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Donald Trump Suggests Someone Is Paying Migrants in Caravan
President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that someone was paying migrants in the caravan traveling to the United States from Honduras.
“We’re starting to find out, and I won’t say 100 percent, I’ll put a little tiny question mark at the end … but a lot of money has been passing through people to come up and try to get to the border by election day,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Montana.
The group of over 4,000 migrants is currently traveling through Guatemala, although the president did not cite evidence on Thursday to back his claim that some of them could be paid.
The president said the caravan would be stopped before they reached the border, mocking Democrats for trying to influence the immigration issue.
“They wanted that caravan, and there are those who say that caravan didn’t just happen,” Trump said.
He told supporters the Mexican government would “hopefully” stop the caravan before it reached their own Southern border.
If Mexico failed, he reassured the crowd, he would send the military to the Southern border.
He ripped Democrats for favoring illegal immigration, accusing them of wanting to import more voters into the United States.
“Hey, they’re not so stupid when you think about it,” he said. “But they are crazy.”
Trump repeated that he needed more Republicans in Congress to help him change the immigration laws, calling them the “worst in the world” for allowing migrants to claim asylum and get released into the country.
He admitted that the flood of migrants coming into the country was “his fault.”
“I caused it because I have created such an incredible economy and I have created so many jobs, I have made this country so great that everybody wants to come in!”
INVASION USA
BORDER CARAVAN PUTS TRUMP LEGACY ON THE LINE
Pat Buchanan: How president handles issue will determine November election, 2020
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East.
Yet far more critical to the future of our civilization is the ongoing invasion of the West from the Third World.
Consider the impact of the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 to throw open Germany’s doors to 1 million refugees from Syria’s civil war.
Last weekend, in a crushing blow to Merkel, the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of her CDU, won its smallest share of the vote in half a century, 37 percent. Her coalition party, the SPD, saw its share of the Bavarian vote fall to a historic low of less than 10 percent.
The right-wing Alternative for Deutchland saw its support rise to 10 percent and has become a force in German politics. Some conservatives are urging the CDU to adopt the AfD hardline on illegal immigration.
The message sent by the Bavarian electorate is the message voters across Europe have been sending to their own capitals for years: You are failing in your first duty – defense of the homeland from foreign invasion. Mass migration of unassimilable peoples and cultures from a global South represents an existential threat to our Europe.
As Merkel’s chancellorship approaches its end, French President Emmanuel Macron, her progressive EU partner, has seen his approval fall to below 30 percent.
The U.S.-led NATO alliance may guard the Baltic and Black Sea regions against a Russian invasion from the east. But in Central, Southern and Western Europe, the more feared invaders are the peoples of Africa and the Muslim world, whose numbers are expected to triple or quadruple by this century’s end.
And as their numbers grow, so, too, does their desperation to escape, even at risk of their lives, the poverty, wars and repression of their homelands to cross the Med and fill the empty spaces left by a depopulating Europe.
It also now appears that the U.S. elections, not three weeks away, may be affected by another immigration crisis on the U.S. border.
As of Thursday, a caravan of 4,000 refugees without visas had crossed from Honduras into Guatemala and was heading toward Mexico. By Election Day, it will either have been stopped, or it will be here. And this caravan is a portent of things to come.
According to the Washington Post, during FY 2018, which ended last month, 107,212 members of “family units” crossed over into the U.S., “obliterating the previous record of 77,857 set in 2016.”
Citing DHS figures, the Post adds, “Border patrol agents arrested 16,658 family members in September alone, the highest one-month total on record and an 80 percent increase from July.”
When Trump, under intense political fire, ended his “zero tolerance” policy of separating refugees from their children, this message went out to Mexico and Central America:
Bring your kids with you when you cross the border. They will have to stay with you, and they cannot be held for more than 20 days. Thus, when they are released, you will be released to await a hearing on your claim of asylum. The odds are excellent that you can vanish into the U.S. population and never be sent back.
Enraged, Trump has threatened to cut off aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala if they do not stop the caravans and has warned Mexico he will use the U.S. military to secure our border.
Unwanted mass migration is the issue of our time, as there is no foreseeable end to it before it alters America irremediably.
As these migrants are almost all poor, not highly skilled and do not speak English, most will join that segment of our population that pays no income taxes but qualifies for social welfare benefits like food stamps, medical care and free education in our public schools.
They are thus a net drain upon the resources of a nation that is already, at full employment, running a deficit of $779 billion a year.
These migrants, however, are a present and future benefit to the Democratic Party that built and maintains our mammoth welfare state, and which, in presidential elections, routinely wins 70 to 90 percent of the votes of people whose trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Not without reason, Democrats believe that if they can change the composition of the American electorate, they can control America forever.
If Donald Trump was elected on any one issue, it was immigration and his promises to secure the border, build the wall and halt the invasion.
How he deals with the impending crisis of the migrant caravan may affect both the fate of his party in November and his presidency in 2020.
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Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats want to repeal Trump’s tax cuts and replace them with cash payouts for the poor and working class
With midterm elections 2½ weeks away and the 2020 presidential race around the corner, prominent Democrats are embracing an ambitious idea: Repeal and replace the $1.5 trillion Republican tax plan.
The proposals would get rid of the tax cuts and, in turn, funnel that money into government-guaranteed cash for low- and middle-income households.
Possible White House contender Sen. Kamala Harris announced a plan this week that would give working families up to $6,000 each year, with the option of receiving monthly payments.
Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, questions Gina Haspel, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) nominee for President Donald Trump, not pictured, during a Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C.,
With midterm elections 2½ weeks away and the 2020 presidential race around the corner, prominent Democrats are embracing an ambitious idea: Repeal and replace the $1.5 trillion Republican tax plan.
The proposals would get rid of the tax cuts and, in turn, funnel that money into government-guaranteed cash for low- and middle-income households.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., announced a plan this week that would give working families up to $6,000 each year, with the option of receiving monthly payments. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., outlined a similar idea last year. A bill from Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., would allow family caregivers and students to receive the money as well.
Facebook co-founder on how tax cuts and economic growth impact investments
“The idea was to provide a clear contrast with Donald Trump,” Khanna told CNBC in an interview. “You know what you could actually do with this money? You could give anyone making under $75,000 a raise.”
The measures are significantly more dramatic than some previous Democratic proposals – a reflection of the proximity to the midterm elections and the early interest surrounding the presidential race in 2020. Harris and Brown are potential contenders for the White House, and Democrats have been seeking bold ideas to present to their energized electorate.
“You know what you could actually do with this money? You could give anyone making under $75,000 a raise.”-Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
“There’s all kind of evidence that voters are not looking for incremental solutions,” said Adam Ruben, campaigns director at the Economic Security Project, a liberal think tank that has pushed the idea. “They’re looking for a big vision of how to pick up all the people who have been left behind in this economy.”
Harris’ plan would create a new tax credit of up to $3,000 for individuals or $6,000 for households. They could opt to receive the money in a lump sum after filing their annual tax return or in monthly installments of $250 to $500, which Harris said could help reduce reliance on payday lenders. The credit would be refundable, which means workers would receive the money even if they don’t owe any taxes. Households earning up to $100,000 would be eligible.
The bill shares many of the same elements of an earlier bill from Brown and Khanna. Their proposal would expand the existing earned income tax credit up to roughly $12,000 for a family with three children. The money could also be paid monthly, but it would only cover households earning up to about $76,000. The lawmakers introduced the bill last fall with more than 50 co-sponsors in the House; no other senators signed on to the measure at the time.
Trump agenda, attitude overshadow tax cuts for GOP in midterms
“We’ve seen the debate shift,” Khanna said. “My hope is that other presidential candidates will look at the Brown plan and embrace it as the alternative to Trump.”
Ruben said his organization has spoken with other potential Democratic candidates about the idea but declined to specify whom. Earlier this year, Senate Democrats announced a more modest proposal to roll back the GOP tax cuts: Move the top tax rate for individuals back to 39 percent, raise the corporate tax rate 4 percentage points to 25 percent and reinstate the alternative minimum tax.
Rep. John Delaney, D-Md., who has announced he is running in 2020, has called for nudging the corporate tax rate up to 23 percent to pay for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending. He told CNBC he also supports expanding the earned income tax credit but did not say by how much.
“We must reform our tax code in a way that is fiscally responsible, addresses our long-term economic competitiveness needs and helps working families,” he said in a statement.
Indeed, the new tax credits come with a hefty price tag. Brown and Khanna’s plan is expected to cost about $1.4 trillion – just about what the Republican tax plan costs. Harris’ bill is likely to be in the same ballpark. That’s why liberals say repealing the current law is a critical component of their plan.
Yet Democrats have repeatedly attacked the GOP tax cuts for ballooning the deficit. And while they argue that the new credits would support long-term economic growth, they are not claiming such a plan would pay for itself.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Rohit ‘Ro’ Khanna
Republicans are preparing for battle.
The conservative Heritage Foundation released an analysis this week showing repealing the tax cuts in 2020 would cost the average household nearly $27,000 in lost take-home pay over the next decade. Some of the decline is due to higher individual tax rates, said Adam Michel, a policy analyst at Heritage and one of the authors of the report. But most of it is the result of lower economic growth because of higher corporate rates, he said.
“That’s where a lot of the juice comes from,” Michel said. “That’s the thing I’m frankly most concerned about.”
Democrats have also criticized the GOP for passing its sweeping tax plan with a party-line vote. Yet it seems unlikely that any Republicans would support repealing and replacing what GOP leadership has dubbed the “crown jewel” of its legislative agenda.
“The tax cuts launched our booming economy into the stratosphere and anybody advocating for repeal will have to explain why they want to reverse the jobs and wage growth our country has seen since the law passed,” said John Ashbrook, a Republican strategist who worked under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The Nov. 6 elections will be a testing ground for the Democratic agenda, and Economic Security Project’s Ruben said the Democratic Party will need fresh thinking to connect with voters in 2020.
“People want to feel the confidence that someone is going to fight for them and push for big changes and not let classic Washington gridlock or the constrained sense of what is acceptable in politics get in the way,” he said.
Story 1: Rush To Judgement or Massive Cover-up — Who Ordered The Brutal Killing of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi? — Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and/or Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ? or Someone Else –Who Will Be The Fall Guy? — Expect Expedited Execution — or Regime Change — Dead Men Tell No Tales — Videos
Clearly there has been a cover up at the consulate by the Saudis: Fmr. US Ambassador
How will the Khashoggi case impact the reign of MBS?
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Mitch McConnell warns journalist’s death is “really going to challenge” the Saudi-US relationship
From CNN’s Manu Raju and Phil Mattingly
US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that the purported killing of a journalist Jamal Khashoggi is “really going to challenge” for the Saudi-US relationship.
In a wide-ranging briefing with reporters on Capitol Hill, McConnell refused to criticize President Trump’s handling of the situation with the Saudis and the President’s decision to continually stress that the Saudis denied killing Khashoogi.
Instead, he said that there needed to be an investigation first before any decision on how to move forward.
“Once we know precisely what happened with a credible investigation, then we need to decide the appropriate response is. I can’t imagine there will be no response.”
“We know our alliance with Saudi Arabia, which has existed for a long time under both parties is because we have aligning interests in that area. … So it’s been kind of a pragmatic relationship. … This particular incident is going to really challenge that. But I think it’s too early to predict what the consequences may be.”
McConnell would not say if he had any concerns with the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — or if he had any views on Trump’s handling of the situation.
“I’m not going to comment on the President’s take on this,” he said, declining repeated questions on the matter.
Trump: I’ve asked for the audio of Khashoggi’s killing — “if it exists”
President Trump was just asked about Turkish claims that they have audio of Jamal Khashoggi’s purported murder.
The President said he’s asked for the audio, but then hedged “if it exists.”
Here’s how the exchange with reporters went down:
Question: Mr. President, you asked for this audio/video intelligence —
Trump: “We have asked for it, if it exists. We have asked.”
Question: But you haven’t gotten it?
Trump: “We asked for it, if it exists.”
Question: Are you surprised they haven’t turned it over?
Trump: “I’m not sure yet that it exists. It probably does. Possibly does. I’ll have a full report on that from Mike when he comes back. That’s one of the things — that’s going to be the first question I ask him.”
Some context: Earlier today, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had “nothing to say” about the Turkish claims that they have audio.
Trump says Saudi Arabia is an “important ally” but he wants to find out what happened
President Trump, speaking during a pool spray ahead of his cabinet meeting on Wednesday, said that while he was awaiting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s report after his visit to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, “Saudi Arabia has been a very important ally of ours in the Middle East.”
“If you look at Saudi Arabia, they’re an ally and they’re a purchaser of military equipment among other things,” Trump said. He added that he wants “to find out what happened and where is the fault,” and hopes to know by the end of the week.
Asked why he hasn’t sent the FBI to investigate, Trump said, “He wasn’t a citizen of this country for one thing,” but then left open the possibility that he already has told the FBI to look into Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance.
“You don’t know whether or not we have, do you?” he asked a reporter. “Do you know whether we have sent the FBI?”
“I’m not going to tell you, he added. “Why would I tell you?”
Trump: “We need Saudi Arabia”
From CNN’s Jeremy Diamond
President Trump said he is hopeful that the situation with Saudi Arabia will work itself out following an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Jamal Khashoggi.
“I hope we’re going to be on the better side of the equation,” the President said on Fox Business as he stressed the importance Saudi Arabia in a range of issues at the heart of his policies in the Middle East.
“We need Saudi Arabia,” the President said, before ticking down a list of items from the fight against terrorism to Iran.
Trump also reiterated that he does not want to cancel the arms deal he struck with Saudi Arabia last year despite the urging of numerous members of Congress, calling it “a tremendous order.”
The President also claimed that the $115 billion arms deal — which has yet to come close to fruition — would produce “500,000 jobs,” a figure that is unsubstantiated.
Trump also stressed that he hopes King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad did not know about what happened to Khashoggi.
“That’s a big factor in my eyes,” Trump said.
4 hr 32 min ago
Pompeo: US should give Saudis and Turks space to complete investigations
From CNN’s Jennifer Hansler and Mike Conte
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo again said the US would give Turkey and Saudi Arabia space to complete their investigation into Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance before discussing any potential responses.
Before taking off from Ankara, Pompeo said he had “nothing to say” about the Turkish claims that they have audio of Khashoggi’s murder. He said he discussed the Khashoggi case with Turkish officials Wednesday, and “we made clear that the Saudis had cooperated with the investigation the Turks are engaged in.”
“There were some delays, but they seemed pretty confident that the Saudis would let them do the things that they need to complete the investigation,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo pushed back on the idea that the US was giving the Saudis “the benefit of the doubt.”
“I keep hearing that we’re giving them some benefit of the doubt. They’re going to do an investigation. And when the investigation comes out we’ll evaluate it. It’s not about benefit of the doubt … It’s that it is reasonable to give them a handful of days more to complete it, so they get it right, so that it’s thorough and complete. And that’s what they, that’s what they’ve indicated they need and I’m hopeful they—and then we’ll get to see it. It won’t, we’ll evaluate this on a factual, straight-up basis.” Pompeo then added, “sooner is better than later” for all involved.
However, Pompeo noted it was important to consider that the US has “lots of important relationships” with the Saudis — financial, governmental, countering Iran.
“I could go on about the places that the Saudis and the US are working together,” he said, adding that the US needs “to make sure that we’re mindful of that” as it forms potential responses.
4 hr 48 min ago
A Turkey forensics team is on the scene
From CNN’s Gul Tuysuz
About a dozen Turkish forensic investigators entered the Saudi Arabia consul general’s residence in Istanbul on Wednesday. They were wearing gloves and white hazmat suits topped with black vests labeled “police.”
A security source tells CNN that they will conduct a “comprehensive crime scene investigation” on the premises.
The teams arrived around 4:45 p.m. Istanbul time (that’s 9:45 a.m. ET) in 5 white vans.
5 hr 3 min ago
Turkish investigators enter Saudi consul’s residence in Istanbul
From CNN’s Barbara Arvanitidis in Istanbul
Five white vans arrived at the Saudi consul’s residence in Istanbul just before 10 a.m. ET this morning and Turkish investigators entered the building, CNN teams outside the consul general residence in Istanbul witnessed.
Police had set up barriers around the residence a little more than an hour before.
Turkey had wanted to search the residence a day earlier.
Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said Wednesday morning the search would happen “once a joint consensus is reached.”
It’s been almost two weeks after Khashoggi went missing.
The House of Saud (Arabic: آل سعود, translit.ʾĀl Suʿūd IPA: [ʔaːl sʊʕuːd]) is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia. It is composed of the descendants of Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the Emirate of Diriyah, known as the First Saudi state (1744–1818), and his brothers, though the ruling faction of the family is primarily led by the descendants of Ibn Saud, the modern founder of Saudi Arabia.[1] The most influential position of the royal family is the King of Saudi Arabia. King Salman, who reigns currently, chose first his nephew and then his son as the crown prince without consulting the Allegiance Council. The family is estimated to comprise 15,000 members, but the majority of the power and wealth is possessed by a group of about 2,000 of them.[2][3] With a estimated combined wealth of over $1 trillion, the House of Saud is one of the wealthiest families in the world.
The House of Saud has gone through three phases: the Emirate of Diriyah, the First Saudi State (1744–1818), marked by the expansion of Wahhabism; the Emirate of Nejd, the Second Saudi State (1824–1891), marked with continuous infighting; and the Third Saudi State (1902–present), which evolved into Saudi Arabia in 1932 and now wields considerable influence in the Middle East. The family has had conflicts with the Ottoman Empire, the Sharif of Mecca, the Al Rashid family of Ha’il and their vassal houses in Najd, numerous Islamist groups both inside and outside Saudi Arabia and Shia minority in Saudi Arabia.
House of Saud is a translation of Al Saud, an Arabic dynastic name formed by adding the word Al (meaning “family of” or “House of”)[8] to the personal name of an ancestor. In the case of the Al Saud, the ancestor is Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, the father of the dynasty’s 18th century founder Muhammad bin Saud (Muhammad, son of Saud).[9]
Today, the surname “Al Saud” is carried by any descendant of Muhammad bin Saud or his three brothers Farhan, Thunayyan, and Mishari. Al Saud’s other family branches like Saud al-Kabir, the Al Jiluwi, the Al Thunayan, the Al Mishari and the Al Farhan are called cadet branches. Members of the cadet branches hold high and influential positions in government though they are not in the line of succession to the Saudi throne. Many cadet members intermarry within the Al Saud to reestablish their lineage and continue to wield influence in the government.[10][11]
The earliest recorded ancestor of the Al Saud was Mani’ ibn Rabiah Al-Muraydi who settled in Diriyah in 1446–1447 with his clan, the Mrudah.[13] Although the Mrudah are believed to be descended from the Rabi’ahtribal confederation, it is unclear whether they trace their ancestry to the Banu Hanifa or the ‘Anizza branches of the Rabi’ah.[13] Mani was invited by a relative named Ibn Dir. Ibn Dir was the ruler of a set of villages and estates that make up modern-day Riyadh.[14][15][16]Mani’s clan had been on a sojourn in east Arabia, near al-Qatif, from an unknown point in time. Ibn Dir handed Mani two estates called al-Mulaybeed and Ghusayba. Mani and his family settled and renamed the region “al-Diriyah“, after their benefactor Ibn Dir.[17][18]
The Mrudah became rulers of al-Diriyah, which prospered along the banks of Wadi Hanifa and became an important Najdi settlement. As the clan grew larger, power struggles ensued, with one branch leaving for nearby Dhruma, while another branch (the “Al Watban”) left for the town of az-Zubayr in southern Iraq. The Al Muqrin became the ruling family among the Mrudah in Diriyah.
