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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:24:00 GMT -8
Church Bulletin Bloopers
Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
Where Can You Find a Bar Without Beer? Zanzi-bar
The spice islands of Zanzibar are facing a shortage of alcohol which threatens the tourism sector of one of Africa's top travel destinations.
Tourism generates about 90% of the Tanzanian archipelago's foreign revenue.
Prices of beer have shot up by almost 100% after the supply chain was disrupted by a sudden change of importers.
The islands' tourism minister resigned recently citing poor work conditions.
However, some have linked his resignation to the issues with alcohol supplies.
Known for their stunning sandy beaches and rich cultural heritage, the Indian Ocean islands are popular with tourists from around the world.
Last year, Zanzibar was ranked among the 10 best travel destinations in Africa by several tour magazines.
But hoteliers now warn that the problems over alcohol supply might make the island lose its tourism shine.
No Zanzi-Beer?
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:26:00 GMT -8
He's Not Clear and He Wasn't Cleared
In a late Friday filing, special counsel Jack Smith brutally shot down a claim made by Donald Trump and his lawyers that the Department of Justice is hiding evidence that the former president received a special security clearance that would have allowed him to keep secret documents belonging to the government.
As part of the ongoing attempts by the former president to delay the obstruction of justice trial the DOJ is struggling to begin due to foot-dragging by Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump and his legal team have asserted the government needs to find and turn over more evidence about his level of clearance as part of discovery.
According to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, Smith made a point of shooting down the claim in no uncertain terms in his Friday filing.
As Joyce wrote on her Substack platform, "One particularly interesting part of the government’s response related to a suggestion in Trump’s motion that he had some form of security clearance issued by the Department of Energy that continued after he left the White House."
"Smith eviscerates that claim in response to Trump’s effort to force the government to search for more evidence that such a clearance existed," she explained before adding, "Trump argued that the government had an obligation to search 'Scattered Castles,' a database of security clearances maintained by the intelligence community, as well as a similar one maintained by the Department of Defense. But Smith pointed out that he had already produced a search in Scattered Castles, 'which yielded no past or present security clearances for Trump.' Same result in the Department of Defense system."
Vance notes that Trump and his team also demanded "discovery about a special 'Q clearance' he held through the Department of Energy," and that Smith responded by informing the the court "he had already produced a memo to Trump that showed his Q clearance, granted at the start of his presidency, was terminated shortly after it ended."
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:27:48 GMT -8
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:35:40 GMT -8
Because the World Needs More Collisions
Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator in Switzerland have submitted proposals for a new, much larger, supercollider. Its aim is to discover new particles that would revolutionise physics and lead to a more complete understanding of how the Universe works. If approved, it will be three times larger than the current giant machine. But its £12bn price tag has raised some eyebrows, with one critic describing the expenditure as "reckless". That money - which is only the initial construction cost - would come from member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) including the UK, and some experts have questioned whether it makes economic sense. The biggest achievement of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the detection of a new particle called the Higgs Boson in 2012. But since then its ambition to track down two holy grails of physics - dark matter and dark energy - have proved elusive and some researchers believe there are cheaper options. Huge atom-smasher bid to find missing 95% of Universe
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:38:23 GMT -8
Would You Take a Vacation to Iran or Russia?
An adult performer from the United States has stirred controversy after visiting Iran and going to the former US embassy in Tehran.
Whitney Wright, 32, from Oklahoma arrived in Iran last week, and confirmed on her social media on Monday that she has left the country.
She posted several pictures of her visit, including one that went viral that showed her – in a headscarf and unrevealing clothing required in Iran – standing next to a lowered US flag at the site of the country’s former embassy.
TucKGBer Visits His Handlers
I guess Vladimir Putin has ended the work from home policy for Tucker Carlson.
