TeamProg
TeamProg's JournalUS sanctions more Russian elites, targeting yachts and aircraft
Source: CNN
The White House on Thursday announced the latest round of sanctions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, targeting Russian government officials and elites close to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a slew of new financial and diplomatic sanctions.
The sanctions, issued by the Treasury and State Departments, take aim at the luxury assets of several prominent Russian elites -- including several yachts and aircraft belonging to Putin's associates -- and "luxury asset management and service companies" working to evade US sanctions, according to a White House statement. The Commerce Department also issued new sanctions restricting Russia's ability to secure military technologies.
The sanctions target several prominent Russian elites and government officials, including Russian businessman God Nisanov, whom Secretary of State Antony Blinken calls "one of the richest men in Europe and a close associate of several Russian officials" and Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
Thursday's sanctions also take aim at a "close friend" of Putin, Sergei Pavlovich Roldugin, who, according to Treasury, is "the godfather to one of Putin's daughters," as well as Roldugin's wife, Elena Yuryevna Mirtova. Roldugin is the artistic director of the St. Petersburg Music House and Mirtova is a soprano opera singer.
The administration also sanctioned a series of other yachts and aircraft belonging to Putin associates.
Five additional Russian government officials were placed on the Department of Treasury's sanctions list, including Yury Slyusar, the president of a Russian state-owned aircraft company, Vitaly Savelyev, the Minister of Transport, Maxim Reshentnikov, the Minister of Economic Development, Irek Envarovich Faizullin, the Minister of Construction, Housing, and Utilities, and Dmitriy Yuryevich Grigorenko, the deputy prime minister.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/02/politics/us-sanctions-russia/index.html
Keep them coming.
Pelosi says House will consider assault weapons ban legislation
Source: CNN
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said next week she will bring forward legislation to ban military-style assault weapons, as the chamber moves to address gun violence.
She said "we will be having a hearing and marking up the assault weapon ban" as soon as the House addresses several pieces of legislation, including the package the House Judiciary Committee will mark up on Thursday.
Speaking at a rally against gun violence in San Francisco, Pelosi said, "We just are trying to hit it in every possible way," to try and curb mass shootings across the country.
The package being considered by the Judiciary Committee, known as the "Protecting our Kids Act," would likely pass the House but wouldn't overcome a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate.
The Senate's discussions revolve around less restrictive gun measures than the House Judiciary Committee's bill, including strengthening background checks and incentivizing mental health initiatives.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/politics/pelosi-assault-weapons-ban-legislation/index.html
Let's get ON IT!
Scientists Find World's Largest Plant In Australia
Source: Huffington Post
Researchers were stunned when they discovered a species of seagrass had effectively cloned itself for 4,500 years and covered nearly 80 square miles.
By
Nick Visser
Jun. 1, 2022, 04:22 AM EDT | Updated 5 hours ago
SYDNEY ― Researchers have made a startling discovery beneath the waters off Western Australia. A meadow of sea grass stretching more than 110 miles long was actually a single plant that had spent the past 4,500 years cloning itself to carpet an area three times larger than Manhattan.
The findings, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, make the colony of Posidonia australis, or ribbon weed, the largest known plant on Earth, scientists said.
Elizabeth Sinclair, a senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia and a lead author of the study, said her team has been testing seagrass meadows around Australia for genetic diversity for years to see how they respond to climate change. When her team visited an area known as Shark Bay, a relatively pristine landscape untouched by development, they went beneath the waves to collect samples of seagrass to see what types of plants were growing across the ocean floor.
The answer was one.
“It’s quite bizarre when you think about it, there’s this plant in one end of the bay and then you move 100 kilometers down to the other end and it’s the same plant,” Sinclair said.
Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/worlds-largest-plant_n_629707bde4b090b53b7ed338
Wow !!
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Job openings in April remain near record highs, U.S. employers report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/01/jolts-job-quits-april/
4.4 million Americans quit or changed jobs, new Labor Department figures show
By Abha Bhattarai
June 1, 2022 at 10:03 a.m. EDT
Job openings remain near record highs with 11.4 million job openings, as the tight labor market continues to be a bright spot for the U.S. economy.
Some 4.4 million Americans quit or changed jobs in April, according to a report released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, using their leverage in a labor economy where job openings continue to outnumber job seekers by close to two-to-one.
Employers reported hiring 6.6 million people in April. Layoffs, meanwhile, fell to an all-time low of 1.2 million, as businesses sought to keep the workers they did have.
“The labor market remains strong even though things are cooling off a bit,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at the jobs site Indeed. “We’re still very much in a worker’s and job-seeker’s market.”