The First Saudi State was founded in 1744. This period was marked by conquest of neighboring areas and by religious zeal. At its height, the First Saudi State included most of the territory of modern-day Saudi Arabia, and raids by Al Saud’s allies and followers reached into Yemen, Oman, Syria, and Iraq. Islamic Scholars, particularly Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and his descendants, are believed to have played a significant role in Saudi rule during this period. The Saudis and their allies referred to themselves during this period as the Muwahhidun or Ahl al-Tawhid (“the monotheists”). Later they were referred to as the Wahhabis, a group of particularly strict, puritanical Sunni sect, named for its founder.
Leadership of the Al Saud during the time of their first state passed from father to son without incident. The first imam, Muhammad ibn Saud, was succeeded by his eldest son Abdulaziz in 1765. In 1802, Abdulaziz led ten thousand Wahhabi soldiers into an attack on the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala, in what is now southern Iraq and where Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad is buried.[20] Led by Abdulaziz, the Wahhabi soldiers killed more than two thousand people, including women and children.[20] The soldiers plundered the city, demolishing the massive golden dome above Hussein’s tomb and loaded hundreds of camels with weapons, jewelry, coins and other valuable goods.[20]
The attack on Karbala convinced the Ottomans and the Egyptians that the Saudis were a threat to regional peace.[21] Abdulaziz was killed in 1803 by an assassin, believed by some to have been a Shi’ite seeking revenge over the sacking of Karbala the year before. Abdul-Aziz was in turn succeeded by his son, Saud, under whose rule the Saudi state reached its greatest extent. By the time Saud died in 1814, his son and successor Abdullah ibn Saud had to contend with an Ottoman-Egyptian invasion in the Ottoman–Wahhabi Warseeking to retake lost Ottoman Empire territory. The mainly Egyptian force succeeded in defeating Abdullah’s forces, taking over the Saudi capital of Diriyyah in 1818. Abdullah was taken prisoner and was soon beheaded by the Ottomans in Constantinople, putting an end to the First Saudi State. The Egyptians sent many members of the Al Saud clan and other members of the local nobility as prisoners to Egypt and Constantinople, and razed the Saudi capital Diriyyah.
A few years after the fall of Diriyah in 1818, the Saudis were able to re-establish their authority in Najd, establishing the Emirate of Nejd, commonly known as the Second Saudi State, with its capital in Riyadh.
Compared to the First Saudi State, the second Saudi period was marked by less territorial expansion (it never reconquered the Hijaz or ‘Asir, for example) and less religious zeal, although the Saudi leaders continued to go by the title of imam and still employed Salafi religious scholars. The second state was also marked by severe internal conflicts within the Saudi family, eventually leading to the dynasty’s downfall. In all but one instance, succession occurred by assassination or civil war, the exception being the passage of authority from Faisal ibn Turki to his son Abdullah ibn Faisal ibn Turki.
After his defeat at Mulayda, Abdul-Rahman ibn Faisal went with his family into exile in the deserts of eastern Arabia among the Al Murrabedouin. Soon afterward, however, he found refuge in Kuwait as a guest of the Kuwaiti emir, Mubarak Al Sabah. In 1902, Abdul-Rahman’s son, Abdul Aziz, took on the task of restoring Saudi rule in Riyadh. Supported by a few dozen followers and accompanied by some of his brothers and relatives, Abdul Aziz was able to capture Riyadh’s Masmak fort and kill the governor appointed there by Ibn Rashid. Abdul Aziz, reported to have been barely 20 at the time, was immediately proclaimed ruler in Riyadh. As the new leader of the House of Saud, Abdul Aziz became commonly known from that time as “Ibn Saud”.
Ibn Saud spent the next three decades trying to re-establish his family’s rule over as much of the Arabian Peninsula as possible, starting with his native Najd. His chief rivals were the Al Rashid clan in Ha’il, the Sharifs of Mecca in the Hijaz, and the Ottoman Turks in al-Hasa. Ibn Saud also had to contend, however, with the descendants of his late uncle Saud ibn Faisal (later known as the “Saud al-Kabir” branch of the family), who posed as the rightful heirs to the throne. Though for a time acknowledging the sovereignty of the Ottoman Sultans and even taking the title of pasha, Ibn Saud allied himself to the British, in opposition to the Ottoman-backed Al Rashid. From 1915 to 1927, Ibn Saud’s dominions were a protectorate of the British Empire, pursuant to the 1915 Treaty of Darin.
Ibn Saud won final victory over the Rashidis in 1921, making him the ruler of most of central Arabia. He consolidated his dominions as the Sultanate of Nejd. He then turned his attention to the Hijaz, finally conquering it in 1926, just months before the British protectorate ended. For the next five and a half years, he administered the two parts of his dual realm, the Kingdom of Hijaz and Nejd, as separate units.
By 1932, Ibn Saud had disposed of all his main rivals and consolidated his rule over much of the Arabian Peninsula. He united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that year. Ibn Saud’s father, Abdul Rahmanretained the honorary title of “imam.” In 1937 near Dammam, American surveyors discovered what later proved to be Saudi Arabia’s vast oil reserves. Before the discovery of oil, many family members were destitute.[22]
Ibn Saud sired dozens of children by his many wives. He had at most only four wives at one time. He divorced and married many times. He made sure to marry into many of the noble clans and tribes within his territory, including the chiefs of the Bani Khalid, Ajman, and Shammar tribes, as well as the Al ash-Sheikh (descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab). He also arranged for his sons and relatives to enter into similar marriages. He appointed his eldest surviving son, Saud as heir apparent, to be succeeded by the next eldest son, Faisal. The Saudi family became known as the “royal family,” and each member, male and female, was accorded the title amir(“prince”) or amira (“princess”), respectively.
Ibn Saud died in 1953, after having cemented an alliance with the United States in 1945. He is still celebrated officially as the “Founder,” and only his direct descendants may take on the title of “his or her Royal Highness.” The date of his recapture of Riyadh in 1902 was chosen to mark Saudi Arabia’s centennial in 1999 (according to the Islamic lunar calendar).
Upon Ibn Saud’s death, his son Saud assumed the throne without incident, but his lavish spending led to a power struggle with the new crown prince, Faisal. In 1964, the royal family forced Saud to abdicate in favor of Faisal, aided by an edict from the country’s grand mufti. During this period, some of Ibn Saud’s younger sons, led by Talal ibn Abdul Aziz defected to Egypt, calling themselves the “Free Princes” and calling for liberalization and reform, but were later induced to return by Faisal. They were fully pardoned but were also barred from any future positions in government.
U.S. President Barack Obamaoffers condolences on death of Saudi King Abdullah, Riyadh, 27 January 2015
Faisal was assassinated in 1975 by a nephew, Faisal ibn Musaid, who was promptly executed. Another brother, Khalid, assumed the throne. The next prince in line had actually been Prince Muhammad, but he had relinquished his claim to the throne in favor of Khalid, his only full brother.
Khalid died of a heart attack in 1982, and was succeeded by Fahd, the eldest of the powerful “Sudairi Seven“, so-called because they were all sons of Ibn Saud by his wife Hassa Al Sudairi. Fahd did away with the previous royal title of “his Majesty” and replaced it with the honorific “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”, in reference to the two Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina, in 1986.
A stroke in 1995 left Fahd largely incapacitated, and the crown prince, Abdullah, gradually took over most of the king’s responsibilities until Fahd’s death in August 2005. Abdullah was proclaimed king on the day of Fahd’s death and promptly appointed his younger brother, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the minister of defense and Fahd’s “Second Deputy Prime Minister,” as the new heir apparent. On 27 March 2009, Abdullah appointed Prince Nayef Interior Minister as his “second deputy prime minister” and Crown Prince on 27 October.[23] Sultan died in October 2011 while Nayef died in Geneva, Switzerland on 15 June 2012. On 23 January 2015, Abdullah died after a prolonged illness, ending his nine-year rule as the King of Saudi Arabia, and Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was declared the new King.
Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammad with U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, Pentagon, 13 May 2015
The head of the House of Saud is the King of Saudi Arabia who serves as Head of State and monarch of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The King holds almost absolute political power. The King appoints ministers to his cabinet who supervise their respective ministries in his name. The key ministries of Defence, the Interior, and Foreign Affairs are usually held by members of the Saud family, as are most of the thirteen regional governorships. Most portfolios, however, such as Finance, Labor, Information, Planning, Petroleum Affairs and Industry, have traditionally been given to commoners, often with junior Al Saud members serving as their deputies. House of Saud family members also hold many of the Kingdom’s critical military and governmental departmental posts. Ultimate power in the Kingdom has always rested upon the Al Saud, though support from the Ulema, the merchant community, and the population at large has been key to the maintenance of the royal family’s political status quo.
Long-term political and government appointments, such as those of King Faisal, who was Foreign Minister almost continuously from 1932 to 1975, King Abdullah, who was Commander of the National Guard from 1963 to 2010, former Crown princeSultan bin Abdulaziz, who was Minister of Defence and Aviation from 1962 until his death in 2011, Prince Mutaib Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs from 1975 to 2009, former Crown Prince Nayef who was the Minister of Interior from 1975 to 2012, and the current King Salman, who was governor of the Riyadh Region from 1963 to 2011, have perpetuated the creation of fiefdoms where senior princes have, often, though not exclusively, co-mingled their personal wealth with that of their respective domains. They have often appointed their own sons to senior positions within their own fiefdom. Examples of these include Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah as assistant commander in the National Guard until 2010; Prince Khalid bin Sultan as assistant minister of defence until 2013; Prince Mansour bin Mutaib as assistant minister for Municipal and Rural Affairs until he replaced his father in 2009; and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef as assistant minister in the Interior Ministry. In cases, where portfolios have notably substantial budgets, appointments of younger, often full, brothers have been necessary, as deputies or vice ministers, ostensibly to share the wealth and the burdens of responsibility, of each fiefdom. Examples of these include Prince Abdul Rahman who was vice minister of defence and aviation under Prince Sultan; Prince Badr, deputy to King Abdullah in the National Guard; Prince Sattam, who was Deputy Riyadh Governor during King Salman‘s term; and Prince Ahmed, who held the deputy minister’s portfolio under Prince Nayef’s interior ministry.
Unlike Western royal families, the Saudi Monarchy has not had a clearly defined order of succession. Historically, upon becoming King, the monarch has designated an heir apparent to the throne who serves as Crown Prince of the Kingdom. Upon the King’s death the Crown Prince becomes King, and during the King’s incapacitation the Crown Prince, likewise, assumes power as regent. Though other members of the Al Saud hold political positions in the Saudi government, technically it is only the King and Crown Prince who legally constitute the political institutions.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter meets with King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd in January 1978
Succession has been from brother-to-brother since the death of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud was succeeded by his son Saud. Saud was succeeded by his brother Faisal. Faisal was succeeded by his brother Khalid who, in turn, was succeeded by his brother Fahd. Fahd was succeeded by his brother Abdullah, and Abdullah by his brother Salman, the current King. Salman appointed his half-brother Muqrin as Crown Prince in January 2015 and removed him in April 2015. Even Abdulaziz’s youngest son was to turn 70 in 2015. Abdulaziz, in 1920, had said that the further succession would be from brother-to-brother, not from father-to-son.
King Salman ended the brother-to-brother succession and appointed his 56-year-old nephew Muhammad bin Nayef as Crown Prince in April 2015, thus making the next succession from uncle-to-nephew. At the same time, King Salman appointed his son, Mohammad bin Salman, as Deputy Crown Prince, thus making the following succession from cousin-to-cousin, as Mohammad bin Salman is the cousin of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef. However, in June of 2017, Salman elevated Mohammad bin Salman to Crown Prince, following his decision to depose Muhammad bin Nayef of all positions, making his son heir apparent to the throne, and making the next succession father-to-son, for the first time since 1953, when Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud succeeded his father, the founder of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud.[4][5][6]
In June 2015 Forbes listed Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal as the 34th-richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$28 billion.[24] Prince Al-Waleed had a net worth of $20.4 billion in 2014.[25] King Salman had a net worth estimated at US$17 billion in 2016.[26]
The net worth of the entire royal family has been estimated at well over $1.4 trillion which makes them one of the wealthiest families in the world if not the wealthiest.[27]
Many princes and government officials have been arrested in the 2017 in alleged anti corruption campaign by the King and Crown prince. United States President Donald Trump has expressed support for the arrests.[28]
Due to its authoritarian and quasi-theocratic rule, the House of Saud has attracted much criticism during its rule of Saudi Arabia. There have been numerous incidents, including the Wahhabi Ikhwan militia uprising during the reign of Ibn Saud. Osama Bin Laden, a critic of the US, was a critic of Saudi Arabia and was denaturalized in the mid 1990s.[29]
On 20 November 1979, the Grand Mosque seizure saw the al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca violently seized by a group of 500 heavily armed and provisioned Saudi dissidents led by Juhayman al-Otaybi and Abdullah al-Qahtani,[30]consisting mostly of members of the former Ikhwan militia of Otaibah[31] but also of other peninsular Arabs and a few Egyptians enrolled in Islamic studies at the Islamic University of Madinah. The Saudi royal family turned to the Ulema who duly issued a fatwa permitting the storming of the holy sanctuary by Saudi forces, aided by French and Pakistani special ops units.[32] According to Lawrence Wright, the GIGN commandos did convert to Islam.[33] Most of those responsible, including Al-Otaybi himself, were beheaded publicly in four cities of Saudi Arabia.[34]
In January 2016, Saudi Arabia executed the prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr, who had called for pro-democracy demonstrations, along with forty-seven other Saudi shia citizens sentenced by the Specialized Criminal Court on terrorism charges.[35]
Since May 2017 in response to protests against the government[disputed– discuss], the predominantly Shia town of Al-Awamiyah has been put under full siege by the Saudi military. Residents are not allowed to enter or leave, and military indiscriminately shells the neighborhoods with airstrikes, mortar[36] and artillery[37] fire along with snipers[38] shooting residents.[39][40][41][42] Dozens of Shia civilians were killed, including a three year old and[43] a two-year-old child.[44][45] The Saudi government claims it is fighting terrorists in al-Awamiyah.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman kept his own mother away from his father for more than two years, out of the fear that she would stop the king from giving the power to him. Princess Fahda bint Falah Al Hathleen, third wife of King Salman was said to be in the US for medical treatment. However, according to the US intelligence she was not in the country.[46]
The list of King Abdulaziz‘s surviving sons, except for current Saudi monarch Salman, are as follows:
Bandar bin Abdulaziz (born 1923) – Eldest surviving son, who is reportedly still alive.
Mutaib bin Abdulaziz (born 1931) – Minister of municipal and rural affairs from 1975 to 2009. He has a long-standing family alliance with King Abdullah.
Talal bin Abdulaziz (born 1931) – Held the ministerial portfolios for finance and communications in the 1950s. Major businessman, special envoy to UNESCO and chairman of AGFUND. He had a leading role in the Free Princes movement of 1958 which sought government reform. He resigned in 2011 from the Allegiance Council.
Mamdouh bin Abdulaziz (born 1940) – Former governor of Tabuk region who was removed from the post by King Fahd for insubordination. Later he was made director of Saudi Center of Strategic Studies.
Ahmed bin Abdulaziz (born 1942) – Deputy minister of interior from 1975 to 2012; minister of interior from June 2012 to 5 November 2012.
Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (born 1945) – Director general of the General Intelligence Directorate from 2005 to 2012; former governor of Ha’il and Madinah provinces. He was appointed second deputy prime minister on 1 February 2013 and he was made crown prince on 23 January 2015 when his half-brother Salman became king. On 28 April 2015 Muqrin was granted resignation based on his request to start the next generation of the royals.
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The U.S. federal budget deficit rose in fiscal 2018 to the highest level in six years as spending climbed, the Trump administration said Monday.
The deficit jumped to $779 billion, $113 billion or 17 percent higher than the previous fiscal period, according to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. It was larger than any year since 2012, when it topped $1 trillion. The budget shortfall rose to 3.9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
The deficit increased by $70 billion less than anticipated in a report published in July, according to the two officials.
Federal revenue rose only slightly, by $14 billion after Republicans chopped tax rates for corporations and most individuals. Outlays climbed by $127 billion, or 3.2 percent. A spike in defense spending, as well as increases for Medicaid, Social Security and disaster relief, contributed to the increase.
Trump: We don’t have to go as fast on interest rates
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have pledged their commitment to fiscal discipline, despite the fact that they passed a tax law projected to dramatically expand budget deficits last year and then authorized a boost in spending. In a statement, Mulvaney claimed that “America’s booming economy will create increased government revenues,” a point the GOP has repeatedly argued in favor of its tax plan.
“But this fiscal picture is a blunt warning to Congress of the dire consequences of irresponsible and unnecessary spending,” he added. “Going forward, President Trump and this Administration will continue to work with Congress to make the difficult choices needed to bring fiscal restraint, which, when matched with increasing revenue, will reduce our deficit.”
Several independent analyses have estimated the GOP tax plan will cause budget deficits to grow dramatically over time, even after economic growth is taken into account.
The Trump administration has proposed dramatic cuts to spending in several government agencies to reduce deficits. Even many Republicans have rejected the severity of proposed budget cuts.
The Treasury noted that receipts related to “excise, customs and other” jumped to $35 billion in September 2018, a 35 percent increase over the prior-year period. It is unclear how much of that revenue relates to Trump’s tariffs on imports from major trading partners.
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From Saudi royal court to exile: Why MBS wants to silence Jamal Khashoggi
Jamal Khashoggi is a friend of mine, so what I am about to write lacks objectivity.
In the many conversations we have had together, and for a long time after he fell out with the new regime in Riyadh under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Khashoggi actively eschewed the label “Saudi dissident”. He regarded himself as a loyalist, a son of the establishment, a journalist and foreign policy veteran who not so long ago was inside the benighted circle of the royal court. On occasions, he travelled with them.
Undying enmity
I can cite many examples of Khashoggi parting company with Western liberal critics of the kingdom. He supported – initially, at least – the Saudi-led war on Yemen. In common with many Sunni Arab analysts, he thought that Iran had overextended its reach into the Sunni Arab world and that it was time for Saudi Arabia to push back.
He defended capital punishment. He supported a crackdown on corruption – if he could be convinced that it was genuine. He supported, too, attempts to diversify and privatise an oil-dependent economy.
But Khashoggi adhered to one principle that the small circle around Mohammed bin Salman could not stomach, a quality that earned him their undying enmity. Khashoggi was honest. He could not be bought. He spoke his mind and was clear about what he was saying.
Khashoggi’s criticism of his country was nuanced and for that reason alone I would consider him a real reformer and true democrat
He thought that there was only one path on which the kingdom should be headed in the 21st Century – that is of a slowly opening democracy headed by a gradually retreating constitutional monarchy.
He feared the crown prince would eventually bankrupt the country as a result of his vanity projects to raise new gleaming cities in the sand – cities that would remain empty. He recognised that MBS was popular with the youth, but calculated that popularity would last up to the point where they had to open their wallets. The Saudi journalist paid heed to reports of capital flight.
The reckless crown prince
Khashoggi’s criticism of his own country was nuanced and for that reason alone I would consider him a real reformer and true democrat. That he should – by now – have been detained for over 24 hours in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul speaks volumes about the character and intentions of those running the show in Riyadh.
Missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancee Hatice (L) and her friends wait in front of the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, on 3 October 2018 (AFP)
It dispels the well-funded PR myth that has ensnared journalists like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Jamal’s colleague on the Washington Post, David Ignatius, who have praised Mohammed bin Salman as a reformer. Ignatius wrote that the Saudi crown prince was giving his country “shock therapy”. I did not think his paper supported the practise of lobotomy.