The Telegraph, Politico, and other media outlets are reporting that Carlson is in Moscow. He was spotted at the airport and watching a performance of “Spartacus” at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Apparently Carlson flew to Moscow via Istanbul three days ago. A “post, published by Mash, included two photos, supposedly showing Carlson at an airport and another at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater”.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:39:19 GMT -8
Another Day, Another 30 Dead Gazans
Rescue teams search for survivors as local authorities say 30 people were killed in Israeli air attacks on “safe homes” and a mosque in central Gaza.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:42:10 GMT -8
What Can We Learn From a Guy Like This?If temperature-tracking sea sponges are to be trusted, climate change has progressed much further than scientists have estimated. A new study that uses ocean organisms called sclerosponges to measure average global temperature suggests the world has already warmed by about 1.7 degrees C over the past 300 years — at least a half degree Celsius more than the scientific consensus as laid out in United Nations reports. The finding, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, is startling, but some scientists say the study authors' conclusions extrapolated too much about global temperature than can be confidently gleaned from sea sponges. But the study hits on an important question: How much did the world warm when fossil-fuel-powered machinery was chugging but humans were not very organized in measuring temperatures across the world? Scientists say it’s a critical question and something they need to better understand. The authors of the study say that industrialization before 1900 had a larger impact than scientists previously realized, that its effect has been captured in the skeletons of centuries-old sponges, and that the baseline we’ve been using to talk about climate change politics has been wrong. Sea sponges keep climate records and the accounting is grim, study shows
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:43:52 GMT -8
They Endanger the Lives of Kids Too Young to Get Vaccinated
As outbreaks of measles spread throughout the world, anti-vaccine activists aren’t just urging people not to get vaccinated — they’re taking a page from a well-worn playbook, falsely downplaying the dangers from the highly contagious respiratory disease.
“The truth is, measles is not a super severe serious illness when you’re a child,” Mary Holland, president of the country’s best-funded anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, said last week on the group’s online morning show. Children’s Health Defense was founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who took a leave from the organization in April to run for president.
Holland, a lawyer, called government responses to recent outbreaks “fearmongering” and “crying wolf.”
“It’s a couple days of spots and then you move on,” she said.
But national health agencies warn the fear of measles is well-founded.
Measles — a disease so contagious it acts as a bellwether for threats from other infectious diseases — is marked by fever, flu-like symptoms and an itchy rash, and sometimes comes with dire complications including pneumonia, seizures and brain damage. For every 1,000 cases of measles, about 200 children may be hospitalized, 50 may get pneumonia, one child may develop brain swelling along with deafness or disability, and between one and three may die.
Despite the availability of an incredibly effective vaccine, the disease is spreading worldwide. The reasons behind the surge are complex. For countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, there are issues of access; childhood vaccine campaigns suffered when Covid weakened already-stretched public health systems. Europe, the U.K. and the U.S. experienced similar, if smaller-scale, disruptions to their childhood vaccine programs during Covid. Rising vaccine skepticism plays a smaller but significant part. Last month, the World Health Organization announced an “alarming” 45-fold increase in measles in Europe from 2022 to 2023, while health officials in the U.K. declared a “national incident” stemming from an outbreak of hundreds of cases in the West Midlands, warning of a likely spread to other regions. U.K. officials attribute the rise to a drop in vaccine uptake.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:45:33 GMT -8
Another Dead Pig
She called herself Anna, and she reached out to Barry May over social media.
“It was on Facebook, was an Asian woman that supposedly lived in New York, on Fifth Avenue,” he said. “And so we just started chatting.”
Soon, he said, Anna was sending explicit photos. May, a divorced and retired insurance adjuster living in Mississippi, was smitten. She told him they could be together, but first she needed a favor.
Her aunt, she said, was holding $3 million of her money. She needed May to invest in cryptocurrency, so her aunt “would release that money to her and then she could come to me and we could get married.”
She promised huge returns. He sold property and liquidated his 401(k), sending the woman more than $500,000 — his life savings. An account on a website appeared to show his holdings.
He was about take out a loan to send more, until one day he got a call from an FBI agent. “They said this is a major fraud situation, and I’m not the only one.”
It turned out May, 62, had gotten caught up in an increasingly common internet scam — and also a new FBI initiative to protect people from financial ruin.
Enticed by the prospect of romance and riches, coaxed over LinkedIn and WhatsApp, thousands of people have sent their hard-earned money overseas, never to be seen again.
The con is called pig butchering — so named because victims are likened to hogs, fattened up for slaughter.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:47:27 GMT -8
Stupid Democrats Continue to Fall for It
President Joe Biden has appointed—and, as of of Jan. 31, the Senate has confirmed—174 federal judges to fill the country’s district courts and circuit courts of appeal, according to Ballotpedia. There are still about 60 current vacancies. That’s not a bad record; Donald Trump ended up with 234 appointments during the abominable four years he occupied the Oval Office.
