TIMBEEEEEEEEEER!

Emirates, the Middle East's biggest airline, said Wednesday that it is cutting flights to the United States because of a drop in demand caused by heightened U.S. security measures and Trump administration attempts to ban travelers from several Muslim-majority nations.

The decision by the Dubai government-owned airline is the strongest sign yet that tougher measures imposed on U.S.-bound travelers from the Middle East are taking a financial toll on fast-growing Persian Gulf carriers that have expanded rapidly in the United States in recent years.

Dubai was one of 10 cities in Muslim-majority countries affected by a ban on laptops and other personal electronics in carry-on luggage aboard U.S.-bound flights.

Emirates' hub at Dubai International Airport, the world's third busiest, is a major transit point for travelers who were affected by President Trump's executive orders temporarily halting entry to citizens of six countries.

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-emirates-flights-20170419-story.html

We don’t live in a post-truth era, despite claims to the contrary. Facts exist as stubbornly as they did before. But we do live in a time when highly-placed people in government and media are actively undermining the idea that there is such a thing as verifiable truth by propagating untruths at dizzying speeds. You can call these falsehoods “weaponized lies,” as the psychologist Daniel J. Levitin does. Or you can call them what the late astronomer Carl Sagan might have: baloney.

https://qz.com/959775/carl-sagans-baloney-detection-kit-can-help-you-spot-fake-news-and-weaponized-lies/

the alarm bells have gotten louder at Breitbart News, the site Bannon used to run.

The latest source of angst for Breitbart came late last week, when Trump tapped former Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus to serve on the board of directors for the Export-Import Bank.

Bachus, the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is apparently the only politician whom the website's late patriarch, Andrew Breitbart, ever called upon to resign.

On Breitbart's radio program on Monday, the site's senior editor-at-large Peter Schweizer called the appointment "troubling." Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, while saying he still had confidence in the president, admitted that he had become "more concerned about the potential for corruption in the Trump White House."

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/18/media/breitbart-donald-trump-steve-bannon/index.html?sr=twCNN041917breitbart-donald-trump-steve-bannon1152AMVODtopPhoto&linkId=36655216

Source: REUTERS

(Reuters Health) - People who live near sources of heavy traffic exhaust may be at higher risk of heart disease because the fine particles in this type of pollution lower levels of “good” cholesterol needed for healthy blood flow, a U.S. study suggests.

High-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol helps curb the odds of heart disease by purging blood vessels of debris and lowering levels of triglycerides - dangerous fats that can make blood thicker, stickier and more prone to clots.

Researchers studied 6,654 adults and found people exposed to higher levels of fine and ultrafine particles in traffic pollution tended to have lower levels of HDL cholesterol in their blood.

“However, this was a fairly small effect - it wasn’t a dramatic lowering of HDL - so I don’t think this is a huge cause for alarm beyond what we already know about the dangers of air pollution,” said lead study author Griffith Bell of the University of Washington School of Public Health in St. Louis.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cholesterol-particle-pollution-idUSKBN17K23Z?utm_campaign=trueAnthem

Here we go again.

When Congress comes back from recess Monday, it has just five days to head off yet another government shutdown by the end of next week, when the U.S. Treasury officially runs out of the legal authority to spend money.

That deadline will set up another showdown — this time with a new president and fractured Republican Party — that could once again inflict fiscal chaos and force federal agencies to suspend services and send workers home.

So far, the threat of a shutdown appears low, as the GOP seeks to avoid the kind of backlash that accompanied the 16-day stalemate of October 2013. That debacle cost the economy more than a billion dollars a day, according to most estimates.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/18/government-shutdown-heres-who-keeps-working-and-who-doesnt.html

The coroner’s van pulled into the driveway sometime after midnight, and for a moment — her dead daughter in her arms — LaTisha Shippy hated God.

“I had hate in my heart for him,” Shippy said. “I questioned my faith, and why this was happening. You don’t lose four children and not have some of that.”

Canyon County Coroner Vicki DeGeus-Morris found Shippy in bed and the baby’s body, cleaned and dressed, on a changing table in another room. “It was apparent that she had been dead for a while, as the skin was slipping off the entire torso of the baby,” DeGeus-Morris wrote in a coroner’s report.

The baby had been dead inside Shippy's womb for days, DeGeus-Morris concluded, and yet Shippy had sought no medical help when she’d felt the nearly full-term baby stop moving. She and her fellow Followers of Christ consider professional medicine an engine of the devil. Instead, she had prayed.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-idaho-children-20170418-story.html

RALEIGH, N.C. — The NCAA announced today that they will be returning championship events to sites in North Carolina for the first time since the state passed sweeping anti-LGBT legislation in 2016. The original law, HB 2, was replaced last month by a new law, HB 142, which continues to discriminate against transgender people.

“North Carolina’s new law does nothing to guarantee that LGBT people will be protected from discrimination” said James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s LGBT and HIV Project. “When the NCAA originally withdrew events from North Carolina, they did so because they claimed to care about ‘fairness and inclusion’ for college athletes and fans. It’s a shame to see that those concerns have already fallen by the wayside.”

https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-statement-ncaa-awarding-championship-events-north-carolina

Thursday 9 March 2017

New York health department alerts doctors to infections linked to ancient ritual in which circumcision wound is cleaned by mouth

A baby boy was rushed to hospital when he developed herpes following a controversial ancient circumcision ritual, it has been reported.

The New York health department alerted doctors to the case of a newborn who fell ill after undergoing the ultra-Orthodox Jewish practice in which the circumcision wound is cleaned by mouth.

A rash is said to have spread across the child’s genitals, buttocks, inner thighs and ankle two weeks after the procedure.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/herpes-babies-jewish-circumcision-ritual-link-rabbis-infants-a7620446.html

New York health department alerts doctors to infections linked to ancient ritual in which circumcision wound is cleaned by mouth

A baby boy was rushed to hospital when he developed herpes following a controversial ancient circumcision ritual, it has been reported.

The New York health department alerted doctors to the case of a newborn who fell ill after undergoing the ultra-Orthodox Jewish practice in which the circumcision wound is cleaned by mouth.

A rash is said to have spread across the child’s genitals, buttocks, inner thighs and ankle two weeks after the procedure.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/herpes-babies-jewish-circumcision-ritual-link-rabbis-infants-a7620446.html

The best of last night’s late-night TV: President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump hosted their first Easter Egg Roll at the White House.

http://www.politico.com/video/2017/04/playback-all-the-shenanigans-at-trumps-first-easter-egg-roll-062969