Mohammed bin Salman is shocking all right, but he is no therapist. He is vindictive. He bears grudges. He is supremely wilful. He has absolutely no respect for another country’s sovereignty, territory, courts or media. He is reckless. That he should have staged this stunt in Istanbul, on Turkish soil, is a measure of how reckless the Saudi crown prince and the narrow circle around him are.
That Mohammed bin Salman should have staged this stunt in Istanbul, on Turkish soil, is a measure of how reckless the Saudi crown prince and the narrow circle around him are
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey have steadily deteriorated since the coup attempt against the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan two years ago. It was clear which side the Saudi state-run media was on during the night of the coup. They ran wall-to-wall coverage, with all commentators saying either that Erdogan was dead or that he had fled the country.
That Erdogan had survived that night was truly bad news for Riyadh.
It took 16 hours for the Saudi state news service to realise that the coup had not succeeded and issue a statement expressing “the kingdom’s welcome that things are returned to normal led by his Excellency President Tayyip Erdogan and his elected government and in line with the constitutional legitimacy and the will of the Turkish people”.
A delicate time
Those memories are still raw, especially in the Turkish presidency. That Mohammed bin Salman should risk sending Saudi relations with Turkey to a new low by seizing a high-profile journalist on Erdogan’s home turf, is another indication of how unstable the next ruler of the kingdom is.
Istanbul is home to virtually the entire gamut of the Egyptian opposition, secular and Islamist (AFP)
As Riyadh knows only too well, it got very little for the $300m it paid, much of it in cash, to Iraqi politicians of different confessions who were contesting the recent election. It also knows that Turkey and Iran are in high-level talks – as is the Hashd el Shabi (also known as the Popular Mobilisation Units) and Sunni groups in Iraq – about a new security accommodation in areas that are traditionally Sunni.
This is the first time in many years that Iraq’s Shia factions are genuinely divided and that a political deal that does not run so fully along sectarian lines is achievable. This is a delicate time for Saudi-Turkish relations. It is not in Riyadh’s interest to upset the apple cart as publicly and clumsily as it appears to have done at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Turkish intelligence are convinced that Khashoggi remains inside the building and have surrounded it. Saudi officials have strongly denied any involvement in his disappearance and say that he left the consulate soon after arriving.
It is essential that Turkey secures Khashoggi’s safe release for reasons that go beyond the man himself, and a threadbare bilateral relationship.
Turkey: A safe haven
Apart from being home to millions of Syrian refugees, Turkey houses thousands of political exiles from all over the Arab world.
Istanbul is home to virtually the entire gamut of the Egyptian opposition, secular and Islamist. It is where British-born militants are kept in prison. There is a lot going on in Istanbul, and more than one Western government would prefer to keep it that way.
If Turkey allowed abductions by foreign governments to take place on its soil, its own internal security would rapidly deteriorate. It would also lose the substantial leverage it has in the Middle East by providing safe haven for a number of Sunni opposition groups.
How much pressure the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is willing to apply with his counterpart, the Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir, over Khashoggi (who has residency in the US and is a Washington Post columnist) is as yet unclear. The White House is no lover of the Washington Post or press freedom.
US President Donald Trump regularly insults and humiliates King Salman of Saudi Arabia to force him to pay even more for his own security than he already has done.
The regime in Saudi Arabia swallows these insults from Trump, while going to the opposite extreme with what it considers lesser nations like Canada, because it knows it has no other option.
Khashoggi was the first to warn Saudis of the dangers of getting into bed with Trump. In fact, this was the reason he fell out with the Saudi regime in the first place, and this was long before the Arab Islamic American summit held in Riyadh last May and the announcement of lucrative arms deals. It is indeed too late for Riyadh to heed the journalist’s words, and so they have gone to desperate lengths to silence him.
For more than one reason, they should not be allowed to succeed.
– David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi speaks at an event hosted by Middle East Monitor in London on 29 September 2018 (Reuters)
As someone who spent three decades working closely with intelligence services in the Arab world and the West, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife.
A one-time regime insider turned critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the de facto head of the Saudi kingdom which tolerates no criticism whatsoever — Khashoggi had been living in Washington for the previous year in self-imposed exile amid a crackdown on independent voices in his homeland.
He had become the darling of western commentators on the Middle East. With almost two million Twitter followers, he was the most famous political pundit in the Arab world and a regular guest on the major TV news networks in Britain and the United States. Would the Saudis dare to cause him harm? It turns out that the answer to that question was ‘You betcha.’
Following uneventful visits to the consulate and, earlier, the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khashoggi was lured into a murderous plan so brazen, so barbaric, that it would seem far-fetched as a subplot in a John le Carré novel. He went inside the Istanbul consulate, but failed to emerge. Turkish police and intelligence officials claimed that a team of 15 hitmen carrying Saudi diplomatic passports arrived the same morning on two private jets. Their convoy of limousines arrived at the consulate building shortly before Khashoggi did.
Their not-so-secret mission? To torture, then execute, Khashoggi, and videotape the ghastly act for whoever had given the order for his merciless dispatch. Khashoggi’s body, Turkish officials say, was dismembered and packed into boxes before being whisked away in a black van with darkened windows. The assassins fled the country.
Saudi denials were swift. The ambassador to Washington said reports that Saudi authorities had killed Khashoggi were ‘absolutely false’. But under the circumstances — with his fiancée waiting for him, and no security cameras finding any trace of his leaving the embassy — the world is left wondering if bin Salman directed this murder. When another Saudi official chimed in that ‘with no body, there is no crime’, it was unclear whether he was being ironic. Is this great reforming prince, with aims the West applauds, using brutal methods to dispose of his enemies? What we have learned so far is far from encouraging. A Turkish newspaper close to the government this week published the photographs and names of the alleged Saudi hitmen, and claims to have identified three of them as members of bin Salman’s personal protection team.
There are also reports in the American media that all surveillance footage was removed from the consulate building, and that all local Turkish employees there were suddenly given the day off. According to the New York Times, among the assassination team was the kingdom’s top forensic expert, who brought a bone saw to dismember Khashoggi’s body. None of this has yet been independently verified, but a very dark narrative is emerging.
In many respects, bin Salman’s regime has been revolutionary: he has let women drive, sided with Israel against Iran and curtailed the religious police. When Boris Johnson was foreign secretary, he said that bin Salman was the best thing to happen to the region in at least a decade, that the style of government of this 33-year-old prince was utterly different. But the cruelty and the bloodletting have not stopped. Saudi Arabia still carries out many public beheadings and other draconian corporal punishments. It continues to wage a war in Yemen which has killed at least 10,000 civilians.
Princes and businessmen caught up in a corruption crackdown are reported to have been tortured; Shia demonstrators have been mowed down in the streets and had their villages reduced to rubble; social media activists have been sentenced to thousands of lashes; families of overseas-based activists have been arbitrarily arrested. In an attempt to justify this, bin Salman said this week he was ‘trying to get rid of extremism and terrorism without civil war, without stopping the country from growing, with continuous progress in all elements,’ adding: ‘So if there is a small price in that area, it’s better than paying a big debt to do that move.’
The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power. This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.
In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.
He had been a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, but then became more of a player than a spectator. Before working with a succession of Saudi princes, he edited Saudi newspapers. The exclusive remit a Saudi government–appointed newspaper editor has is to ensure nothing remotely resembling honest journalism makes it into the pages. Khashoggi put the money in the bank — making a handsome living was always his top priority. Actions, anyway, speak louder than words.
It was Yasin Aktay — a former MP for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) — whom Khashoggi told his fiancée to call if he did not emerge from the consulate. The AKP is, in effect, the Turkish branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. His most trusted friend, then, was an adviser to President Erdogan, who is fast becoming known as the most vicious persecutor of journalists on earth. Khashoggi never meaningfully criticised Erdogan. So we ought not to see this as the assassination of a liberal reformer.
Khashoggi had this undeserved status in the West because of the publicity surrounding his sacking as editor of the Saudi daily Al Watan back in 2003. (I broke the news of his removal for Reuters. I’d worked alongside Khashoggi at the Saudi daily Arab News during the preceding years.) He was dismissed because he allowed a columnist to criticise an Islamist thinker considered to be the founding father of Wahhabism. Thus, overnight, Khashoggi became known as a liberal progressive.
The Muslim Brotherhood, though, has always been at odds with the Wahhabi movement. Khashoggi and his fellow travellers believe in imposing Islamic rule by engaging in the democratic process. The Wahhabis loathe democracy as a western invention. Instead, they choose to live life as it supposedly existed during the time of the Muslim prophet. In the final analysis, though, they are different means to achieving the same goal: Islamist theocracy. This matters because, although bin Salman has rejected Wahhabism — to the delight of the West — he continues to view the Muslim Brotherhood as the main threat most likely to derail his vision for a new Saudi Arabia. Most of the Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia who have been imprisoned over the past two years — Khashoggi’s friends — have historic ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Khashoggi had therefore emerged as a de facto leader of the Saudi branch. Due to his profile and influence, he was the biggest political threat to bin Salman’s rule outside of the royal family.
Worse, from the royals’ point of view, was that Khashoggi had dirt on Saudi links to al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. He had befriended Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan and Sudan while championing his jihad against the Soviets in dispatches. At that same time, he was employed by the Saudi intelligence services to try to persuade bin Laden to make peace with the Saudi royal family. The result? Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi who had the beef on the royals’ intimate dealing with al Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. That would have been crucial if he had escalated his campaign to undermine the crown prince.
Like the Saudi royals, Khashoggi dissociated himself from bin Laden after 9/11 (which Khashoggi and I watched unfold together in the Arab News office in Jeddah). But he then teamed up as an adviser to the Saudi ambassador to London and then Washington, Prince Turki Al Faisal. The latter had been Saudi intelligence chief from 1977 until just ten days before the 9/11 attacks, when he inexplicably resigned. Once again, by working alongside Prince Turki during the latter’s ambassadorial stints, as he had while reporting on bin Laden, Khashoggi mixed with British, US and Saudi intelligence officials. In short, he was uniquely able to acquire invaluable inside information.
The Saudis, too, may have worried that Khashoggi had become a US asset. In Washington in 2005, a senior Pentagon official told me of a ridiculous plan they had to take ‘the Saudi out of Arabia’ (as was the rage post-9/11). It involved establishing a council of selected Saudi figures in Mecca to govern the country under US auspices after the US took control of the oil. He named three Saudis the Pentagon team were in regular contact with regarding the project. One of them was Khashoggi. A fantasy, certainly, but it shows how highly he was regarded by those imagining a different Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps it was for this and other reasons — and working according to the dictum of keeping your enemies closer — that a few weeks ago, according to a friend of Khashoggi, bin Salman had made a traditional tribal offer of reconciliation — offering him a place as an adviser if he returned to the kingdom. Khashoggi had declined because of ‘moral and religious’ principles. And that may have been the fatal snub, not least because Khashoggi had earlier this year established a new political party in the US called Democracy for the Arab World Now, which would support Islamist gains in democratic elections throughout the region. Bin Salman’s nightmare of a Khashoggi-led Islamist political opposition was about to become a reality.
The West has been fawning over bin Salman. But how now to overlook what seems to be a brazen Mafia-style murder? ‘I don’t like hearing about it,’ Donald Trump said. ‘Nobody knows anything about it, but there’s some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it.’ Well, there are plenty more stories where that came from, stories about a ruthless prince whose opponents have a habit of disappearing. The fate of Khashoggi is the latest sign of what’s really happening inside Saudi Arabia. For how much longer will our leaders look the other way?
This article was originally published inThe Spectator magazine.
Global media has been widely reporting on the alleged disappearance of Saudi national and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, often describing him in terms such as “a dissident-journalist critical of the oil-rich kingdom.” As the BBC recently reported:
Jamal Khashoggi, a well-known journalist and critic of the Saudi government, walked into the country’s consulate in Istanbul last week to obtain some documents and has not been seen since.
Generally but not always overlooked in the media coverage are Khashoggi’s ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood
1. What is the Global Muslim Brotherhood?
Most observers are familiar with the pan-Islamic organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan El-Banna, the Egyptian Brotherhood has been a wellspring of Islamism and political Islam since it(…)
“>Global Muslim Brotherhood. For example, British author and journalist John R. Bradley reports that Khashoggi joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970’s:
October 11, 2018 In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.
Washington Post writer David Ignatius, who says he knew Khashoggi for 15 years, also reports that Khashoggi joined the Muslim Brotherhood at some unspecified time, likely while in the US for his education:
October 7, 2018 Khashoggi was passionate for reform of an Arab Muslim world that he considered corrupt and dishonest. He grew up in Medina, the son of a Saudi who owned a small textile shop. He went to the United States for college, attending Indiana State University. He also embraced Islam, joining the Muslim Brotherhood and, in the late 1970s, befriending the young Osama bin Laden, whom he tried to turn against violence.
Interesting is Khashoggi’s attendance at Indiana State University confirmed in a local media report which says he was an undergraduate student at Indiana State from 1977-1982, and was awarded a degree in business administration on May 7, 1983. According to a report by the GMBDW author, at the same time Khashoggi was attending university in Indiana, the state was the hub of the newly developing complex of organizations that would become the US Muslim Brotherhood. For example, the report notes a key meeting held in early 1977 described as follows:
As the Muslim Student Association
No entry yet. You can still search for Muslim Student Association
“>Muslim Student Association (MSA) reached its mid-teens it began preparing for an expanded role in the service of Islam. It called an historic meeting of a cross-section of Islamic workers, in Plainfield, Indiana, in early 1397/1977. This meeting set up a task force to recommend a new organizational structure to respond to the increasing challenges and responsibilities emerging in the growing North American Muslim communities. The task force concluded that the new environment would be best served by establishing a broader umbrella organization called “ISNA.”
ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, emerged out of the early US Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure and documents discovered in the course of the the terrorism trial of the Holy Land Foundation
No entry yet. You can still search for Holy Land Foundation
“>Holy Land Foundation
confirmed that the organization was part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. ISNA was named as a Holy Land unindicted co-conspirator as a result of what the US Justice Department called the organization’s “intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestine Committee, and the defendants in this case.” Although not confirmed, it would seem more than possible that a Muslim student active in Indiana would have been interacting with the complex of US Brotherhood organizations rapidly developing at that time. Khashoggi is also known to have close relations with Saudi businessman Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal who appointed him to run the ill-fated Al Arab television station in Bahrain in 2015. As frequently reported by the GMBDW, Prince Talal is known to have made donations to both the ISNA and to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), also part of the US Muslim Brotherhood.
Not all reporting characterizes Khashoggi as a Muslim Brotherhood “member” although it should be remembered that membership is a nebulous concept when discussing the Global Muslim Brotherhood. The independent Turkish news portal Ahval claims that while Khashoggi was not a Brotherhood member he was “someone close to their ideas”:
October 10, 2018 Khashoggi is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but someone close to their ideas, according to his friends, … “I cannot say he was an official member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe he was at the beginning, but he had close ties. The leaders of the movement in Egypt and Tunisia were Jamal’s friends. After the Arab spring, he wanted political Islam to come to power. But he was not an Islamist,” Ahmed Zaki, from BBC Arabic said.
As for Khashoggi himself, Islamist media reported in 2017 that he denied that being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood although he characterized Brotherhood thought as “noble”:
September 11, 2017 Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi has denied that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The writer, who has been banned from publication by the Saudi authorities for the past 9 months, pointed out that the Brotherhood allegation is directed at anyone believing in change, reform or the Arab Spring. Responding on Twitter to another user who asked who was behind the accusations directed at him, Khashoggi said: “For a while now, I have found that anyone who believes in reform, change, the Arab Spring, and freedom, and those who are proud of their religion and their country is labelled as being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. It seems that the Brotherhood’s school of thought is noble.”
However at the same time, and in another interview, Khashoggi gave a somewhat disingenuous denial of Brotherhood membership, stating that he was not “officially a member” but did not mind being referred to as such:
September 13, 2017 Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi confirmed the news stating that he was suspended from writing for Al-Hayat newspaper, based on a decision by Al-Hayat publisher Khalid bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and the recommendation of Fahd bin Khalid Al Saud.Commenting on the news, Khashoggi said in a tweet that “the decision of suspension was indeed made by the publisher. I spoke with his Highness a little while ago, we agreed to reject the dissemination of the culture of hatred, and disagreed with regards to the Muslim Brotherhood. I have much appreciation for him.” Khashoggi, who currently resides in Washington, has criticized the arrests of preachers, including Salman al-Awda and Awad al-Qarni, who are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, adding that belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood “is not a charge,” further noting that he “does not feel offended if someone says I am [part of]the Brotherhood, although I am not officially a member.”
Consistent with ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood is Khashoggi’s friendship with Azzam Tamimi, a UK activist for Hamas and a leader in the UK Muslim Brotherhood. According to an Associated Press report, the two hd been involved in setting up “pro-democracy” projects since 1992:
Khashoggi had incorporated his democracy advocacy group, DAWN, in January in Delaware, said Khaled Saffuri, another friend. The group was still in the planning stages, and Khashoggi was working on it quietly, likely concerned it could cause trouble for associates, including activists in the Gulf, Saffuri said. The project was expected to reach out to journalists and lobby for change, representing both Islamists and liberals, said another friend, Azzam Tamimi
According to a Washington Report on Middle East Affairs article, Azzam Tamimi was born in 1955 and he was seven when his family moved from Hebron to Kuwait. After high school graduation, he moved to England and the University of Westminster, London. First studying pure science, he changed to(…)
“>Azzam Tamimi
, a prominent Palestinian-British activist and TV presenter. … Tamimi said he and Khashoggi had set up a similar pro-democracy project together in 1992 when they first met. It was called Friends of Democracy in Algeria, he said, and followed the botched elections in Algeria, which the government annulled to avert an imminent Islamist victory.
Although described as a “democracy advocacy group” it should be noted that in reality, as described in an ABC News report, DAWN was in fact a stalking horse for the inclusion of “Sunni Political Islam” in Middle Eastern governments, presumably including Saudi Arabia. Another self-described Islamic Democracy group is the US-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) was founded in 1998 in what appears to have been a cooperative effort among the US Muslim Brotherhood, the US State Department and Georgetown University academic Dr. John Esposito who served during the 1990’s as a State Department “foreign(…)
“>Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
(CSID) where Khashoggi gave the keynote address in April 2018 and were he reportedly:
applauded the efforts made by organizations like CSID in advocating for democracy and freedom of speech and helping save the Middle East from drowning in dark ages of dictatorship.
Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) was founded in 1998 in what appears to have been a cooperative effort among the US Muslim Brotherhood, the US State Department and Georgetown University academic Dr. John Esposito who served during the 1990’s as a State Department “foreign affairs analyst” and who has at least a dozen past or present affiliations with global Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas
The Hamas charter says that it is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine” and soon after Hamas took over the Gaza strip, Muslim Brotherhood representatives traveled to Gaza from Egypt through the newly-opened border to review Hamas military formations. A Hamas journalist(…)
“>Hamas
organizations. From its inception, CSID has argued that the U.S. government should support Islamist movements in foreign countries and has received financial support from the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy and the United States Institute of Peace.
It should also be noted that the British journalist John R. Bradley, has reported that Khashoggi instructed his fiancée to contact former Turkish MP and AK Party leader Yasin Aktay in case he failed to come out of the consulate. Aktay is known to be a close advisor to Muslim Brotherhood supporter and Turkish President Erdogan and the AK Party is an Islamist party close to the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
The evidence offered above strongly suggests that Jamal Khashoggi was not only a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood and close to the Global Muslim Brotherhood but was, in fact, actively supporting Brotherhood-related projects as recently as April of this year as evidenced by his key note address on behalf of the CSID. The GMBDW wished to state in the clearest terms that none of the above should be taken as support for any violence that may or may not have been committed against Mr. Khashoggi by any party. The evidence does however raise serious questions about how such an individual came to be associated with the Washington Post and why he is generally fêted as a “pro-democracy reformer” by so much of the global media. Perhaps much of that media is not aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is often categorized by academics as a “reformist movement.”