Now the bad news: The vast majority of those confirmed judges hail from states with two Democratic senators, so their nominations didn’t fall victim to the Senate ”blue slip” tradition that dictates the process. A blue slip indicates consent to the nomination by the nominee’s home state’s senators. In recent practice, it’s led to Republican senators blocking many of Biden’s judicial appointments in red states, regardless of the nominee’s qualifications. Under current Senate custom—but not actual Senate rules—without that blue slip, the nominees cannot be considered or voted on by the Judiciary Committee, resulting in their nominations, and any subsequent vote by the full Senate, being stalled indefinitely.
Under the current Senate calendar, the number of Biden’s nominees likely to be approved under this regimen—barring retirements or other judicial openings—stands at approximately 189. After that, a few judges will likely still make their way to a vote, but only if Democrats and Republicans can agree on a path forward. That typically requires that Republicans provide the coveted blue slip, usually in exchange for a more conservative nominee. It is realistically quite limited, given Republicans’ track record during the last three years, and the intense emphasis they place on appointing only like-minded judges. So unless the blue slip tradition is abrogated, Biden may see very few judges confirmed by the Senate beyond those 189 or so “blue state” nominees.
And assuming he wins a second term, should Republicans gain control of the Senate in 2024 or thereafter, Biden’s ability to get his chosen judges confirmed will almost completely evaporate.
The Congressional Research Service is quite clear that the blue slip process is and has been a Senate tradition wholly outside the existing rules for judicial nominations:
Since the use of blue slips is not codified or included in the committee’s rules, the chairman of the committee has the discretion to determine the extent to which a home state Senator’s negative or withheld blue slip stops a President’s judicial nomination from receiving consideration by the committee and, consequently, whether it reaches the Senate floor.
In other words, the presiding chair of the Judiciary Committee can decide whether or not a blue slip is being withheld in bad faith and can act accordingly to advance a nomination for the committee’s consideration. The current chair is Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who continues to stand by the tradition.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:49:09 GMT -8
The Speaker Chooses to Help Our Enemies, Screw Our Allies, and Hurt Out National Security to Help Previous Guy
Senators on Sunday released a highly anticipated $118 billion package that pairs border enforcement policy with wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies, but it quickly ran into a wall of opposition from top House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson.
The proposal could be the best chance for President Joe Biden to resupply Ukraine with wartime aid — a major foreign policy goal that is shared with both the Senate’s top Democrat, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and top Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell. The Senate was expected this week to hold a key test vote on the legislation, but within hours of the text being released Johnson said on social media that it would be “dead on arrival” if it reaches the House.
With Congress stalled on approving $60 billion in Ukraine aid, the U.S. has halted shipments of ammunition and missiles to Kyiv, leaving Ukrainian soldiers outgunned as they try to beat back Russia’s invasion.
Trump Uber Alles and Trump Uber Allies
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 9:51:49 GMT -8
It's Early, But the Trend is Good
What Biden's South Carolina primary win means for his 2024 chances
For starters, Democrats seem to be falling in line. A full 74% of potential primary voters now say they support Biden as their 2024 nominee against Williamson (4%) and Phillips (3%) — up from 68% who said in December that they would vote for Biden in their state’s primary or caucus.
Likewise, Democratic support for Biden (62%) versus a hypothetical “someone else” (28%) is 11 points higher than it was just last month — and less than half (42%) of potential Democratic primary voters say they want another Democrat to challenge the president, down from 50% in December and 54% in November. Democrats are also increasingly likely to describe Biden as “fit to serve another term as president”: 64% now vs. 54% in November.
At the same time, Democrats are seven points more likely to say they approve of how Biden is handling the presidency (81%) than they were last month (74%). As a result, Biden’s overall approval rating among all Americans (40%) has jumped by three points over the same period — and while still low, it’s higher than it has been since August of last year.
The issue on which Biden has gained the most ground since December? The economy, where he’s gone from 36% to 39% approval among all Americans — and from 69% to 79% among Democrats.