The latest figures come as the U.S. job market notches month after month of solid growth. U.S. employers added 428,000 jobs in April — the 12th consecutive month of at least 400,000 new jobs. The unemployment rate is at a pandemic low of 3.6 percent.
In all, the labor market has added more than 6.5 million jobs in the past year and is on pace to return to pre-pandemic levels this summer. That brisk growth has empowered millions of workers to leave dissatisfying jobs.
U.S. marks Memorial Day weekend with at least 12 mass shootings
Source: Washington Post
These incidents, gleaned from local news reports and police statements, meet the threshold for mass shootings as defined by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization.
GVA defines a mass shooting as one in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.” Several of those shootings occurred at parties, and one at a Memorial Day event.
At least eight people have been killed and 55 injured in the mass shootings over the holiday weekend, according to GVA and local news sources. Since the Uvalde shooting last Tuesday, at least 11 people have been killed and 67 injured in mass shootings.
Brian Stelter, chief media correspondent and news anchor at CNN, interrupted a broadcast Sunday about the response to the mass shooting in Uvalde to tell viewers about another — in Tennessee.
“Mass killings like Buffalo and Uvalde become national news, but many mass shootings do not. They just end up being local stories,” Stelter said, in a clip that has been viewed over 370,000 times on Twitter.
On Saturday evening, six teenagers were injured by gunfire in Chattanooga, Tenn., in what Mayor Tim Kelly said was probably “an altercation between other teenagers.”
On Sunday, there were at least another five mass shootings, including one at a Memorial Day festival in Taft, Okla.
Authorities said one person was killed and seven people were injured, including a minor. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said a suspect turned himself in and was in custody.
Meanwhile, one person died and three others were injured during a shooting at a party in Merced County, Calif., the sheriff’s office said. One victim was still in “critical condition” Sunday afternoon.
The shootings continued into Monday, when police in Benton Harbor, Mich., were called to an area around a liquor store where a shooting had taken place in the early hours of Monday. One man was dead, and six were injured by gunfire, according to WNDU.
Around the same time, two people died and two others were injured during a shooting at a party in Port Richmond, Pa., according to statements from law enforcement. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 21, and police told FOX 29 Philadelphia they found 47 shell casings at the scene.
It was the city’s “2nd DOUBLE HOMICIDE scene in two hours,” according to Steve Keeley, a reporter for FOX 29 Philadelphia, after a father and his 9-year-old son were shot inside their car in Philadelphia on Sunday evening, law enforcement said.
In the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, many local leaders and community representatives issued emotional pleas for action. As The Washington Post has reported, it is unlikely that Congress will be able to pass gun-control measures.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/mass-shootings-memorial-day-weekend-taft-chattanooga-uvalde/
Why do Republicans and the NRA hate America and the American people?
Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science. -Hal Clement, science fiction author (30 May 1922-2003)
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Christianity is superstition.
Religion is superstition.
But, you probably already knew that!
The Thin YELLOW Line !
(Joe) Walsh, the former GOP congressman from Illinois who has since become a vocal critic of former president Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party, tweeted he had “no … words” after hearing Olivarez’s comments.
“He actually said it,” Walsh wrote. “He actually said the cops were reluctant to engage the shooter because, ‘They could’ve been shot. They could’ve been killed.’”
Janice Dean, a senior meteorologist for Fox News, was among those echoing the disgust over law enforcement’s response.
“It’s like a fireman not going into a building because they might get burned,” Dean wrote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/27/uvalde-shooting-police-gunman-shot-olivarez/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36f34e6%2F6290f93c956121755a941fb7%2F5fe8e448ade4e21670bc1e37%2F25%2F70%2F6290f93c956121755a941fb7
Not knowing where the suspect was at, they could've been shot, they could've been killed,
Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Chris Olivarez defended the response in an interview Thursday with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who asked the lieutenant to walk him through “what exactly law enforcement was doing for 60 minutes or so while the shooter remained in that classroom killing those kids and teachers?”
Olivarez said that, while the goal for law enforcement during active-shooter situations such as the one this week in Uvalde is to stop the killing and preserve life, officers did not initially know where Ramos was located when they were shot at.
“At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school,” Olivarez said.
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FUCKING COWARDS !!!
[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/27/uvalde-shooting-police-gunman-shot-olivarez/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36f34e6%2F6290f93c956121755a941fb7%2F5fe8e448ade4e21670bc1e37%2F25%2F70%2F6290f93c956121755a941fb7|
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: Monte Sereno, CA
Home country: USA
Current location: At home on five acres of pines and cedars at 3,100 ft elev in the Sierra Nevada, California ( in a VAN, down) by a river!
Member since: Tue Jan 26, 2021, 10:27 PM
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