While it would seem unlikely and/or unusual that such a prominent journalist would be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the GMBDW has long reported on the example of Waddah Khanfar, the former General Manager of Al Jazeera who is tied to both the Global Muslim Brotherhood and to Hamas as well as currently serving as a trustee of the US-based International Crisis Group.
We should also add that this is by no means the only example of the Washington Post showing astonishingly bad judgment with respect to the Global Muslim Brotherhood. In February 2017, we reported on the Post’s shoddy work with respect to an article purporting to fact check recent series of claims about long-time Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. As we wrote at that time:
The GMBDW only hopes, and our hopes are perpetually dashed, that the mainstream media in the US would once again assume its rightful role as the guardian of the public interest with respect to the topic.
It would seem our hopes are to be dashed once again.
BREAKING: CNN Reports Saudis Preparing to Admit Jamal Khashoggi Was Killed in ‘Interrogation Gone Wrong’
by Aidan McLaughlin | Oct 15th, 2018, 3:17 pm
CNN reported on Monday that Saudi Arabia is preparing a report in which they will admit that Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Postcolumnist who went missing earlier this month, was killed in an “interrogation gone wrong.”
Per two sources who spoke to CNN, however, the Saudis are preparing a report admitting that they intended to abduct and bring Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia, but that he was inadvertently killed in the process. The report is intended, per CNN, to absolve the Saudi government of responsibility for the murder by claiming the operation was not cleared.
CNN’s Arwa Damon reported from Istanbul that the report will most likely conclude “the operation was carried out without clearance and transparency, and that those involved will be held responsible.”
Damon added that the Saudis’ report is still being prepared, and could change.
On Oct. 14, CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired an interview with President Donald Trump — rare for its status as having appeared outside of Fox News or conservative media. Appearing the same weekend as First Lady Melania Trump’s appearance on “20/20,” this would seem to represent a new level of media blitzing on the part of an administration that’s already seen its head get plenty of free promotion during rallies broadcast on cable news. And, like Melania Trump’s utterly-on-message, relentlessly forward-moving TV interview, the President’s interview had effectively the same impact as a rally; it allowed him to bulldoze his chief enemy, the media, while airing his own points at ceaseless length. The lesson the media has evidently not learned yet is not to be sitting right there when he does it.Lesley Stahl’s interview with Trump was an undeniable get; he’d been scarce on mainstream media since around the time he appeared on tape with NBC’s Lester Holt and indicated he’d fired former FBI Director James Comey in part due to the Russia investigation. But the interview seemed governed by two motives, both of which played into the hands of a media-savvy President whose refusal to play by typical rules of engagement has been at the center of his rise.
First, Stahl seemed to want to conduct a definitive interview with Trump summarizing his presidency so far. In so doing, she skittered across the map of global and domestic issues, seeming to touch on every topic under the sun, from the ultra-current — the fate of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi — to the more long-range. Questions about, say, North Korea, tariffs on China, climate change, and NATO were met with long bursts of Trumpian verbiage, spilling out so fast they seemed barely able to be edited. What fell away in editing, or what was barely allowed to happen in the time allotted, were many follow-ups.
And when follow-up questions did happen, they seemed to fall into the interview’s second trap: Trying to crack the code of Donald Trump, human being. “I wish you could go to Greenland,” Stahl mused in the brief portion of the interview dealing with climate change, “watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels.” Trump shouted her down, predictably unmoved by Stahl’s evident passion about a story imbued with dread. He won every segment of the interview because he was utterly unable to brook doubt — and, at this point, a broadcast dealing with a president who cannot face facts must be armed with real facts of their own. Stahl asked Trump about “the scientists who say [the effects of climate change are] worse than ever,” but was unprepared to cite one; knowing, now, that the human factor will not work on Trump, a broadcaster should be prepared to cite hard facts in a face-off with the President.
Not, of course, that those facts will change his mind or even elicit an unexpected answer from the Commander-in-Chief. But it felt like a missed opportunity that both so many ardent Trump fans and so many in the hazy middle tuned into an interview with the President and found so much of what was put to him phrased in loose, conversational terms. If he won’t deal with the realities of climate change (presented in this interview only in anecdotal terms of ice and hurricanes and in data, never explained, from “NOAA and NASA,” and not the recent, catastrophic United Nations report) or of abandoning NATO, the broadcaster should rush in to fill the gap. Instead, facts like these ones seemed to be assumed on the part of the viewership at home, and the silences were filled by Trump, who explained away why orthodoxies were wrong while Stahl struggled to break into his monologues. The one moment Stahl meaningfully challenged Trump was on his alliance with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un — presenting the President with a “resume” of his conversation partner’s misdeeds in his own country — but even then, the format demanded she move forward after Trump said the pair shared “a good energy.” Her next question was, verbatim, “China.” And Trump free-associated there, too.
So many of Stahl’s questions seemed premised on the notion that Trump could be brought to reason through earnest questioning that treaded somewhat lightly — but that signaled to viewers at home a certain set of values. This would have been a good playbook for a conservative-but-not-category-busting President Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, perhaps; all players could say their piece, and all could go home relatively unscathed. But even as Trump was unwilling to play along, the questions got no harder. Late in the interview, Stahl asked Trump what had been “the biggest surprise” and what he had learned as President, a question unworthy of the occasion and of time that might have been spent fleshing out answers elsewhere. (The surprise is that politicians are “vicious,” and the President went on.) Trump relentlessly talked over the follow-ups to a further question — why he didn’t bring the country together in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings, seeking a moment of unity. That the President’s vanishingly rare appearance on a nonpartisan news program had resulted in a spectacle in which randomly assorted questions were bulldozed by a man eager to speak, and in which the interviewer generally left the viewers to decide what those answers meant without the benefit of meaningful follow-up, made the point clear.
By pushing through questions and by capitalizing on an interview approach seeking to synthesize his entire presidency into two segments of television, Trump effectively converted “60 Minutes” into a short rally. There are those who will see his rants as worthy, and those who will loathe them; whatever unity can be made to exist by the President exists only within those camps. That “60 Minutes” went looking for something greater is more proof than viewers needed that their approach to the President left them outmatched.
Stahl was born to a wealthy Jewish family[2] in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was raised in Swampscott, Massachusetts. She is the daughter of Dorothy J. (née Tishler), and Louis E. Stahl, a food company executive.[1][2][3] In 1977, Stahl married author Aaron Latham. They have one child, Taylor Stahl Latham. The couple currently lives in New York City.
An honors graduate of Wheaton College who majored in history,[4] Stahl began her television broadcasting career at Boston’s original Channel 5, WHDH-TV, as a producer and on-air reporter.[5] She joined CBS News in 1972, and became a correspondent in 1974. “I was born on my 30th birthday,” Stahl would later write about the experience. “Everything up till then was prenatal.”[6] Stahl credits her CBS News hire to the Federal Communication Commission‘s 1972 inclusion of women in its affirmative action mandate: “the television networks were scouring the country for women and blacks with any news experience at all. A friend in New York had called to tell me about a memo floating around CBS News mandating that ‘the next reporter we hire will be a woman.'”[7] According to Stahl, Connie Chung and Bernard Shaw were “the two other ‘affirmative action babies’ in what became known as the Class of ’72.”[8] Stahl reflected in an interview on her early days at CBS how, on the night of the ’72 Nixon-McGovern election returns, she found her on-air studio chair marked with masking tape, not with her name as with her colleagues, but with “Female.” Stahl was the mentor of CBS news producer Susan Zirinsky.[9]
Stahl’s prominence grew after she covered Watergate. “I found an apartment in the Watergate complex, moved all my stuff from Boston, and didn’t miss a day of work. … June 1972. Most of the reporters in our bureau were on the road, covering the presidential campaign. Thus, I was sent out to cover the arrest of some men who had broken into one of the buildings in the Watergate complex. That CBS let me, the newest hire, hold on to Watergate as an assignment was a measure of how unimportant the story seemed: … I was the only television reporter covering the early court appearances. When the five Watergate burglars asked for a bail reduction, I got my first scoop. Unlike my competitors, I was able to identify them. The next time the cameraman listened when I said, ‘Roll! That’s them!’ And so CBS was the only network to get pictures of the burglars. I was a hero at the bureau.” [10]
She went on to become White House correspondent during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. At the Republican Convention of 1980, she broke the news on CBS that Reagan’s negotiations with ex-President Gerald Ford had broken down and the answer to the question of who would be vice-presidential nominee was: “It’s Bush! Yes, it’s Bush!” George H. W. Bush had been standing perhaps not far away, largely off by himself, looking discouraged because he was sure he wasn’t going to be chosen.
Stahl was the moderator of Face the Nation between September 1983 and May 1991. In addition, she hosted 48 Hours Investigates from 2002 to 2004. In 2002, Stahl made headlines when Al Gore appeared on 60 Minutes and revealed for the first time that he would not run for president again in 2004. When Katie Couric was hired, CBS News asked Stahl to reduce her salary by $500,000 to accommodate Couric’s salary, bringing her salary down to $1.8 million.[11][12] In October 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, stood up and walked away from an interview with Stahl because she asked him about his relationship with his soon-to-be estranged wife, Cécilia.
In 1998, she appeared on the NBC sitcom Frasier, playing herself in the episode “Desperately Seeking Closure”. In 2014, she served as a correspondent for Years of Living Dangerously, a documentary show about climate change.[13]
Stahl has written two books, the first of which, Reporting Live, was published in 1999:
I had decided by August 1989, in my 48th year, that I had already had the best day of my life. … Then we went to Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas, Dian Fossey‘s gorillas in the mist. … After two and a half hours … there they were: two baby gorillas frolicking like any four-year-olds. We snapped and stared. We were right there, in their lives, in the middle of their open-air house. And then the silverback, the patriarch, seemed to welcome us, as three females kept grooming him. … We spent one hour in their world, watching them tumble and wrestle, nurse their babies, swing in the trees, forage for food—vines, leaves, berries— … so close that a female reached out to touch me. When I went to reciprocate, the guide hit my arm with a stick. “Non, madame. C’est inderdit.” … What I decided that day with the gorillas in Rwanda was that the best day of your life may not have happened yet. No matter what you think.[14]
Her second book, Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting, which chronicles her own experiences with her grandchildren, was published in 2016.
Lesley Stahl hosting the 67th Annual Peabody Awards
She received a Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa from Colgate University in 2008[15] and a Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa from Loyola College in Maryland in 2008.
Lesley Stahl was a founding member in 2008, along with Liz Smith, Mary Wells Lawrence, and Joni Evans, of wowOwow.com, a website for “women over 40” to talk about culture, politics, and gossip.[16] By the end of 2010 it had merged into PureWow, a Web site aimed at younger women.
Story 4: Kids, What Time Is It? It is Howdy Dowdy Time — Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring — Tone Deaf Elizabeth Warren aka Princess Pocahontas is 99.999% White — Killing Identity Politics — Who Cares? — Lying Lunatic Leftist Losers — Videos —
Trump reacts to Elizabeth Warren releasing DNA test results
Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.
Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention.
The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.
He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
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Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
Smith was born in the late 1700s. She identified as white in historical documents, though at the time Indians faced discrimination, and Smith would have had strong incentives to call herself white if possible.
The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren’s critics. If O.C. Sarah Smith were fully Native American, that would make Warren up to 1/32nd native. But the generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. The report notes there could be missed ancestors.
Undergoing the test and releasing the results reveal how seriously Warren is taking the attacks from Trump, who has been able to effectively caricature and diminish his national foes via nicknames and conspiracy theories. Trump pushed then President Barack Obama into releasing the long form of his birth certificate to prove what most knew was already true: He was born in America.
The move is also another indication of how seriously Warren is considering running for president. And while it’s unclear whether the test will convince Trump and his die-hard supporters, Warren will be able to point to it with other, more open-minded voters. Once Obama produced his birth certificate in 2011, the racist “birther’’ movement, which thrived on the Internet and was stoked by Trump, largely evaporated.
Warren is seeking reelection in Massachusetts and is expected to easily win a second term. She has said that she will take a “hard look” at running for the Democratic nomination for president once the midterm elections are over. She’s already released 10 years worth of her tax returns and made her personnel files available to The Boston Globe, showing that ethnicity was not a factor in her rise in law.
By taking a DNA test, Warren is showing that if she runs for president, she plans to be a very different candidate than Hillary Clinton was. The 2016 Democratic nominee for president chafed at releasing personal information and was dogged throughout her campaign by her use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides. The data from that test was sent to Bustamante and his team for analysis. Warren received the report last week.
Warren didn’t use a commercial service, but Bustamante is on the scientific advisory board for Ancestry, which provides commercial DNA tests. He’s also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.
Warren said she was committed to releasing the report regardless of the results. However, Warren’s aides would not say whether she or any of her three siblings had previously done a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance about Bustamante’s analysis.
There were five parts of Warren’s DNA that signaled she had a Native American ancestor, according to the report. The largest piece of Native American DNA was found on her 10th chromosome, according to the report. Each human has 23 pairs of chromosomes.
“It really stood out,” said Bustamante in an interview. “We found five segments, and that long segment was pretty significant. It tells us about one ancestor, and we can’t rule out more ancestors.”
He added: “We are confident it is not an error.”
Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.
“The tribes have felt they have been exploited,” explained Lawrence Brody, a senior investigator with the Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The amount of genetic data that is available from Native Americans is sparse.”
To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That’s because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago and settled in what’s now America but also migrated further south. His report explained that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed “for maximal accuracy.”
Bustamante said he can tease out the markers that these South Americans would have in common with Native Americans on the North American continent.
Bustamante also compared Warren’s DNA to white populations in Utah and Great Britain to determine if the amounts of Native American markers in Warren’s sample were significant or just background noise.
Warren has 12 times more Native American blood than a white person from Great Britain and 10 times more than a white person from Utah, the report found.
Warren has come under blistering attacks from Trump for making claims of Native American heritage. His taunts of her as “Pocahontas” have become part of his standard rally monologue.
Earlier this month at rally in Iowa, Trump said he hoped Warren would run for president because it would allow him to find out “whether or not she has Indian blood.”
In July, during a rally in Montana, Trump imagined debating Warren during the 2020 presidential election and said that he’d try to make her take a DNA test by throwing it at her onstage. “We have to do it gently, because we’re in the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very gentle,” Trump said.
He also offered to provide $1 million to her charity of choice if she takes the test.
Warren’s Senate campaign has used clips from Trump and his spokeswoman Sarah Sanders attacking her for making the Native American claims in a slickly produced video it planned to distribute Monday morning. It includes a scene of Warren and her three older brothers discussing the issue.
There’s even footage of Warren calling Bustamante to get the results of her DNA test.
“The president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say?” asks Warren, sitting at a desk by behind a Macintosh laptop.
“The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree,” replies Bustamante, who was also captured on film by Warren’s team.
Bustamante is considered one of the leading DNA analysts in the world. When several DNA experts were asked by the Globe, earlier this year, how they’d recommend Warren go about taking a DNA test, his name came up repeatedly.
He has never donated to Warren’s campaigns. (A different California professor with the same name donated $200 to Obama in 2008, federal records show.)
Questions over Warren’s ethnicity have dogged her since her 2012 Senate campaign. That’s when GOP operatives found archival stories in the Harvard Crimson of a Harvard Law School spokesman referring to her as a Native American as a way to show the school had a diverse faculty.
During her academic career as a law professor, she had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995. (She was a visiting professor at Harvard during the 1992-1993 academic year.)
In an interview with the Globe published last month, Warren explained that she identified herself as Native American in the late 1980s and early 1990s as many of the matriarchs of her family were dying and she began to feel that her family stories and history were becoming lost.
Ivy League universities, like the ones where Warren taught, were under great pressure to show they had diverse staffs.
The University of Pennsylvania filled out a document explaining why it hired a white woman over minority candidates — clear evidence it didn’t view her as a Native American addition. And the Globe interviewed 31 Harvard Law School faculty members who voted on her appointment there, and all said her heritage was not a factor.
Correction: Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 6th to 10th generation relative. The generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.
Besides Howdy Doody, the other characters in this show are:
Heidi Doody – Introduced as a stranger who saved Buffalo Bob’s life in Africa, she was adopted as Howdy’s sister.
Phineas T. Bluster – The resident skinflint, mayor of Doodyville and nemesis of Howdy; one of the Bluster triplets.
Petey Bluster – Phineas’s nephew.
Don Jose Bluster – The South American Bluster brother.
Hector Hamhock Bluster – A rarely seen Bluster brother
Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring – Introduced as a puppet, then played by actress Judy Tyler, who had appeared opposite Elvis Presley in the 1957 film Jailhouse Rock. After she was killed in a car accident on July 3, 1957, at the age of 24, the character was portrayed by a marionette.
Dilly Dally – Howdy’s naive boyhood friend.
Inspector John J. Fadoozle – “America’s No. 1 private eye” whose character was revealed as the mysterious “Mr. X” who used the pseudonym to run against Howdy for the office of President of All the Boys and Girls of America; children could vote by using ballots that were attached to the wrappers of loaves of Wonder Bread, a major sponsor of the show.
Chief Thunderthud and Chief Featherman – Two of several Native American characters used to emphasize the show’s western theme.
J. Cornelius Cobb – The shopkeeper played by Nick Nicholson, who had a strong dislike for clowns.
Sandra the Witch
Capt. Windy Scuttlebut
Flub-a-Dub – A combination of eight animals. He had a duck‘s bill, a cat‘s whiskers, a spaniel‘s ears, a giraffe‘s neck, a dachshund‘s body, a seal‘s flippers, a pig‘s tail, and an elephant‘s memory.
If the Massachusetts senator is now a person of color then the term has no meaning.
By James Freeman
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) arrives for a procedural vote on the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on October 5.PHOTO: MARY F. CALVERT/REUTERS
“Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Heritage” is the title of a new campaign video promoting the senior senator from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren, a former Harvard law professor, is claiming vindication after presenting the results of a genetic test which appears to show she likely has more of a claim to Native American heritage—but perhaps less of a claim—than the average white person in the United States.
The likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has been trying to find some way to respond to questions about her longtime claim of Native American heritage given that her family doesn’t belong to a tribe.
“Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides,” says a report today by Annie Linskey in the Boston Globe. But the senator sought a judgment on the results from Carlos Bustamante, a professor of biomedical data science at Stanford. Writes Ms. Linskey:
Warren didn’t use a commercial service, but Bustamante is on the scientific advisory board for Ancestry, which provides commercial DNA tests. He’s also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.
Warren said she was committed to releasing the report regardless of the results. However, Warren’s aides would not say whether she or any of her three siblings had previously done a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance about Bustamante’s analysis.
This column doesn’t find it odd that the senator didn’t want to rely on analysis performed by a commercial firm given her hostility to commerce generally. In any case here’s Professor Bustamante’s conclusion after studying the Warren test results:
While the vast majority of the individual’s ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago.
This suggests that the senator is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American. A 2014 news account seems to provide useful context. “In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people,” reported Carl Zimmer in the New York Times. Mr. Zimmer added:
The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.
These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the resarchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin.
