If you’re looking for a way to get back at United for not allowing a passenger to wear leggings, dragging a passenger off a flight or for the scorpion that fell from an overhead bin and stung a passenger, there’s a Chrome extension that can help you avoid the airline.

The extension, called “Drop United,” will remove all United flights from your search when you’re booking trips using Google Chrome.

http://www.ibtimes.com/united-airlines-boycott-drop-united-chrome-extension-blocks-companys-flights-your-2525269

The company you keep, 1st in a series

https://twitter.com/NRA/status/852993382616117248

WAYNE LAPIERRE

CHRIS W. COX

SHERIFF DAVID A. CLARKE, JR.

SECRETARY OF INTERIOR RYAN ZINKE

LT. COL. ALLEN WEST (RET.)

NEVADA ATTORNEY GENERAL ADAM LAXALT

SENATOR TED CRUZ

GOVERNOR RICK SCOTT

U.S. REPRESENTATIVE CLAY HIGGINS

ANTONIA OKAFOR

SENATOR LUTHER STRANGE

SENATOR ROB PORTMAN

SENATOR DAVID PERDUE

Donald Trump is so rich. Big-league (bigly?) wealthy. So wonderfully wealthy that he apparently owes a Miami paint store $300,000 for work at his Trump National Doral Miami resort. So wealthy he's been fighting not to pay that $300,000 since last year. So wealthy that his lawyers officially lost an appeal yesterday and now he's gotta pay that $300,000 or try to appeal all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.

Yes, the president of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, the single most powerful human being on Planet Earth, a man who recently bombed Syria on a whim, lost a fight over a few thousand dollars' worth of paint supplies.

Yesterday Miami's Third District Court of Appeal ruled that Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, which owns Trump National, owes the cash to a local store called the Paint Spot, which has been fighting to get money out of Trump since 2013. (Perhaps this is why a few of the president's latest budget proposals seem designed to let Miami sink into the rising ocean.)

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/donald-trump-wont-pay-miami-paint-store-court-upholds-300000-fine-over-trump-national-doral-miami-golf-course-9275404

Source: AP

ISTANBUL (AP) — Turkey's state-run news agency says the Istanbul chief prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into 17 U.S.-based individuals, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and ex-CIA director John Brennan, for their alleged links to cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Anadolu Agency says Saturday the probe was launched after a group of Turkish lawyers filed a criminal complaint.

It said the prosecutor's office would investigate their links to Gulen's movement, in a step that could lead to charges of attempting to overthrow the Turkish government and membership in a terror organization.

Turkey accuses Gulen, who is based in Pennsylvania, of orchestrating last summer's failed coup and has designated his movement as a terror organization. Gulen denies involvement.

Read more: https://apnews.com/76979da0678c4299b3569b53a80e4b4b/Turkey-probes-senator,-ex-CIA-director-over-links-to-cleric?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP

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Someone is pulling out their big guns

We must be getting too close for their comfort

Washington, D.C.—In response to the White House’s decision to break six years of tradition and refuse to release White House visitor logs, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Executive Director Noah Bookbinder released the following statement:


“It’s disappointing that the man who promised to ‘drain the swamp’ just took a massive step away from transparency by refusing the release the White House visitor logs that the American people have grown accustomed to accessing over the last six years and that provide indispensable information about who is seeking to influence the president. The Obama administration agreed to release the visitor logs in response to our lawsuits, and despite the Trump administration’s worry over ‘grave national security risks and concerns,’ only positives for the American people came out of them. This week, we sued the Trump administration to make sure they would continue to release the logs. It looks like we’ll see them in court.”

http://www.citizensforethics.org/press-release/crew-statement-white-house-refusal-release-visitor-logs/

Read the lawsuit

Source: Crain's Chicago Business

Chicago Congressman Mike Quigley is just back from a hush-hush two-day trip to Cyprus, the latest development in the probe of Russian intervention in the U.S. election and whether aides to Donald Trump colluded with it.

Quigley, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, which is probing potential Trump-Russia ties, wouldn't say too much about what exactly he found out during his two-day trip, in which he was accompanied only by a military escort. But he sure dropped some riveting hints.

