnivorous humans and the planet. Over half of adults in both America and Britain say they want to reduce their meat consumption, according to Mintel, a market-research firm. Whether they will is a different matter. The amount of meat that Americans and Britons consume per day has risen by 10% since 1970, according to figures from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
People who want to eat less livestock—but who can’t quite bring themselves to exchange burgers for beans—might take inspiration from two recent academic papers. A study published this week by scientists at Oxford University and the University of Minnesota estimates both the medical and environmental burdens of having an extra serving per day of various food types. The health findings were sobering. Compared with a typical Western adult of the same age who eats an average diet, a person who guzzles an additional 50g of processed red meat (about two rashers of bacon) per day has a 41% higher chance of dying in a given year.
Meat has an even starker impact on the environment. Compared with a 100g portion of vegetables—the standard serving size considered in academic papers—a 50g chunk of red meat is associated with at least 20 times as much greenhouse-gas emitted and 100 times as much land use. Averaged across all the ecological indicators the authors used, red meat was about 35 times as damaging as a bowl of greens.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much-would-giving-up-meat-help-the-environment?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/howmuchwouldgivingupmeathelptheenvironmentdailychart
R. Kelly Is Charged With Using Bribes to Marry Aaliyah at Age 15
Source: NYT
He bribed a government employee in 1994 so that he could obtain a fake ID for the singer Aaliyah, a person familiar with the matter said.
One persistent question has dogged R. Kelly’s two-decade music career: How was he able to legally marry the singer Aaliyah in 1994 when she was only 15 years old?
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn accused Mr. Kelly of bribing an Illinois government employee in 1994 in order to obtain a fake ID for Aaliyah, according to the indictment and a person familiar with the matter.
The fake ID was to be used to obtain a marriage license that listed her age as 18, the person familiar said.
The new allegation expands on an existing racketeering indictment filed in New York against Mr. Kelly that accuses him of sexually exploiting underage girls and coercing them into illegal sexual activity. This year, Mr. Kelly has been criminally charged in several jurisdictions over sex abuse of minors.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/nyregion/rkelly-aaliyah.html
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1202730235617325058
BIG: House Democrats are calling the GOP's bluff on prescription drug prices.
NEXT WEEK: House will vote to give Medicare the power to lower prices of prescription drugs (HR3). CBO says it could lower as much as 55%.
QUESTION: Will GOP vote with PATIENTS or with PHRMA?
https://twitter.com/JesseFFerguson/status/1202612057864048640
Pete Buttigieg scores endorsements from former Obama officials
Obama's former special assistant and personal aide Reggie Love is endorsing Buttigieg, the campaign said. Love, who began his time with Obama as deputy political director in his Senate office, was a ubiquitous presence at Obama's side during the 2008 presidential campaign and at the White House through most of his first term. The endorsement is a boost for Buttigieg from a high profile African American official from Obama's orbit at a time when the South Bend mayor is working to build support with black voters.
Buttigieg is also being formally endorsed by Austan Goolsbee, who served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama, and Linda Douglass, the former director of communications for the White House Office of Health Reform.
The Obama-era endorsements come at a time when Buttigieg is increasingly emphasizing parallels between his candidacy and Obama's 2008 run. Buttigieg has noted that both he and Obama are running on a message of hope and unity and are also running as relatively young candidates new to the political scene.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/05/politics/pete-buttigieg-obama-endorsements/index.html
Stop Using Avast and AVG Plugins Right Now
Wladimir Palant, the creator behind Adblock Plus, initially surfaced the issue—which extends to Avast Online Security and Avast SafePrice as well as Avast-owned AVG Online Security and AVG SafePrice extensions—in a blog post back in October but this week flagged the issue to the companies themselves. In response, both Mozilla and Opera yanked the extensions from their stores. However, as of Wednesday, the extensions curiously remained in Google’s extensions store.
Using dev tools to examine network traffic, Palant was able to determine that the extensions were collecting an alarming amount of data about users’ browsing history and activity, including URLs, where you navigated from, whether the page was visited in the past, the version of browser you’re using, country code, and, if the Avast Antivirus is installed, the OS version of your device, among other data. Palant argued the data collection far exceeded what was necessary for the extensions to perform their basic jobs.
At the time of Palant’s original post, the company’s privacy policy appeared to include language around this data collection that has now seemingly disappeared from the text. However, according to a version of the page archived in the Wayback Machine on November 4, that language read:
https://gizmodo.com/stop-using-avast-and-avg-plugins-right-now-1840213548?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
Giuliani, Facing Scrutiny, Travels to Europe to Interview Ukrainians
Source: NYT
President Trump’s personal lawyer has been in Budapest and Kyiv this week to talk with former Ukrainian prosecutors for a documentary series intended to debunk the impeachment case.
WASHINGTON — Even as Democrats intensified their scrutiny this week of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s role in the pressure campaign against the Ukrainian government that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, Mr. Giuliani has been in Europe continuing his efforts to shift the focus to purported wrongdoing by President Trump’s political rivals.
Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, met in Budapest on Tuesday with a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who has become a key figure in the impeachment inquiry. He then traveled to Kyiv on Wednesday seeking to meet with other former Ukrainian prosecutors whose claims have been embraced by Republicans, including Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, according to people familiar with the effort.
The former prosecutors, who have faced allegations of corruption, all played some role in promoting claims about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a former United States ambassador to Ukraine and Ukrainians who disseminated damaging information about Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in 2016.
Those claims — some baseless and others with key disputed elements — have been the foundations of the effort by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani to pressure the Ukrainian government to commit itself to investigations that would benefit Mr. Trump heading into his re-election campaign. That effort in turn has led to the impeachment proceedings in the House against the president.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/giuliani-europe-impeachment.html
A tweet for everything as the @realDonaldTrump blows up NATO again and humiliates America again.
We need a President who isn't a laughing stock to the entire World. We need a truly great leader, a genius at strategy and winning. Respect!
https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/1202228654744453120
House passes resolution disapproving of Russia being included in future G7 summits
Source: The Hill
The House on Tuesday passed a resolution disapproving of Russia being included in future Group of Seven (G-7) summits in a 339-71 vote on Tuesday.
The resolution was introduced by Rep. Albio Sires (D-N.J.) in August after President Trump said in August he believed Russia should be readmitted into the G-7. Russia was expelled from the G-8 in 2014 due to its occupation of territory in Ukraine.
The resolution includes language reiterating the United States’ support for Ukraine while denouncing the country’s occupation of Crimea and destabilization in the region.
The measure also condemns the “Kremlin’s assaults on democratic societies worldwide, including in the United States and other Group of Seven countries,” and calls of the leaders of the G-7 to oppose Russia rejoining the group unless it ends its occupation of “ Ukraine’s sovereign territory, including Crimea” and attacks on democracies around the world.
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/472905-house-passes-resolution-disapproving-of-russia-being-included-in-future-g7
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