At least according to the report from Professor Bustamante, it’s possible that Sen. Warren has far less than one percent Native American ancestry, and that her genetic makeup is perhaps similar to that of the average white person in the U.S. Could this create a problem for the senator both among those who have never claimed minority status and those who believe they clearly deserve it? Ms. Warren’s Senate re-election campaign is now rolling out testimonials from academic colleagues who say she never benefited from her identification as a Native American. The Boston Globe’s Ms. Linskey has previously reported on Ms. Warren’s various racial claims:
In 1984, she contributed five recipes to a Native American cookbook entitled “Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes From Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.” In the book, which was edited by her cousin and unearthed during her 2012 campaign by the Boston Herald, her name is listed as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”
Warren also listed herself as a minority in a legal directory published by the Association of American Law Schools from 1986 to 1995. She’s never provided a clear answer on why she stopped self-identifying.
She was also listed as a Native American in federal forms filed by the law schools at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania where she worked.
And in 1996, as Harvard Law School was being criticized for lacking diversity, a spokesman for the law school told the Harvard Crimson that Warren was Native American.
Given the Bustamante analysis, Ms. Warren might have chosen to acknowledge that her claims of minority status were a stretch. But she’s instead decided to present it as vindication, even demanding on Twitter that the President donate $1 million to something called the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
At a speech in July, Mr. Trump discussed the possibility of debating Sen. Warren in the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump said that “in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims she’s of Indian heritage“ he would toss a DNA testing kit her way and say, “I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.”
One could argue that the President didn’t actually make the offer but instead described a hypothetical scenario. Yet by demanding a Trump payment Sen. Warren clearly seems to be asserting that she is “an Indian.”
Before facing President Trump in a 2020 debate, Sen. Warren will first need to win over the Democrats who vote in presidential primaries. If these voters accept her as a Native American then logically it suggests that most if not all Americans can also claim to be members of groups that have historically suffered discrimination. We’re all minorities now?
This column thinks it would be wonderful if politicians decided to stop separating Americans by race but doubts Ms. Warren can sell this to Democratic party activists.
Pocahontas (born Matoaka, known as Amonute, c. 1596 – March 1617) was a Native American[2][3][4] woman notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief[2] of a network of tributary tribal nations in the Tsenacommacah, encompassing the Tidewater region of Virginia. In a well-known historical anecdote, she saved the life of a captive of the Native Americans, the Englishman John Smith, in 1607 by placing her head upon his own when her father raised his war club to execute him. Many historians doubt the veracity of this story.[5][6]
Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom by the English during Anglo-Indian hostilities in 1613. During her captivity, she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. When the opportunity arose for her to return to her people, she chose to remain with the English. In April 1614, at the age of 17, she married tobacco planter John Rolfe, and in January 1615, she bore their son, Thomas Rolfe.[1]
In 1616, the Rolfes travelled to London. Pocahontas was presented to English society as an example of the “civilized savage” in hopes of stimulating investment in the Jamestown settlement. She became something of a celebrity, was elegantly fêted, and attended a masque at Whitehall Palace. In 1617, the Rolfes set sail for Virginia, but Pocahontas died at Gravesend of unknown causes, aged 20 or 21. She was buried in St George’s Church, Gravesend in England, but her grave’s exact location is unknown, as the church has been rebuilt.[1]
Numerous places, landmarks, and products in the United States have been named after Pocahontas. Her story has been romanticized over the years, and she is a subject of art, literature, and film. Many famous people have claimed to be among her descendants through her son, including members of the First Families of Virginia, First LadyEdith Wilson, American Western actor Glenn Strange, Las Vegas performer Wayne Newton, and astronomer Percival Lowell.[7]
Early life
Pocahontas’s birth year is unknown, but some historians estimate it to have been around 1596.[1] In A True Relation of Virginia (1608), Smith described the Pocahontas he met in the spring of 1608 as “a child of ten years old”.[8] In a 1616 letter, he again described her as she was in 1608, but this time as “a child of twelve or thirteen years of age”.[9]
Pocahontas was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, paramount chief of Tsenacommacah, an alliance of about 30 Algonquian-speaking groups and petty chiefdoms in Tidewater, Virginia.[10] Her mother’s name and origins are unknown but she was probably of lowly status. The colonist Henry Spelman, who had lived among the Powhatan as an interpreter, noted that when one of the paramount chief’s many wives gave birth to a child, the mother was returned to her place of origin, to be supported there by the paramount chief until she found another husband.[11] In the traditional histories of the Powhatan, Pocahontas’s mother died in childbirth.[12][13] An oral history of the Mattaponi Reservation Peoples, who are descendants of the Powhatan, claims that Pocahontas’s mother was first wife of Powhatan, and that Pocahontas was named after her.[14]
Pocahontas’s childhood was probably little different from that of most girls who lived in Tsenacommacah. She would have learned how to perform what was considered women’s work: foraging for food and firewood, farming, and searching for the plant materials used in building thatched houses.[15] As she grew older, she would have helped other members of Powhatan’s household with preparations for large feasts.[13] Serving feasts, such as the one presented to John Smith after his capture, was a regular obligation of the Mamanatowick, or paramount chief.[16]
Names
At the time Pocahontas was born, it was common for Powhatan Native Americans to be given several personal names, have more than one name at the same time, have secret names that only a select few knew, and to change their names on important occasions. Bestowed at different times, the names carried different meanings and might be used in different contexts.[17] Pocahontas was no different. Early in her life, she was given a secret name, Matoaka, but later she was also known as Amonute. Matoaka means “Bright Stream Between the Hills”; Amonute has not been translated.[18][19]
According to the colonist William Strachey, “Pocahontas” was a childhood nickname that probably referred to her frolicsome nature; it meant “little wanton”;[20] some interpret the meaning as “playful one”.[16] The 18th-century historian William Stith claimed that “her real name, it seems, was originally Matoax, which the Indians carefully concealed from the English and changed it to Pocahontas, out of a superstitious fear, lest they, by the knowledge of her true name, should be enabled to do her some hurt.”[21] According to the anthropologist Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas “revealed [her secret name] to the English only after she had taken another religious—baptismal—name, Rebecca”.[22]
Pocahontas’s Christian name, Rebecca, may have been a symbolic gesture to Rebecca of the Book of Genesis who, as the mother of Jacob and Esau, was the mother of two “nations”, or distinct peoples. Pocahontas, as a Powhatan marrying an Englishman, may have been seen by herself and her contemporaries as also potentially a matriarchal figure of two distinct peoples.[23]
Title and status
Pocahontas has been considered in popular culture a princess. In 1841, William Watson Waldron of Trinity College, Dublin, in Ireland, published Pocahontas, American Princess: and Other Poems, calling her “the beloved and only surviving daughter of the king”.[24]Pocahontas was her father’s “delight and darling”, according to the colonist Captain Ralph Hamor[25] but she was not in line to inherit a position as a weroance, subchief, or mamanatowick (paramount chief). Instead, Powhatan’s brothers, sisters, and his sisters’ children all stood in line to succeed him.[26] In his A Map of Virginia John Smith explained how matrilineal inheritance worked among the Powhatan:
His [Powhatan’s] kingdom descendeth not to his sonnes nor children: but first to his brethren, whereof he hath three namely Opitchapan, Opechanncanough, and Catataugh; and after their decease to his sisters. First to the eldest sister, then to the rest: and after them to the heires male and female of the eldest sister; but never to the heires of the males.
Interactions with the English
John Smith
In this chromolithograph credited to the New England Chromo. Lith. Company, around 1870, Pocahontas saves the life of John Smith. The scene is idealized and relies on stereotypes of Native Americans rather than reliable information about the particulars of this historical moment. There are no mountains in Tidewater Virginia, for example, and the Powhatans lived not in tipis but in thatched houses. And the scene that Smith famously described in his Generall Historie (1624) did not take place outdoors but in a longhouse.
Pocahontas is most famously linked to the English colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with a hundred other settlers in April 1607, at the behest of the London Company. After building a fort on a marshy peninsula poking out into the James River, the Englishmen had numerous encounters over the next several months with the people of Tsenacommacah, some of them friendly, some hostile. Then, in December 1607, while exploring on the Chickahominy River, Smith was captured by a hunting party led by Powhatan’s younger brother (or close relative) Opechancanough and brought to Powhatan’s capital at Werowocomoco. In his 1608 account, Smith describes a great feast followed by a long talk with Powhatan. He does not mention Pocahontas in relation to his capture, and claims that they first met some months later.[27][28] Huber understands the meeting of Smith and Powhatan as the latter’s attempt to bring Smith, and so the English, into his chiefdom: Powhatan offered Smith rule of the town of Capahosic, which was close to Powhatan’s capital at Werowocomoco. The paramount chief thus hoped to keep Smith and his men “nearby and better under control”.[29]
In 1616, Smith wrote a letter to Queen Anne in anticipation of Pocahontas’s visit to England. In this new account, his capture included the threat of his own death: “at the minute of my execution”, he wrote, “she [Pocahontas] hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”[9] In his 1624 Generall Historie, published long after the death of Pocahontas, Smith expanded the story. Writing about himself in the third person, he explained that after he was captured and taken to the paramount chief, “two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death …”[30]
In a later publication, True Travels (1630), Smith claimed a similar rescue by another young girl in 1602, following his capture by Turks in Hungary; the story resembles a popular contemporary type of moral tale, in which a Christian hero maintains his faith despite threats and intimidation. Karen Ordahl Kupperman suggests that Smith used such details to embroider his first account, thus producing a more dramatic, second account of his encounter with Pocahontas as a heroine worthy of reception by Queen Anne. Its later revision and publication was probably an attempt to raise his own stock and reputation; he had long since fallen from favor with the London Company, which had funded the Jamestown enterprise.[31] Anthropologist Frederic W. Gleach, drawing on substantial ethnohistory, suggests that Smith’s second account, while substantially accurate, represents his misunderstanding of a three-stage ritual intended to adopt Smith, as representative of the English colony, into the confederacy;[32][33] but not all writers are convinced, some suggesting the absence of certain corroborating evidence.[34]
Early histories did establish that Pocahontas befriended Smith and the Jamestown colony. Pocahontas often went to the settlement and played games with the boys there.[35] When the colonists were starving, “every once in four or five days, Pocahontas with her attendants brought him [Smith] so much provision that saved many of their lives that else for all this had starved with hunger”.[36] As the colonists expanded their settlement further, the Powhatan felt their lands were threatened, and conflicts arose again.
In late 1609, an injury from a gunpowder explosion forced Smith to return to England for medical care. The English told the Powhatans that Smith was dead. Pocahontas believed that account and hence stopped visiting Jamestown. Much later, she learned that he was living in England when she traveled there with her husband, John Rolfe.[37]
Capture
In his engraving The abduction of Pocahontas (1619), Johann Theodor de Bry depicts a full narrative. Starting in the lower left, Pocahontas (centre) is deceived by the weroance Iopassus, who holds as bait a copper kettle, and his wife, who pretends to cry. At centre right, Pocahontas is put on the boat and feasted. In the background, the action moves from the Potomac to the York River, where negotiations for a hostage trade fail and the English attack and burn a Native American village.[38]
Pocahontas’s capture occurred in the context of the First Anglo-Powhatan War, a conflict between the Jamestown settlers and the Native Americans that began late in the summer of 1609.[39] In the first years of war, the English took control of the James River, both at its mouth and at the falls. Captain Samuel Argall, in the meantime, pursued contacts with Native American groups in the northern portion of Powhatan’s paramount chiefdom. The Patawomecks, who lived on the Potomac River, were not always loyal to Powhatan, and living with them was a young English interpreter named Henry Spelman. In March 1613, Argall learned that Pocahontas was visiting the Patawomeck village of Passapatanzy and living under the protection of the Weroance Iopassus (also known as Japazaws).[40]
With Spelman’s help translating, Argall pressured Iopassus to assist in Pocahontas’s capture by promising an alliance with the English against the Powhatans.[40] They tricked Pocahontas into boarding Argall’s ship and held her for ransom, demanding the release of English prisoners held by her father, along with various stolen weapons and tools.[41] Powhatan returned the prisoners but failed to satisfy the colonists with the number of weapons and tools he returned. A long standoff ensued, during which the English kept Pocahontas captive.
During the yearlong wait, she was held at Henricus, in modern-day Chesterfield County, Virginia. Little is known about her life there, although colonist Ralph Hamor wrote that she received “extraordinary courteous usage”.[42]Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow, in a 2007 book, refers to an oral tradition that during this time, Pocahontas was raped; according to Helen Rountree, “Other historians have disputed that such oral tradition survived and instead argue that any mistreatment of Pocahontas would have gone against the interests of the English in their negotiations with Powhatan. A truce had been called, the Indians still far outnumbered the English, and the colonists feared retaliation.”[43]
In March 1614, the standoff built up to a violent confrontation between hundreds of English and Powhatan men on the Pamunkey River. At Powhatan’s capital of Matchcot, the English encountered a group of senior Native American leaders. The English allowed Pocahontas to talk to her countrymen. When Powhatan arrived, Pocahontas reportedly rebuked him for valuing her “less than old swords, pieces, or axes”, and said that she preferred to live with the English, “who loved her”.[45]
Possible first marriage
Current Mattaponi tradition holds that Pocahontas’s first husband was Kocoum, brother of the Patawomeck weroance Japazaws, and that Kocoum was killed by the English after his wife’s capture in 1613.[46] Today’s Patawomecks believe that Pocahontas and Kocoum had a daughter, Ka-Okee, who was raised by the Patawomecks after her father’s death and her mother’s abduction.[47]
Kocoum’s actual identity, location, and even existence have been widely debated among scholars for centuries, with several historians[who?] arguing that the only mention of a “Kocoum” in any English document is taken from a brief statement written about 1616 by William Strachey in England that Pocahontas had been living married to a “private captaine called Kocoum” for two years.[48] Since 1614 is certainly when she married John Rolfe, and no other records even hint at any previous husband, it has accordingly been suggested that when Strachey wrote of the “private captaine called Kocoum” he was mistakenly referring to Rolfe himself, with the reference being later misunderstood as one of Powhatan’s officers.[49] There was a Powhatan military rank called kokoraws, sometimes translated “captain”, and scholars have suggested[attribution needed] that Strachey could have meant this as one of his famously divergent spellings, as a gloss to “Captayne”. In addition, the date of Strachey’s original statement has been widely disputed by numerous authors attempting either to argue or refute that Pocahontas had been previously married. If there was such a marriage and Kocoum was not murdered, it likely ended, according to Powhatan custom, when Pocahontas was captured.[50]
During her stay in Henricus, Pocahontas met John Rolfe. Rolfe’s English-born wife, Sarah Hacker, and child, Bermuda Rolfe, had died on the way to Virginia after the wreck of the ship “Sea Venture” on the Summer Isles, also known as Bermuda. Rolfe established a Virginia plantation, Varina Farms, where he successfully cultivated a new strain of tobacco. He was a pious man and agonized over the potential moral repercussions of marrying a heathen, though in fact Pocahontas had by this time accepted the Anglican faith and taken the baptismal name Rebecca. In a long letter to the governor requesting permission to wed her, he expressed his love for Pocahontas and his belief that he would be saving her soul. He wrote that he was
motivated not by the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation … namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout.[51]
Pocahontas’s feelings for Rolfe are unknown. They were married on April 5, 1614, by chaplain Richard Buck, probably at Jamestown. For two years they lived at Varina Farms, across the James River from Henricus. Their son, Thomas, was born on January 30, 1615.[52]
Their marriage created a climate of peace between the Jamestown colonists and Powhatan’s tribes; it endured for eight years as the “Peace of Pocahontas.”[53] In 1615, Ralph Hamor wrote, “Since the wedding we have had friendly commerce and trade not only with Powhatan but also with his subjects round about us.”[54]
England
The Sedgeford Hall Portrait, once thought to represent Pocahontas and Thomas Rolfe, is now believed to actually depict the wife (Pe-o-ka) and son of Osceola, Seminole Indian Chief.[55]
The Virginia Company of London had long seen one of its primary goals as the conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. With the conversion of Pocahontas and her marriage to an Englishman – all of which helped bring an end to the First Anglo-Powhatan War – the company saw an opportunity to promote investment. The company decided to bring Pocahontas to England as a symbol of the tamed New World “savage” and the success of the Virginia colony.[56] In 1616, the Rolfes travelled to England, arriving at the port of Plymouth on June 12.[57] They journeyed to London by coach, accompanied by a group of about eleven other Powhatans, including a holy man named Tomocomo.[58] John Smith was living in London at the time and while Pocahontas was in Plymouth, she learned he was still alive.[59] Smith did not meet Pocahontas, but wrote to Queen Anne, the wife of King James, urging that Pocahontas be treated with respect as a royal visitor. He suggested that if she were treated badly, her “present love to us and Christianity might turn to … scorn and fury”, and England might lose the chance to “rightly have a Kingdom by her means”.[9]
Pocahontas was entertained at various social gatherings. On January 5, 1617, she and Tomocomo were brought before the king at the old Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall at a performance of Ben Jonson‘s masqueThe Vision of Delight. According to Smith, King James was so unprepossessing that neither Pocahontas nor Tomocomo realized whom they had met until it was explained to them afterward.[59]
Although Pocahontas was not a princess in Powhatan culture, the Virginia Company nevertheless presented her as one to the English public. The inscription on a 1616 engraving of Pocahontas, made for the company, reads: “MATOAKA ALS REBECCA FILIA POTENTISS : PRINC : POWHATANI IMP:VIRGINIÆ”, which means: “Matoaka, alias Rebecca, daughter of the most powerful prince of the Powhatan Empire of Virginia”. Many English at this time recognized Powhatan as the ruler of an empire, and presumably accorded to his daughter what they considered appropriate status. Smith’s letter to Queen Anne refers to “Powhatan their chief King”.[9] Cleric and travel writer Samuel Purchas recalled meeting Pocahontas in London, noting that she impressed those she met because she “carried her selfe as the daughter of a king”.[60] When he met her again in London, Smith referred to Pocahontas deferentially as a “Kings daughter”.[61]
Pocahontas was apparently treated well in London. At the masque, her seats were described as “well placed”,[62] and, according to Purchas, John King, Bishop of London, “entertained her with festival state and pomp beyond what I have seen in his greate hospitalitie afforded to other ladies”.[63]
Not all the English were so impressed. According to Helen C. Rountree, “there is no contemporary evidence to suggest … that Pocahontas was regarded [in England] as anything like royalty”. Rather, she was considered to be something of a curiosity and, according to one observer, she was merely “the Virginian woman”.[26]
Pocahontas and Rolfe lived in the suburb of Brentford, Middlesex, for some time, as well as at Rolfe’s family home at Heacham Hall, Heacham, Norfolk. In early 1617, Smith met the couple at a social gathering and later wrote that when Pocahontas saw him, “without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented”, and was left alone for two or three hours. Later, they spoke more; Smith’s record of what she said to him is fragmentary and enigmatic. She reminded him of the “courtesies she had done”, saying, “you did promise Powhatan what was yours would be his, and he the like to you”. She then discomfited him by calling him “father”, explaining Smith had called Powhatan “father” when a stranger in Virginia, “and by the same reason so must I do you”. Smith did not accept this form of address because, he wrote, Pocahontas outranked him as “a King’s daughter”. Pocahontas then, “with a well-set countenance”, said:
Were you not afraid to come into my father’s country and caused fear in him and all his people (but me) and fear you here I should call you “father”? I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman.[59]
Finally, Pocahontas told Smith that she and her fellow Native Americans had thought him dead, but her father had told Tomocomo to seek him “because your countrymen will lie much”.[59]
In March 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas boarded a ship to return to Virginia; the ship had sailed only as far as Gravesend on the river Thames when Pocahontas became gravely ill.[64] She was taken ashore and died at the approximate age of 21. It is not known what caused her death, but theories range from pneumonia, smallpox, and tuberculosis to her having been poisoned.[65] According to Rolfe, she died saying, “all must die, but tis enough that her child liveth”.[66]
Pocahontas’s funeral took place on March 21, 1617, in the parish of Saint George’s, Gravesend.[67] Her grave is thought to be underneath the church’s chancel, though since that church was destroyed in a fire in 1727, its exact site is unknown.[68] Her memory is honored with a life-size bronze statue at St. George’s Church by William Ordway Partridge.[69]
Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe, had one child, Thomas Rolfe, who was born in January 1615. The following year, Thomas’ parents travelled to London.