This modest shift likely reflects real-world economic trends, including falling inflation, low unemployment and higher-than-expected growth. A third of all U.S. adults (33%) now describe the current state of the American economy as excellent or good, up six points from 27% in December and 10 points from 23% in September.
Will the Women Save Us All?
Trump Is Botching His Already Dismal Shot With Women Voters
If Donald Trump doesn’t change his campaign’s trajectory, the voter gender gap will be a gender Grand Canyon by November, as hordes of women run screaming away from the presumptive nominee, earning Joe Biden a second term.
According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 58 percent of female registered voters now support Biden—an increase that propelled Biden to a 6-point lead against Trump in a hypothetical 2024 presidential matchup. As of December 2023, Biden’s support among women was just 53 percent and has grown by 5 points in just the last month.
It’s not absurd to think that three women have contributed to this abrupt shift: Nikki Haley, E. Jean Carroll, and Taylor Swift.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 10:03:35 GMT -8
Today's Money Tip: Don't Get Your Financial Advice from TikTokYounger U.S. adults are flocking to social media for advice on how to handle their money, seeking and sharing information on a range of personal finance topics, or sometimes just commiserating about the kind of financial challenges Gen-Zers and millennials face. On TikTok, videos from content creators touting money-saving strategies such as "loud budgeting," "frugal February" and the "100 envelope challenge" have garnered millions of views, belying common complaints from older generations that younger Americans don't pay enough attention to pocketbook issues. The videos are a departure from traditional personal finance coverage in mainstream media outlets. The tone is generally conversational, irreverent and even sassy, while leaning into the lo-fi confessional style embraced by many younger people on social media that puts a premium on authenticity and even vulnerability. A recent survey from Forbes Advisor found that roughly 80% millennials and-Gen Zers report having turned to social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube for financial advice. By contrast, 35% said they sought out family members for such guidance, and only 11% said they had consulted a financial adviser. Not surprisingly, scores of certified financial planners and other financial experts have followed this migration and today post their own content on social media. Yet plenty of content creators also appear to be peddling "get rich quick" schemes and otherwise offering mostly useless, and even dubious, money advice. "A lot of these trends are gimmicky, creative ways to get people to save, but they are not all are sound. So it depends on the trend, but overall they are getting people to start thinking about saving which is a good thing," said Ben McLaughlin, president and chief marketing officer of savings platform Raisin. Read on to learn about some of the most popular personal finance tips circulating on TikTok, and what experts make of them. TikTok is full of money tips. But how reliable are they?Just Buy Index Funds or Dividend-Paying StocksIf you want good advice, read Jeremy Siegel. I wouldn't invest with him, but Ken Fisher's books are pretty good.
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 10:06:26 GMT -8
Those Opposing Green Energy Are BattyThe issue: Do wind turbines kill birds and bats?
The short answer: Yes, wind turbines can kill both bats and birds. But the more important question is how many they kill compared with other sources. Buildings are estimated to kill up to 988 million birds a year and outdoor cats are an enormous danger to birds. By one estimate, free-ranging domestic cats kill between 1.3 and 4 billion birds each year. A study to be published in 2024 found that wind farms had no statistically significant effect on bird counts. But another kind of energy did. Fracking reduced the total number of birds counted in near shale and oil production sites by 15%. And all of that is separate from considering the impact of climate change. Do wind turbines kill birds? Are solar panels toxic? The truth behind green-energy debatesI'll Bet Climate Change Kills More Birds than Turbines
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Post by mhbruin on Feb 5, 2024 10:08:29 GMT -8
Dirty Money/ Dirty Banks?
Santander and Lloyds shares fell after the Financial Times (FT) newspaper reported that Iran used accounts held at the banks in the UK to covertly move money around the world in a sanctions-evasion scheme backed by Iran's intelligence services.
Lloyds and Santander UK provided accounts to British front companies secretly owned by a sanctioned Iranian petrochemicals company based in London, the FT reported citing documents the newspaper had obtained.
Shares in Madrid-based parent Santander fell as much as 6.1% and were down 4% at 1328 GMT, while shares in Lloyds declined 0.7%. Santander shares rose more than 6% last week following 2023 earnings that beat forecasts.
"The market must be realising that they may be fined," said Nuria Alvarez, an analyst at Madrid-based broker Renta 4.
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