"The Russians laundered money to avoid (U.S.) sanctions" over Russia's seizure of Crimea and other matters, Quigley told me. "That makes it front-and-center in this investigation. . . .Sanctions are the possible motives for collusion."

Read more: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20170414/BLOGS02/170419905/trump-russia-probe-takes-rep-quigley-to-cyprus

Using ‘mother of all bombs’ in Afghanistan to kill 36 militants – at $450,000 each – will not change its reputation as a white elephant

War, boiled down to its most brutal calculation, is a business of accounting: “blood and treasure” in the horrible expression.

Cost calculations underpin warfare in terms of hard cash damage to economies and societies – what is called resilience.

Which makes the use of one of the US military’s largest non-nuclear explosive devices – the MOAB – to kill 36 jihadis in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, somewhat baffling in military terms.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/14/moab-attack-isis-baffling-choice-cold-blooded-terms-cost-afghanistan?CMP=edit_2221

1. The obstruction of justice, 1981. As Trump was trying to get into the Atlantic City casino boom, he blew the cover of a confidential FBI informant named Daniel Sullivan, a mob-connected "labor consultant" Trump had hired to liaison with construction unions. "New York was so totally corrupt and so controlled by the mob in the '80s that in order to be a successful businessman, you had to have some way to work that world," Walter Stowe, one of Sullivan's FBI handlers, told the Washington Post last year.

2. The Empty Box, 1986. In the 1980s it was a common practice to avoid state sales tax: You walk into the store and buy something expensive, like jewelry. To avoid the tax, in collusion with the merchant, you direct that an empty box be shipped to an out-of-state address. Many, many merchants engaged in this shabby scam, which gave them a competitive advantage over honest retailers; many were caught. Trump was a regular at Bulgari, a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. Like other rich, famous people (Henry Kissinger, Mary Tyler Moore, Frank Sinatra), Trump partook of the empty box discount, skipping the state sales tax on some $65,000 worth of purchases. Once pinched, in 1986, he testified against the retailer, avoiding a prosecution that would have jeopardized his New Jersey casino license.

3. The briefcase full of cash, 1988. Donald Trump personally sold two units in Trump Tower to Robert Hopkins, the mob-connected head of New York's largest gambling ring. As the late Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice told the story, Hopkins, who had no verifiable legitimate income or assets, showed up at the closing with a briefcase full of $200,000, which he counted at the table. To complete the purchase, he got a loan from a New Jersey bank that did business with Trump's casino. Trump summoned a limousine to ferry the cash to that bank.

......................http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-five-times-law-enforcers-could-have-arrested-donald-trump-but-didn-t-20170306-story.html

"It is something we are looking ... at very regularly, we have our eyes on it," Amazon SVP Jeff Blackburn told Amazon employees, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Inside Amazon, tensions are mounting as employees push management to stop running ads for Amazon products on Breitbart News.

On March 22, a group of Amazon employees took issue with the company's ads on Breitbart in an email to CEO Jeff Bezos and SVP Jeff Blackburn. Entitled "Amazon Must Stop Advertising on Breitbart News," the email included a petition opposing Amazon's continued advertising on Breitbart, with some 564 signatures.

According to the email, an Amazon employee confronted Blackburn at the company’s March all-hands meeting about advertising on a site that the employee said "regularly publishes hateful and bigoted content."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/over-550-amazon-employees-are-pressuring-leadership-to-cut?utm_term=.unQnQZpmg#.owRBE9Xml

The U.S. has begun considering adding a new kinetic energy weapon to its arsenal in hopes of countering advances in Russian nuclear technology that could potentially threaten U.S. tactical military dominance.

Called the Kinetic Energy Projectile, the weapon is a tungsten-based warhead launched at more than three times the speed of sound that bursts into numerous flaming, metal fragments easily capable of piercing most conventional types of armor, according to Aviation Week. The Army is looking into fitting the new super-weapon onto existing launch platforms that are capable of supplying sufficient charge to shoot the projectile at such speeds. One reason for the weapon would be to respond to Russia's pursuit of miniaturized nuclear warheads fired by tanks.

http://www.newsweek.com/military-new-weapon-russia-nukes-582974