In 1907, Pocahontas became the first Native American to be honored on a US stamp.[71] She was a member of the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History in 2000.[72]
After her death, increasingly fanciful and romanticized representations of Pocahontas were produced, in which Pocahontas and Smith were romantically involved. Contemporary sources substantiate claims of their friendship, not romance.[53] The first claim of their romantic involvement was in John Davis’ Travels in the United States of America (1803)[75]
On stage
Miss Pocahontas (Broadway musical) – Lyric Theatre, New York City – Oct 28, 1907.
Pocahontas (ballet) by Elliot Carter, Jr. – Martin Beck Theatre, New York City – May 24, 1939
Pocahontas (musical) by Kermit Goell – Lyric Theatre (West End, London) – November 14, 1963
The Jamestown Exposition, held in Norfolk from April 26 to December 1, 1907, celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in 1607 as the first permanent British colony in America. In conjunction with the Exposition, three commemorative postage stamps were issued. The 5-cent portrays Pocahontas, modelled from Simon van de Passe‘s 1616 engraving. About 8 million were issued.[76]
Pocahontas (1995), a Walt Disney Company animated feature which presents a fictional romantic affair between Pocahontas and John Smith, in which Pocahontas teaches Smith respect for nature
Davis, John (1803). Travels in the United States of America.[75]
In music
“Fever” by Peggy Lee describes an affair between Pocahontas and John Smith
Neil Young‘s song “Pocahontas“, on his album Rust Never Sleeps (1979), is based on Strachey’s account and expresses the speaker’s desire to sleep with her “as part of his romantic yearning to return to a preconquest, natural world”.[79]
A woman (Pocahontas) standing half draped in fur skin tunic holding a cross in right hand, leash in left hand and a reclining fawn.
In visual art
The only contemporary portrait of Pocahontas is Simon van de Passe‘s engraving of 1616. In this portrait, he tried to portray her Virginia-Native American features.[citation needed]
The U.S. federal budget deficit rose in fiscal 2018 to the highest level in six years as spending climbed, the Trump administration said Monday.
The deficit jumped to $779 billion, $113 billion or 17 percent higher than the previous fiscal period, according to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. It was larger than any year since 2012, when it topped $1 trillion. The budget shortfall rose to 3.9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
The deficit increased by $70 billion less than anticipated in a report published in July, according to the two officials.
Federal revenue rose only slightly, by $14 billion after Republicans chopped tax rates for corporations and most individuals. Outlays climbed by $127 billion, or 3.2 percent. A spike in defense spending, as well as increases for Medicaid, Social Security and disaster relief, contributed to the increase.
Trump: We don’t have to go as fast on interest rates
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have pledged their commitment to fiscal discipline, despite the fact that they passed a tax law projected to dramatically expand budget deficits last year and then authorized a boost in spending. In a statement, Mulvaney claimed that “America’s booming economy will create increased government revenues,” a point the GOP has repeatedly argued in favor of its tax plan.
“But this fiscal picture is a blunt warning to Congress of the dire consequences of irresponsible and unnecessary spending,” he added. “Going forward, President Trump and this Administration will continue to work with Congress to make the difficult choices needed to bring fiscal restraint, which, when matched with increasing revenue, will reduce our deficit.”
Several independent analyses have estimated the GOP tax plan will cause budget deficits to grow dramatically over time, even after economic growth is taken into account.
The Trump administration has proposed dramatic cuts to spending in several government agencies to reduce deficits. Even many Republicans have rejected the severity of proposed budget cuts.
The Treasury noted that receipts related to “excise, customs and other” jumped to $35 billion in September 2018, a 35 percent increase over the prior-year period. It is unclear how much of that revenue relates to Trump’s tariffs on imports from major trading partners.
Story 1: Pastor Andrew Brunson After Two Years Held By Turkey For Alledgedly Abetting Terrorist Groups and Espionage, Convicted, Sentence Commuted and Freed To Go Home — Videos —
Special Report w/ Bret Baier 10/12/18 | Breaking Fox News Today | October 12, 2018
Turkish court releases Pastor Brunson from house arrest
Turkish court frees American pastor Andrew Brunson
Turkey: US pastor Andrew Brunson returns to house after release by court
US pastor Andrew Brunson leaves Turkey
Trump says freed Christian pastor Andrew Brunson could meet with him in the Oval Office as soon as TOMORROW after Turkish court freed him following ‘terrorism’ arrest
Andrew Brunson faced life in jail if convicted of terror charges and espionage
The pastor, originally from North Carolina, had lived in Turkey for 20 years
President Donald Trump has said on Twitter that Turkey must free Brunson, 50
Trump’s tariff on Turkish steel and aluminum imports triggered a currency crisis
President now says Brunson will meet him in the Oval Office, perhaps Saturday
He insisted no deal was struck for Brunson’s release
PUBLISHED: 04:38 EDT, 12 October 2018 | UPDATED: 01:02 EDT, 13 October 2018
President Donald Trump will soon meet with American pastor Andrew Brunson, who a Turkish court released on Friday despite convicting him on a terrorism charge and sentencing him to three years in jail. The court declared that he should walk free since he has already spent more than two years on house arrest.
Traveling in Ohio, President Donald Trump told reporters that it was ‘good news’ and he understands that Brunson is ‘in good shape.’ Trump has long pressed Turkey for the pastor’s release.
‘He’s going to be coming to the Oval Office, most likely on Saturday,’ the president said in Ohio. ‘But we’re very honored to have him back here with us. He suffered greatly but we’re very appreciative of a lot of people, a lot of people.’
US pastor Brunson arrives at Adnan Menderes airport in Izmir, after being freed
US pastor Andrew Craig Brunson (down L), is escorted to his home in Izmir, Turkey, before heading to the airport to board a US military plane to begin his journey back to the United States after a court freed him
‘We went through a system and we got him out. We tried to get him out for a long time. This has nothing to do with anything and there’s no deal there at all, there’s no deal,’ he insisted.
The White House said it was still ‘deeply concerned about the continued detention of other United States citizens in Turkey and around the world, and urge the resolution of all these cases in a transparent and fair manner.’
The Turkish court’s decision to lift judicial controls meant that evangelical pastor Brunson, at the heart of a diplomatic spat between the two countries, can leave Turkey and return to the United States.
The trial of pastor Andrew Craig Brunson (pictured), which has huge implications for U.S.-Turkey relations, ended Friday with an order to release him – a move that allows him to leave the country
President Donald Trump told reporters in Ohio that Brunson will soon meet with him in the Oval Office
The White House said that despite the release of Brunson (shown in the back seat) it was still ‘deeply concerned about the continued detention of other United States citizens in Turkey and around the world, and urge the resolution of all these cases in a transparent and fair manner.’
Brunson’s arrest in 2016 sparked a diplomatic dispute between Turkey and the Trump administration, which had threatened new sanctions against the Erdogan government.
President Donald Trump tweeted – after international press reported the verdict – that he was ‘[w]orking very hard on Pastor Brunson!’
He later added in a second tweet: ‘My thoughts and prayers are with Pastor Brunson, and we hope to have him safely back home soon!’
And then a third hit Twitter: ‘PASTOR BRUNSON JUST RELEASED. WILL BE HOME SOON!’
Fahrettin Altun, communications director for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, insisted that Turkish courts are independent from governments, including Trump’s.
‘We would like to remind him once again that Turkey is a democratic country with the rule of law, and that Turkish courts are independent, he told reporters. ‘No body, authority, office or person may issue orders or instructions to the courts or to judges in the exercise of their powers.’
Pamela Brunson, 75, the mother of the pastor, was at her home in Black Mountain, a town in North Carolina near Asheville, when she learned of the news from a Reuters reporter calling about the court’s decision.
A U.S. embassy official escorted Norine Brunson, the wife of Andrew Brunson, before his trial in Izmir, Turkey, early Friday, October 12
US pastor Andrew Brunson (C) travels in a police vehicle escorted by Turkish police as he enters Aliaga Prison Court at Aliaga District in Izmir
‘They have?’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘Well, we were at an all-night prayer meeting during the trial and we got home and we fell asleep. We were up all night. Praise God! I’m so excited! Oh that’s wonderful! Thank you so much for letting us know. We’re so happy.’
She brought her husband, Ron, near the phone as the reporter read aloud some of a published Reuters report about the proceedings in Turkey.
‘We are overjoyed that God has answered the prayers of so many people around the world,’ she said.
In Turkey, witnesses said Brunson wept as the decision was announced. Before the judge’s ruling, the pastor told the court: ‘I am an innocent man. I love Jesus, I love Turkey.’
The fourth hearing of the case against Brunson took place in a prison complex near the western Turkish city of Izmir.
Brunson, an evangelical pastor accused of terror-related charges and espionage, arrived in a secured convoy before daybreak. He had faced up to 35 years in jail.
Brunson, 50, has lived in Turkey for more than two decades. He rejected the charges and strongly maintained his innocence.
President Donald Trump tweeted after international press reported Brunson’s release that he was ‘[w]orking very hard on Partor Brunson, later adding his ‘thoughts and prayers’ and a prediction that he will have a safe return to the United States
He is one of thousands caught up in the widespread government crackdown that followed a failed coup against the Turkish government in July 2016.
Prosecutors accuse Brunson of committing crimes on behalf of terror groups, linking him to outlawed Kurdish militants and a network led by a US-based Turkish cleric who is accused of orchestrating the coup attempt.
The U.S. maintained that he was being held unjustly, and repeatedly called for his release.
The new hearing came at a time of a new but growing alignment between the U.S. and Turkey over the suspected murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who lived in America and who is feared to have been killed inside the Gulf kingdom’s Istanbul consulate.
Turkish police sources have leaked information to a number of news outlets that the Turkish government believes that the Saudi Arabian government ordered Khashoggi’s murder.
Some commentators have suggested that in order to procure America intervention – particularly against the Saudis, who Trump considers a firm ally – Turkey should release all of its American hostages – starting with Pastor Brunson.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters Thursday that the US was hopeful he will soon go free, but said she was unaware of any agreement for his release.
A car carrying Norine Brunson, wife of pastor Andrew Brunson, arrives at the Aliaga Prison and Courthouse complex in Izmir
Turkish security officials stand outside a courthouse before a convoy with US pastor Andrew Brunson sitting inside a car arrives for his trial in Izmir
Norine Brunson wife of American pastor Andrew Brunson, departs for her husband’s court hearing. Brunson has been under house arrest in Izmir, Turkey while awaiting trial
President Trump has posted a number of tweets about Brunson’s case, demanding his release and threatening sanctions on Turkey
The pastor, who is originally from Black Mountain, North Carolina, was imprisoned for nearly two years – detained in October 2016 and formally arrested in December that year – before being placed under house arrest on July 25 for health reasons.
The court’s decision failed to improve tensions between the two NATO allies and Washington slapped sanctions on two Turkish officials and doubled tariff on Turkish steel and aluminum imports.
Those moves in August, coupled with concerns over the government’s economic management, helped trigger a Turkish currency crisis.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has resisted demands for Brunson’s release, insisting that the courts are independent.
But he had previously suggested a possible swap of Brunson and the Pennsylvania-resident Fethullah Gulen – the cleric accused of being behind the coup.
Turkish police officers stand near the residence of US pastor Andrew Brunson, who is being held under house arrest in Izmir
Official car of Charge d’Affaires of the U.S. Mission to Turkey Jeffrey M. Hovenier (not pictured) arrives to visit US pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been accused of abetting terrorist groups and supporting Fethullah Gulen, the cleric blamed for the failed coup attempt in 2016
A person involved in efforts to free Andrew Brunson say the 50-year-old pastor from North Carolina could be freed at his next court appearance on Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because officials had not yet reached a final agreement on the release and it could still fall through
Brunson led a small congregation in the Izmir Resurrection Church. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, with representatives monitoring the trial, has listed him as a ‘prisoner of conscience.’
William Devlin, an evangelical pastor from New York spoke to reporters outside the prison, saying hundreds of thousands of Christians are praying for Brunson’s release.
Brunson’s lawyer took the case to Turkey’s highest court last week seeking his release.
Story 2: Missing Journalist Presumed Killed By Saudi Government — Videos —
How the U.S. should respond to Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance
Turkey has video evidence of journalist’s killing in Saudi consulate, source says
What’s behind the Arab silence over Khashoggi fate? l Inside Story
Where is Jamal Khashoggi? Saudi Arabia denies abduction of missing journalist
Alleged Saudi Murder of Washington Post Columnist Prompts Calls to Halt U.S. Relations with Regime
Saudi Arabia’s missing princes – BBC Newsnight
How this young prince seized power in Saudi Arabia
‘He was interrogated, tortured and then murdered’: Arabic audio handed to the U.S. ‘proves Saudi critic WAS killed at consulate before 15-man assassination squad sneaked his body to consul general’s home’
The Washington Post reports journalist Jamal Khashoggi was beaten, killed and dismembered October 2 at the Saudi Arabia Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey
Audio recording reportedly lays out the story as voices are heard speaking Arabic but Turkish authorities are reluctant to release it
Sources believe the man who split his time between the US and Istanbul was victim of a plan to lure him to KSA for punishment after his critiques
John R. Bradley says Khashoggi ‘had dirt’ on Saudi ties to Osama bin Laden
He also says Crown Prince considered him a threat to his vision for the kingdom
PUBLISHED: 23:34 EDT, 11 October 2018 | UPDATED: 01:45 EDT, 12 October 2018
The government in Turkey claims to have evidence that US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi Arabia embassy after the critic of the country went to get a visa for his upcoming wedding.
He was captured on CCTV footage entering the building in Istanbul October 2 and a source has told The Washington Post he was killed and then dismembered by members of security.
‘The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,’ the insider told the newspaper that Khashoggi, 59, worked for.
‘You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic … You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered.’
The Washington Post reports journalist Jamal Khashoggi was beaten and killed October 2 at the Saudi Arabia Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey
1.14pm: Jamal Khashoggi, right, at Saudi consulate in Istanbul
One of them, a Mercedes Vito, stops for several hours at Saudi consul general’s residence
On the move – 3.08pm: Vehicles with diplomatic plates leave the Istanbul consulate
The audio reportedly hold the key to the ‘gruesome’ goings on that day but the Post reports the Turkish officials have been reluctant to release the recording as it may give away how they spy on foreign entities that are based there.
Recordings allegedly are very ‘persuasive’ in revealing the journalist was ‘beaten’ before various other details that have been shared with American officials took place. It’s not clear if the US side has listened directly to the alleged evidence however.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia denied the claims something happened to the man – who has been known to critique KSA – inside the consulate and state he left unharmed.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has recently been promoted as the member of the royal family that has pushed forward for one of the strictest Middle Eastern countries to take a more liberal approach to culture.
Khashoggi wasn’t necessarily supportive of his vision however.
However, the Post reports that even before the journalist’s plan to go to Saudi, some people connected to the US government believed Salman was involved in a plan to lure him back.
Mr Khashoggi was critical of some of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (above) policies
One official said there was no evidence to support that claim which included speculation the team of 15 men in the consulate planned to take him to Saudi Arabia initially and didn’t arrive with the intention to kill him.
The Washington Post was told the audio reveals the team went to the home of the Saudi consul general after the incident and staff were instructed to go home earlier than usual.
It is believed a car discreetly took the body of Khashoggi out of the consulate and to the property two hours after he went in.
The report also refers to at least one phone call from inside the consulate worth noting.
President Donald Trump had commented on the disappearance but stands by his decision to sell arms to the kingdom. The US leader had shared if he didn’t make the sale the wealthy country would simply buy from Russia instead.
Democrat Senator Bob Corker believes that as more of the story unfolds Trump may regret his decision.
‘I shared with him before this happened, please do not push to have any arms sales brought up right now because they will not pass. It will not happen. With this, I can assure it won’t happen for a while,’ he added to reporter Wednesday.
The Saudi ambassador in the United States is expected to answer to officials in the country when he returns from a trip, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said at a media briefing.
She said: ‘We have said to him that we expect information upon his return to the United States.’
Saudi Arabia targeted Jamal Khashoggi (pictured) because he knew about the kingdom’s ties to al-Qaeda in the run-up to 9/11, former colleague John R. Bradley (right) has said
Further evidence that Mr Khashoggi never left the consulate include screen grabs from a WhatsApp chat showing he used his phone minutes before entering the building – and then never again
Mr Khashoggi had been living in self-imposed exile in the US since late 2017, fearing arrest back home.
John R. Bradley – who is also a former colleague of Mr Khashoggi’s – has revealed exactly why the kingdom wants him dead.
In an article called for The Spectator, Bradley, who worked alongside Mr Khashoggi at Saudi daily Arab News, reveals Khashoggi ‘had dirt’ on the kingdom’s links to al-Qaeda before the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
Bradley believes the Saudis may have also worried that he had become a US asset.
Earlier this year, Mr Khashoggi had established a new political party in the US called Democracy for the Arab World.
But Mr Khashoggi’s recent rejection of the offer to return to Saudi Arabia as an advisor – a snub to the Crown Prince – may have been the final straw.
Friends of Mr Khashoggi told the Washington Post that for several months, senior Saudi officials were offering him protection, ‘even a high-level job working for the government’ if the critic returned to the kingdom – but he was sceptical of such offers.
He was the most well-known political pundit in the Arab world with more than two million followers on Twitter.
In his columns, Bradley says, he urged Crown Prince Mohammed to embrace the rise of political Islam, rather than western-style democracy.
Last month, he criticized the Saudi war in Yemen, which is closely identified with Crown Prince Mohammed.
‘Saudi Arabia must face the damage from the past three-plus years of war in Yemen,’ he wrote in the Washington Post on September 11.
Hatice Cengiz, 36, who waited outside for hours for her fiance Khashoggi to return, has spoken of being left in a ‘state of deep confusion and sadness’
Despite there being a number of visible CCTV cameras – ringed in red – Saudi Arabia claims none of them worked on the day in question
TIMELINE: WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN MR KHASHOGGI’S DISAPPEARANCE
OCTOBER 2
03:28: Gulf Stream IV private jet carrying suspected Saudi agents arrives at Istanbul airport.
05:05: The group checking into two hotels nearby to the Saudi consulate building.
12:13: Several diplomatic vehicles are filmed arriving at the consulate, allegedly carrying some of the Saudi agents.
13:06: Jamal Khashoggi is last seen on WhatsApp. He then hands his mobile to his fiancée Hatice Cengiz.
13:14: Khashoggi enters the consulate building.
13.24: A message is delivered to Khashoggi’s WhatsApp – but it is never read.
15:08: Vehicles leave the consulate and are filmed arriving at the nearby Saudi consul’s residence.
17:15: A second private jet carrying a number of suspected Saudi officials lands in Istanbul.
17:33: Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, is seen on CCTV waiting outside the consulate.
18:20: One of the private jets departs from Istanbul airport.
21:00: The final plane leaves Istanbul.
OCTOBER 3
The Washington Post, for whom Khashoggi writes opinion pieces, raises the alarm, saying Khashoggi has not been seen since he entered the consulate.
OCTOBER 4
After an initial period of silence, Saudi Arabia says Khashoggi had disappeared ‘after he left the consulate building’.
*All times in Istanbul time.
On Thursday, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee said sanctions would have to be imposed at the ‘highest levels’ of the Saudi government if it were found that the government was behind the disappearance and reported death of Mr Khashoggi.
It comes as Turkish investigators prepared to enter the Saudi consulate in Istanbul where he was last seen.
‘If it turns out to be what we all think it is today but don’t know, there will have to be significant sanctions placed at the highest levels,’ Republican Senator Bob Corker told reporters at the US Capitol.
Corker added: ‘You can´t go around killing journalists.’
Global pressure has mounted on Saudi Arabia, a close US ally, over the whereabouts of Mr Khashoggi, who entered the consulate to get documents for his planned marriage last week.
His Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, who was waiting outside, said he never re-appeared.
‘I have to find out what happened … and we’re probably getting closer than you might think,’ President Trump said in an interview on Fox & Friends.
She also shared her heart-break in an opinion piece for the Post.
‘We were in the middle of making wedding plans, life plans. After the consulate, we were going to buy appliances for our new home and set a date. All we needed was a piece of paper,’ she wrote. ‘Jamal is a valuable person, an exemplary thinker and a courageous man who has been fighting for his principles. I don’t know how I can keep living if he was abducted or killed in Turkey.’
It comes as a witness claimed to have heard screams for help moments before Mr Khashoggi disappeared from the Saudi consulate.
The source, who was inside the consulate last Tuesday afternoon when Mr Khashoggi arrived to pick up official documents, has spoken to investigators.
They said they heard ‘sounds of loud screams and shouting, as well as calls for help and the sound of a struggle and then sudden silence,’ according to Al Jazeera.
Further evidence that Mr Khashoggi never left the consulate emerged, as screenshots of his WhatsApp account shows he last used his mobile phone minutes before entering the building – when he was sent a link to a MailOnline article regarding a prominent Saudi.
The screenshots, obtained by NBC News, show the WhatsApp conversation between Mr Khashoggi and a US friend, which indicated that the last time he was active on his phone was at 1.06pm Istanbul time.
Just eight minutes later, at 1.14pm, he was caught on CCTV as he entered the Saudi Arabian consulate.
The friend sent a message to Mr Khashoggi at 1.24pm – a message which was received, but never read.
Investigators are confident they may be able to discover Mr Khashoggi’s fate, using data collected from his Apple Watch – which was connected to the phone he left with Ms Cengiz.
Britain warned Saudi Arabia of ‘serious consequences’ if it turns out Mr Khashoggi was murdered by his own people.
‘People who have long thought of themselves as Saudi’s friends are saying this is a very, very serious matter,’ Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan challenged Saudi Arabia to provide CCTV images to back up its version that Mr Khashoggi had left the consulate safely, indicating he did not find the current Saudi explanations sufficient.
‘It’s not possible for us [Turkey] to stay silent regarding an incident like this,’ Erdogan said.
‘Is it possible there were no camera systems in a consulate, in an embassy? Is it possible that there was no Saudi camera system where this incident took place?’
‘If a bird flew, or a fly or a mosquito appeared, the systems would capture this; they (Saudi Arabia) have the most cutting-edge systems,’ he was quoted as saying.
The identities of an alleged 15-member assassination squad surfaced.
The team is said to include a Saudi special forces officer, members of the royal guard and a senior forensics expert.
Police were seen entering the consulate this week but it is understood the Saudis rescinded an offer to allow forensic experts onto the premises after details of the Saudi identities emerged.
Riyadh has insisted Mr Khashoggi left the building alive and murder claims are ‘baseless’.
It says CCTV at the consulate were not working on the day in question.
Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi (Arabic: جمال خاشقجي Jamāl Khāshuqjī, Hejazi: [ʒaˈmaːl χaːˈʃoɡʒi], born 1958[2]– disappeared 2 October 2018) is a Saudi journalist,[3] author, and the former general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel.[4] He also served as editor for Saudi newspaper Al Watan, turning it into a platform for Saudi progressives.[5]
Khashoggi disappeared on 2 October 2018 and was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, by its main entrance.[8] Anonymous Turkish police sources have alleged that he was murdered and dismemberedinside the consulate.[9][10] The Saudi government claims that Khashoggi left the consulate alive, through a rear entrance,[11] but Turkish police say that no CCTV recorded him exiting the consulate.[12] On 15 October, an inspection of the consulate by both Turkish and Saudi officials took place.
Early life and education
Khashoggi speaking in Washington, DC in March 2018
He received his elementary and secondary education in Saudi Arabia and obtained a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Indiana State University in the United States in 1982.[4][18][19]
Career
Jamal Khashoggi began his career as a regional manager for Tihama Bookstores from 1983 to 1984.[20] Later he worked as a correspondent for the Saudi Gazette and as an assistant manager for Okaz from 1985 to 1987.[20] He continued his career as a reporter for various daily and weekly Arab newspapers from 1987 to 1990, including Al Sharq Al Awsat, Al Majalla and Al Muslimoon.[4][20] Khashoggi became managing editor and acting editor-in-chief of Al Madina in 1991 and his term lasted until 1999.[20]
From 1991 to 1999, he was a foreign correspondent in such countries as Afghanistan, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and in the Middle East.[4] It is also claimed that he served with both Saudi Intelligence Agency and possibly the United States in Afghanistan during this period.[21] He then was appointed a deputy editor-in-chief of Arab News, the leading English newspaper of Saudi Arabia and served in the post from 1999 to 2003.[22]
Khashoggi became the editor-in-chief of the Saudi daily Al Watan for a short period, less than two months, in 2003.[4][23][24][22] He was fired in May 2003 by the Saudi ministry of information because he had allowed a columnist to criticize the Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya (1263 – 1328), who is considered the founding father of Wahhabism – a movement that the Muslim Brotherhood has always been at odds with.[25] This incident led to Khashoggi’s dubious reputation in the West as a liberal progressive.[26]
After he was fired, Khashoggi went to London in voluntary exile. There he joined the Al Faisal’s team as an adviser.[27] He then served as a media aide to Prince Turki Al Faisal, while the latter was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States.[28] In April 2007, Khashoggi began to work as editor-in-chief in Al Watan for a second time.[22]
A column by poet Ibrahim al-Almaee challenging the basic Salafi premises was published in Al Watan in May 2010, which led to Khashoggi’s seemingly forced resignation, now for a second time, on 17 May 2010.[29]Al Watan announced that Khashoggi resigned as editor-in-chief “to focus on his personal projects”. However, it is thought that he was forced to resign due to official displeasure with articles published in the paper that were critical of the Kingdom’s harsh Islamic rules.[29] After his second resignation from Al Watan in 2010 Khashoggi maintained ties with Saudi elites, including those in its intelligence apparatus. In 2015 he launched the satellite news channel Al-Arab, based in Bahrain outside Saudi Arabia as the country does not allow independent news channels to operate within its borders. The news channel was backed by of Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and partnered with US financial news channel Bloomberg Television. But the channel was on air for less than 11 hours before it was shut down by Bahrain.[30][31] He was also a political commentator for Saudi and international channels, including MBC, BBC, Al Jazeera and Dubai TV.[20] Between June 2012 and September 2016, his opinion columns were regularly published by Al Arabiya.[32]
Citing a report from Middle East Eye, The Independent said in December 2016 that Khashoggi had been banned by Saudi Arabian authorities from publishing or appearing on television “for criticising US President-elect Donald Trump“.[33]
Kashoggi criticized the arrest (in May 2018) of women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul
Speaking to the BBC’s Newshour, Khashoggi criticized Israel‘s settlement building in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying: “There was no international pressure on the Israelis and therefore the Israelis got away with building settlements, demolishing homes.”[39]
According to The Spectator, “With almost two million Twitter followers, he was the most famous political pundit in the Arab world and a regular guest on the major TV news networks in Britain and the United States.”[26] In 2018, Khashoggi established a new political party called Democracy for the Arab World Now, posing a political threat to Crown Prince Mohammed.[26] He wrote in a Post column on 3 April 2018 that Saudi Arabia “should return to its pre-1979 climate, when the government restricted hard-line Wahhabi traditions. Women today should have the same rights as men. And all citizens should have the right to speak their minds without fear of imprisonment.”[36]
Interviews with Osama bin Laden
Khashoggi befriended Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan and Sudan while championing his jihad against the Soviets in dispatches. At that same time, he was employed by the Saudi intelligence services to try to persuade bin Laden to make peace with the Saudi royal family. Khashoggi interviewed bin Laden several times. He also met bin Laden in Tora Bora, and once more in Sudan in 1995.[40]
It is reported that Khashoggi once tried to persuade bin Laden to quit violence.[41] Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi who knew of the royals’ intimate dealing with al Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9/11 terror attacks. He dissociated himself from bin Laden following the attacks.[26]
Khashoggi was last seen going inside the main entrance of the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018, in order to obtain a document that proved he was divorced.[11] This document would allow him to marry his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, a Turkish citizen, who waited outside.[11][42] As he did not come out after 4 PM, though the working hours of the consulate were until 3:30 PM, his fiancée reported him missing when the consulate closed.[43] The Saudi government said that he had left the consulate[44][45][46] via a back entrance.[47] The Turkish government said that he was still inside, and his fiancée and friends said that he was missing.[48]
According to numerous anonymous police sources, the Turkish police believe that Khashoggi was tortured and killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul[49][50] by a 15-member team brought in from Saudi Arabia for the operation.[51][52] One anonymous police source claimed that the dead body was chopped to pieces and quietly moved out of the consulate, and all of this was “videotaped to prove the mission had been accomplished and the tape was taken out of the country”.[50]
Turkish authorities have claimed that security camera footage of the day of the incident was removed from the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and that Turkish consulate staff were abruptly told to take a holiday on the day Khashoggi disappeared while inside the building.[53]Turkish police investigators told the media that the recordings from the security cameras did not show any evidence of Khashoggi leaving the consulate.[54] A security camera was located outside the consulate’s front which had showed him entering but not leaving, while another camera installed at a preschool opposite of the rear entrance of the consulate also did not show him leaving.[54]
On 7 October, Turkish officials pledged to release evidence showing that Khashoggi was killed.[52] Yasin Aktay, an adviser to the Turkish president, initially said he believed Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate,[50] but on 10 October he claimed “the Saudi state is not blamed here”, something the Guardian journalist sees as Turkey trying not to harm lucrative trade ties and a delicate regional relationship with Saudi Arabia.[53] Turkey then claimed to have direct audio and video evidence of the killing occuring inside the consulate.[55]
Al-Waqt news quoted informed sources as saying that Mohammad bin Salman had assigned Ahmad Asiri, the deputy head of the Al-Mukhabarat Al-A’amah[56] and the former spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, with the mission to execute Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Another military officer with lots of experience in dealing with dissidents was the second candidate for the mission.[57] On the same day, Turkish media close to the president published images of what it described as a 15-member “assassination squad” allegedly sent to kill Khashoggi, and of a black van later traveling from the Saudi consulate to the consul’s home.[58]
Reuters reported on 11 October that Turkish officials were investigating whether Khashoggi’s Apple Watch would reveal clues as to what happened to him inside the Saudi consulate, examining whether data from the smartwatch could have been transmitted to the cloud, or his personal phone, which was with his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.[59]
Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan said on 12 October that he is 95 percent certain that Saudi Arabia killed Jamal Khashoggi.[60]
Analysts have suggested that Khashoggi might have been considered especially dangerous by the Saudi leadership because he was not a long-time dissident, but rather a pillar of the Saudi establishment who was close to its ruling circles for decades, had worked as an editor at Saudi news outlets and had been an adviser to a former Saudi intelligence chief.[61]
Reactions
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman claimed Khashoggi left the consulate shortly after the visit.[62] The English-language Arab News on 10 October 2018 reported that the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Khalid bin Salman, “condemns ‘malicious leaks and grim rumors’ surrounding Khashoggi disappearance” and that “the reports that suggest that Jamal Khashoggi went missing in the Consulate in Istanbul or that the Kingdom’s authorities have detained him or killed him are absolutely false, and baseless”.[63][64]Saudi Arabia threatened to retaliate “if it is [targeted by] any action”.[65]Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned pan-Arab televison based in Dubai, claimed that reports of Khashoggi’s disappearance inside the Saudi consulate have been pushed by Qatar. According to the Saudi Arabian daily newspaper Okaz, Qatar has a “50 percent ownership of the Post and has influence over its editorial direction.” Saudi Arabian daily newspaper Al Yaum has claimed that members of the death squad were in fact tourists.[66]
Turkish president Erdoğan demanded that Saudi government provide proof for their claims that Khashoggi left the consulate alive, something that Turkish police CCTV did not capture.[67]
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Saudi Arabia “to support a thorough investigation of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance and to be transparent about the results of that investigation.”[68] President Trump expressed concern about the fate of Khashoggi.[69] U.S. Senator Chris Murphy wrote that if the reports of Khashoggi’s murder are true, “it should represent a fundamental break” in Saudi Arabia–United States relations.[70] Murphy also called for at least a temporary halt in U.S. military support for the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen.[71]
U.S. Senator Rand Paul said that he would attempt to force a vote on blocking the future U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.[73] Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Trump over Khashoggi’s disappearance. Signed by the entire Committee other than Senator Paul who prepared his own letter, it “instructs the administration to determine whether Khashoggi was indeed kidnapped, tortured, or murdered by the Saudi government and, as the Global Magnitsky Act requires, to respond within 120 days with a determination of sanctions against individuals who may have been responsible.”[64] U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said that “it seems clear that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman feels emboldened by the Trump administration’s unquestioning support.”[64] President Trump told journalists: “I know [Senators] are talking about different kinds of sanctions, but [the Saudis] are spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs for this country.”[74] Trump, in responding specifically to the Senate’s attempt to block the Saudi arms deal, stated that the blocking of such a deal “would not be acceptable to me.”[75] While opposing trade sanctions, Trump remained open to the possibility of other forms of what he described as the “severe punishment” of Saudi Arabia.[65]
The Washington Post reported on 9 October that “US intelligence intercepted communications of Saudi officials discussing a plan to capture” Khashoggi. It was not clear whether the Saudis intended to arrest and interrogate Khashoggi or to kill him, or if the US warned Khashoggi that he was a target.[78] The intercepted communication is deemed important because Khashoggi is a legal resident of the United States, and is therefore entitled to protection. According to NSA officials, this threat warning was communicated to the White House through official intelligence channels.[79]
According to Rami George Khouri, a professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, “The case of Jamal Khashoggi, unfortunately, is only the tip of the iceberg…it would only be the most dramatic example of a trend that has been ongoing for at least 30 to 40 years, but which has escalated under [Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman],”[84].
Al-Jazeera reported on 13 October that “the Arab world stays silent…there’s been no official reaction from any Arab government, and hardly any condemnation from Arab media.”[85]
On the evening of 14 October, President Erdoğan and King Salman announced that a deal had been made for a “jointing working group” to examine the case.[86] On 15 October the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced that an “inspection” of the consulate, by both Turkish and Saudi officials, would take place that afternoon.[87][88] On the same day, after speaking to the Saudi king by phone, President Trump said that Salman “denies any knowledge of whatever may have happened… The denial was very, very strong, It sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows?”[86]
Story 3: Major Security Breach at Facebook With — Facebook Changes The Lock — Videos —
Facebook says hackers accessed data of 29M users
Facebook Purges Accounts of Hundreds for Absolutely No Explicable or Cogent Reason
Former hacker weighs in on Facebook’s big security breach
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Facebook security breach affects tens of millions of accounts
Facebook confirms 50m accounts were hacked
Real Future: What Happens When You Dare Expert Hackers To Hack You (Episode 8)
Hackers Reveal How They Make Money Breaking Into Companies | Inc.
21st Century Hackers – Documentary 2018
Inside Russia’s Hacker Underworld
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How to Know If Your Facebook Account Has Been Hacked
How to Know If Your Facebook Account Has Been HackedFor the second time this year, hackers have attacked millions of Facebook accounts. The social network announced last week that about 50 million users were recently hacked.
The hacking occurred because of a flaw in Facebook’s “View As” feature, which allows you to see your profile as others do. Users can type in a person’s name to get an understanding of what can be seen when a particular person is viewing their page.
This feature has been susceptible to attack since an update that occurred in July 2017.
Affected access tokens, which are like digital keys that allow a person to access their account without having to log in each time, were reset, forcing 50 million users plus an additional 40 million users to manually log back into their accounts. So if you were automatically logged out on all of your devices on the morning of Friday, Sept. 28, then there’s reason to believe your account was susceptible to the vulnerability.
Facebook said it did this as a precautionary step, logging out anyone who used the “View As” feature whether their account was actually affected or not. Users who were logged out do not need to change their password to be protected. The rightful owners of affected accounts will be able to log in with their current username and password.
Currently, the “View As” feature is not available while Facebook works to rectify the problem, those who try to use this feature should see an error message.
When Facebook announced the attack on its blog last Friday, it said affected users would receive a notification at the top of their News Feed when logging back into their account explaining what happened and what steps to take moving forward.
If you received this notification, you can select “Learn More” to get an understanding of how this breach will affect you. If you did not receive a notification at the top of your News Feed, your account was probably not affected by this security issue.
If you want to be extra safe, go to Settings– Security and Login– Where You’re Logged In to see if there are any unfamiliar devices attached to your account.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company isn’t sure about the source of the attack; nor is it clear if this breach led to users’ information being stolen or misused. The investigation is ongoing and those affected will be updated accordingly as the tech company learns more about the hack and the motives behind it.
The full extent of the breach is not known, but the company has alerted law enforcement and is working with the FBI to get to the bottom of the issue.
Hackers accessed personal information of 30 million Facebook users
Almost 30 million Facebook users’ phone numbers and email addresses were accessed by hackers in the biggest security breach in the company’s history, Facebook said Friday. The attackers accessed even more details on 14 million of those users, including the area where they live, their relationship status, their religion, and part of their search history.
The FBI is “actively investigating” the breach, Guy Rosen, a Facebook vice-president, told reporters on a call Friday. He said the FBI has asked the company”not to discuss who may be behind this attack” or to share other details that could compromise its investigation.
The company said that it may still not know the full extent of the attack and wasn’t ruling out the possibility of other “smaller-scale attacks” linked to the breach. The company said it will continue to investigate “other ways the people behind this attack used Facebook.”
The new details come two weeks after Facebook first announced that attackers had access to 50 million users’ accounts — meaning they could have logged in as those users. Facebook said on Friday that, “We now know that fewer people were impacted than we originally thought,” and said that 30 million people had been impacted.
For the 14 million worst hit by the breach, the attackers were able to access the following information, Facebook said: “username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches.”
Facebook said it will send a message to the 30 million users affected in the coming days and will be posting information to its help center.
Facebook is regulated by Irish authorities in Europe as its European headquarters is located there. A spokesperson for the Irish data regulator said of Friday’s announcement, “The update from Facebook today is significant now that Facebook has confirmed that the personal data of millions of users was taken by the perpetrators of the attack.”
The attack prompted Facebook to take the unprecedented step of logging out the 50 million users whose accounts were exposed and logged out another 40 million users as a precautionary measure.
The attackers exploited a series of bugs on Facebook’s platform. The vulnerability, Facebook said, had existed since July 2017. It wasn’t patched until last month, after the company’s engineers noticed some unusual activity that turned out to be the attack.
Despite Friday’s announcement, there are still many details about the hack that have not been made public, including who was behind it and if the attackers were targeting particular users or countries.
Was I hacked?
To find out if you are among the 30 million people whose information was accessed, you can click here to go to the Facebook help center. You need to be logged into Facebook. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll find details about your account in a blue box titled, “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?”
If you’re among those who were worst affected by the Facebook hack this is what you will see when you go to this link to check if your account was breached (you need to be logged into Facebook for this to work) https://www.facebook.com/help/securitynotice?ref=sec …
Facebook Hack Included Search History and Location Data of Millions
Facebook said Friday that a security breach had affected 30 million users, 20 million fewer than originally thought.CreditCreditWilfredo Lee/Associated Press
By Mike Isaac
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said Friday that an attack on its computer systems that was announced two weeks ago had affected 30 million users, about 20 million fewer than it estimated earlier.
But the personal information that was exposed was far more intimate than originally thought, adding to Facebook’s challenges as it investigates what was probably the most substantial breach of its network in the company’s 14-year history.
Detailed information was stolen from the Facebook profiles of about 14 million of the 30 million users. The data was as specific as the last 15 people or things they had searched for on Facebook and the last 10 physical locations they had “checked into.”
Other personal details were also exposed, like gender, religious affiliation, telephone number, email addresses and the types of computing devices used to reach Facebook.
Users’ names and contact information like telephone numbers were stolen from an additional 15 million profiles, Facebook said. The security tokens of about one million other people were stolen, but hackers did not get their profile information, the company said.
The hackers did not gain access to account passwords or credit card information, Facebook said.
“We have been working around the clock to investigate the security issue we discovered and fixed two weeks ago so we can help people understand what information the attackers may have accessed,” Guy Rosen, vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post on Friday.
While Facebook has cautioned that the attack was not as large as it had originally anticipated — it forced 90 million users to log out so the security of their profiles would reset — the details of what was stolen worried security experts. The data can be used for all sorts of schemes by sophisticated hackers.
“Hackers have some sort of a goal,” said Oren J. Falkowitz, chief executive of the cybersecurity company Area 1 Security and a former National Security Agency official. “It’s not that their motivation is to attack Facebook, but to use Facebook as a lily pad to conduct other attacks.”
An attacker may use that information to conduct sophisticated “phishing attacks,” a method used to get into financial accounts, health records or other important personal databases, Mr. Falkowitz said.
“Once you’ve become a target, it never ends,” he said.
The breach was disclosed at the worst possible time for Facebook, which is grappling with a series of crises that have shaken user trust in the world’s largest social network.
Over the last year, Facebook has faced repeated criticism that it hasn’t been doing enough to protect the personal information of its more than two billion regular users.
In March, Facebook was hit by revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that had worked for the Trump campaign, had gained access to the private information of up to 87 million users.
The company is also dealing with concerns that disinformation on its platforms has affected elections and has even led to deaths in several countries. On Thursday, Facebook disclosed that it had removed hundreds of accounts and pages used to spread disinformation in the United States. While Russian agents had used Facebook and other social media to incite conflict before the 2016 election, domestic sources of false or misleading posts have jumped into the fray, the company said.
Disinformation has had dire results outside the United States. In Sri Lanka, Myanmar and other countries, hundreds of people have been killed, partly because of the rampant spread of misinformation across social networks and other internet sites.
Former employees have also taken to criticizing Facebook. Brian Acton, a co-founder of the Facebook-owned smartphone application WhatsApp, has called for people to delete their Facebook accounts.
The breach could affect users’ willingness to use Facebook products. On Monday, Facebook debuted Portal, the company’s first hardware device built from the ground up, for high-definition video calls. The product asks users to install a camera in their living rooms.
Facebook first found hints of suspicious activity across its network in early September when security engineers noticed a flurry of activity around the “View As” feature, a way for users to check on what information other people can see about them. It was built to give users move control over their privacy.
More than a week later, Facebook determined that the activity was an attack on its systems, focused on three interconnected vulnerabilities in the company’s software.
Those flaws were compounded by a bug in Facebook’s video-uploading program for birthday celebrations, a software feature that was introduced in July 2017. The flaw allowed the attackers to steal so-called access tokens — digital keys that allow access to an account.
Facebook fixed the bugs and alerted users on Sept. 28 that the accounts of about 50 million users had been compromised.
In the days since, Facebook has scrambled to figure out how things went wrong, who could be responsible for the attack and what the attackers planned to do with the information.
In a conference call with reporters on Friday, Mr. Rosen declined to answer who might be responsible for the attack or how the information could be used.
Facebook engineers are working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the hack. F.B.I. officials have asked Facebook not to share details on the suspected identities of the attackers for fear of compromising the investigation.
Videos — Story 4: President Trump Celebrates Columbus Day? — Happy Columbus Day — Videos
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Goodbye, Columbus Day
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Recognize contributions of Americans of Spanish and Italian descent
Date
October 12 (actual/traditional); second Monday in October (observed in the United States)
2017 date
October 9
2018 date
October 8
2019 date
October 14
2020 date
October 12
Frequency
Annual
Columbus Day is a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and elsewhere which officially celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus‘s arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492. The landing is celebrated as “Columbus Day” in the United States, as “Día de la Raza” (“Day of the Race”) in some countries in Latin America, as “Día de la Hispanidad” and “Fiesta Nacional” in Spain, where it is also the religious festivity ofla Virgen del Pilar, as Día de las Américas (Day of the Americas) in Belize and Uruguay, as Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural(Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity) in Argentina, and as Giornata Nazionale di Cristoforo Colombo or Festa Nazionale di Cristoforo Colombo in Italy as well as in Little Italys around the world.[1][2] As the day of remembrance of Our Lady of the Pillar, 12 October had been declared a religious feast day throughout the Spanish Empire in 1730; the secular Fiesta de la Raza Española was first proposed by Faustino Rodríguez-San Pedro y Díaz-Argüelles in 1913. In recent years, celebration of the holiday has faced some opposition from various organizations.
Celebration of Christopher Columbus’s voyage in the early United States is recorded from as early as 1792, when the Tammany Society in New York City[3] (for whom it became an annual tradition)[4][5] and also the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston celebrated the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World.[6][7] President Benjamin Harrison called upon the people of the United States to celebrate Columbus’s landing in the New World on the 400th anniversary of the event. During the anniversary in 1892, teachers, preachers, poets and politicians used rituals to teach ideals of patriotism. These rituals took themes such as citizenship boundaries, the importance of loyalty to the nation, and the celebration of social progress.[8][9][10]
Many Italian-Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage, and the first such celebration was held in New York City on October 12, 1866.[11] The day was first enshrined as a legal holiday in the United States through the lobbying of Angelo Noce, a first generation Italian, in Denver. The first statewide holiday was proclaimed by Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald in 1905, and it was made a statutory holiday in 1907.[12] In April 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed October 12 a federal holiday under the name Columbus Day.[12][13][14]
Since 1971 (Oct. 11), the holiday has been fixed to the second Monday in October,[15] coincidentally exactly the same day as Thanksgiving in neighboring Canada fixed since 1957. It is generally observed nowadays by banks, the bond market, the U.S. Postal Service, other federal agencies, most state government offices, many businesses, and most school districts. Some businesses and some stock exchanges remain open, and some states and municipalities abstain from observing the holiday.[16] The traditional date of the holiday also adjoins the anniversary of the United States Navy (founded October 13, 1775), and thus both occasions are customarily observed by the Navy (and usually the Marine Corps as well) with either a 72- or 96-hour liberty period.[citation needed]
Actual observance varies in different parts of the United States, ranging from large-scale parades and events to complete non-observance. Most states celebrate Columbus Day as an official state holiday, though many mark it as a “Day of Observance” or “Recognition” and at least four do not recognize it at all. Most states that celebrate Columbus Day will close state services, while others operate as normal.[17]
San Francisco claims the nation’s oldest continuously existing celebration with the Italian-American community’s annual Columbus Day Parade, which was established by Nicola Larco in 1868,[18] while New York City boasts the largest, with over 35,000 marchers and one million viewers.[19][20][21]
Iowa and Nevada do not celebrate Columbus Day as an official holiday, but the states’ respective governors are “authorized and requested” by statute to proclaim the day each year.[32] Several states have removed the day as a paid holiday for state government workers, while still maintaining it—either as a day of recognition, or as a legal holiday for other purposes, including Californiaand Texas.[33][34][35][36][37]
Argentine government poster from 1947 including the concept of la Raza.
The date Columbus arrived in the Americas is celebrated in some countries of Latin America. The most common name for the celebration in Spanish (including some Latin American communities[48] in the United States) is the Día de la Raza (“day of the race” or the “day of the [Hispanic] people”), commemorating the first encounters of Europeans and the Native Americans. The day was first celebrated in Argentina in 1917, in Venezuela and Colombia in 1921, in Chile in 1922 and in Mexico it was first celebrated in 1928. The day was also celebrated under this title in Spain until 1957, when it was changed to the Día de la Hispanidad (“Hispanicity Day”), and in Venezuela it was celebrated under this title until 2002, when it was changed to the Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance). Originally conceived of as a celebration of Hispanic influence in the Americas, as evidenced by the complementary celebrations in Spain and Latin America, Día de la Raza has come to be seen by nationalist activists throughout Latin America as a counter to Columbus Day; a celebration of the native races and cultures and their resistance to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.[citation needed]
In the United States, Día de la Raza has served as a time of mobilization for pan-ethnic Latino activists, particularly since the 1960s. Since then, La Raza has served as a periodic rallying cry for Hispanic activists. The first Hispanic March on Washington occurred on Columbus Day in 1996. The name is still used by the largest Hispanic social justice organization in the nation, the National Council of La Raza.[8]
Argentina
The Day of the Race was established in Argentina in 1916 by a decree of President Hipólito Yrigoyen. The name was changed to “Day of Respect of Cultural Diversity” by a Decree of Necessity and Urgency 1584/2010 issued by President Cristina Kirchner. Under the likely influence of the Venezuelan government, the statue of Columbus was removed from its original position near the Casa Rosada and replaced by one of Juana Azurduy.
Colombia
Colombia, the only country in the world with a name originated from Columbus himself, celebrates El día de la Raza y de la Hispanidad and is taken as an opportunity to celebrate the encounter of “the two worlds” and to reflect on the richness that the racial diversity has brought to the culture.
Venezuela
Current state (June 6, 2006) of the Columbus Walk in Caracas. The statue was knocked down by activists after a “public trial” during the celebrations of the newly instituted “Day of the Indigenous Resistance” (October 12) in 2004.[49]
Between 1921 and 2002, Venezuela celebrated Día de la Raza along with many other Latin American nations. The original holiday was officially established in 1921 under President Juan Vicente Gómez. In 2002, under President Hugo Chávez, the holiday was changed to Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance) to commemorate the Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European settlement. On October 12, 2004, a crowd of pro-government activists toppled the statue of Christopher Columbus in Caracas and sprayed allusive graffiti over its pedestal. The pro-Chávez website Aporrea wrote: “Just like the statue of Saddam in Baghdad, that of Columbus the tyrant also fell this October 12, 2004 in Caracas”.[50] The famous toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue had occurred the previous year.
Costa Rica
On September 21, 1994, Costa Rica changed the official holiday from Día de la Raza to Día del Encuentro de las Culturas (Day of the Encounter of Cultures) to recognize the mix of European, Native American (autochthonous populations), African and Asian cultures that constitute modern Costa Rican (and Latin American) culture and ethnicity. In accordance to the Costa Rican labor law, the holiday is observed on October 12. However, should this date coincide with a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, the employer shall agree that said holiday be postponed to the following Monday. [51]
Brazil
In Brazil, Columbus Day is not celebrated. Instead, the country celebrates the arrival on the coast of present-day Brazil of the fleet led by Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral on April 22, 1500. This date is known in Brazil as “O Descobrimento do Brasil” (The Discovery of Brazil). The date began to be celebrated after the country’s independence from Portugal, when Brazilian Emperor Pedro IIinstituted the date as part of a plan to foster a sense of nationalism among Brazil’s diverse citizenry—giving them a common identity and history as residents of a unique Portuguese-speaking empire surrounded by Hispanic Republics of the Americas. [52] The Discovery of Brazil was originally celebrated on May 3, but scholars in the nineteen century found definitive evidence proving April 22 to be the actual date of the arrival of Cabral’s fleet on South American shores. [53] In 2000, the government of Brazil used the date to celebrate 500 years of the existence of the country. The festivities, however, were met with protests by indigenous peoples who claimed it marked 500 years of genocide of indigenous Brazilians.[54][55]
Since the 18th century, many Italian communities in the Americas have observed the Discovery of the New World as a celebration of their heritage; Christopher Columbus (whose original, Italian name is “Cristoforo Colombo”) was an Italian explorer, citizen of the Republic of Genoa.[11]
In Italy, Columbus Day has been officially celebrated since 2004.[2] It is officially named Giornata nazionale di Cristoforo Colombo.
The “Lega Navale Italiana” has created a Regata di Colombo as a celebration of the Columbus achievement.[59] Italians have celebrated their “Cristoforo Colombo” naming after him many civilian and military ships, like the ocean liner SS Cristoforo Colombo.
Since 1987, Spain has celebrated the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas as its Fiesta Nacional or “National Day”.[60] Previously Spain had celebrated the day as Día de la Hispanidad, emphasizing Spain’s ties with the Hispanidad, the international Hispanic community.[60] In 1981 a royal decree established the Día de la Hispanidad as a national holiday.[60] However, in 1987 the name was changed to Fiesta Nacional, and October 12 became one of two national celebrations, along with Constitution Day on December 6.[61] Spain’s “national day” had moved around several times during the various regime changes of the 20th century; establishing it on the day of the international Columbus celebration was part of a compromise between conservatives, who wanted to emphasize the status of the monarchy and Spain’s history, and Republicans, who wanted to commemorate Spain’s burgeoning democracy with an official holiday.[61] Since 2000, October 12 has also been Spain’s Day of the Armed Forces, celebrated each year with a military parade in Madrid.[61] Other than this, however, the holiday is not widely or enthusiastically celebrated in Spain; there are no other large-scale patriotic parades, marches, or other events, and the observation is generally overshadowed by the feast day of Our Lady of the Pillar (Fiestas del Pilar).[61]
Opposition to Columbus Day dates back to at least the 19th century, when anti-immigrant nativists (see Know Nothings) sought to eliminate its celebration because of its association with immigrants from the Catholic countries of Ireland and Italy, and the American Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.[62] Some anti-Catholics, notably including the Ku Klux Klan and the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, opposed celebrations of Columbus or monuments about him because they thought that it increased Catholic influence in the United States, which was largely a Protestant country.[62]
By far the more common opposition today, decrying both Columbus’ and other Europeans’ actions against the indigenous populations of the Americas, did not gain much traction until the latter half of the 20th century. This opposition was led by Native Americans and expanded upon by left-wing political parties,[63][64][65][66][67] though it has become more mainstream.[68] Surveys conducted in 2013 and 2015 found 26% to 38% of American adults not in favor of celebrating Columbus Day.[69][70]
A second strain of criticism of Columbus Day focuses on the character of Columbus himself. In time for the 2004 observation of the day, the final volume of a compendium of Columbus-era documents was published by the University of California, Los Angeles‘s Medieval and Renaissance Center. It stated that Columbus, while a brilliant mariner, exploited and enslaved the indigenous population.[73]
Spelman College historian Howard Zinn described some of the details of how Columbus personally ordered the enslavement and mutilation of the native Arawak people in a bid to repay his investors.[74]
Journalist and media critic Norman Solomon reflects, in Columbus Day: A Clash of Myth and History, that many people choose to hold on to the myths surrounding Columbus. He quotes from the logbook Columbus’s initial description of the American Indians: “They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. They would make fine servants…. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Solomon states that the most important contemporary documentary evidence is the multi-volume History of the Indies by the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who observed the region where Columbus was governor. In contrast to “the myth,” Solomon quotes Las Casas, who describes Spaniards driven by “insatiable greed”—”killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples” with “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty” and how systematic violence was aimed at preventing “[American] Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.” The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing [American] Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades,” wrote Las Casas. “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”[75]
In the summer of 1990, 350 representatives from American Indian groups from all over the hemisphere, met in Quito, Ecuador, at the first Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas, to mobilize against the 500th anniversary (quin-centennial) celebration of Columbus Day planned for 1992. The following summer, in Davis, California, more than a hundred Native Americans gathered for a follow-up meeting to the Quito conference. They declared October 12, 1992 to be “International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People.”[76]
Story 1: Hurricane Michael’s Path of Destruction in Florida and Georgia — Catastrophic Damage — Florida Panhandle Hit Hardest with Panama City, Mexico Beach and Port Saint Joe Masssive Destruction — 6 Dead and 100s Missing — Pine Trees and Power Lines Down — Videos —
Aerial view shows catastrophic damage from Hurricane Michael
MEXICO BEACH the day after powerful Hurricane Michael storm surge
Parts of Florida Panhandle unreachable after Hurricane Michael
Hurricane Michael Aftermath – Panama City Florida 2018
Panama City Residents Picking Up The Pieces After Hurricane Michael
Scott says Florida Panhandle faces ‘unimaginable destruction’
Apalachicola’s St. George Island residents face destruction
Hurricane Michael leaves nothing unscathed in hard-hit areas
Hear from the people who stayed during category 4 Hurricane Michael
Florida residents rescued while riding out Hurricane Michael
Inside Hurricane Michael as it made landfall
Cleanup efforts underway after Hurricane Michael devastates Florida Panhandle
Panhandle digging out after Hurricane Michael rips through region
Incredible video from eye of Hurricane Michael emerges as ‘monstrous’ storm battered Florida Panhandle and blitzed every home in its path – as downgraded Tropical Storm now floods Georgia and the Carolinas
Hurricane Michael strengthened into a Category 4 storm with winds of up to 155mph on Wednesday
Michael was downgraded to a Tropical Storm on Thursday as it moved over Georgia and the Carolinas
Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters filmed their aircraft flying directly into the eye of the ‘monstrous’ storm as it was making landfall at Mexico Beach on Wednesday
Michael shattered buildings, brought down power lines and ripped trees as it crashed ashore and caused deep seawater flooding
At least six people have been killed in separate incidents, including an 11-year-old girl
More than 500,000 homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia and Alabama have been left without power
President Donald Trump, under fire for not visiting victims, has declared a state of emergency for Florida
Michael is the fourth strongest after Andrew in 1992, Camille in 1969 and a Labor Day Hurricane in 1935
PUBLISHED: 19:19 EDT, 10 October 2018 | UPDATED: 16:25 EDT, 11 October 2018
ncredible footage from the eye of Hurricane Michael has emerged as the Category 4 storm battered Florida‘s Panhandle with one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to strike the U.S. mainland, leaving at least five people dead and blitzing every home in its path.
Michael was downgraded to a Tropical Storm on Thursday as it took its drenching rains to Georgia and the Carolinas – just one day after unleashing deadly fury on Florida with its 155 mph winds.
The Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters filmed their aircraft flying directly into the eye of the ‘monstrous’ storm as it was making landfall on the small tourist town of Mexico Beach on Wednesday afternoon.
The footage showed a rare pilot’s view of the eye wall and revealed a breathtaking stadium-like effect set again the clear sky.
But down below, Michael was shattering buildings, bringing down power lines and ripping out trees as it crashed ashore and caused deep seawater flooding with storm surges as high as 14-feet in some areas of Florida’s Gulf coast.
Search-and-rescue teams fanned out across the Florida Panhandle to reach trapped people in Michael’s wake on Thursday as daylight yielded scenes of rows upon rows of houses smashed to pieces.
At least six deaths were blamed on Michael, including Sarah Radney, an 11-year-old girl in Seminole County, Georgia, who died after a tree fell on her home. A man in Greensboro, Florida was also killed when a tree crashed through his home and trapped him. Three other people also died in Florida and a man was killed in his car in North Carolina.
The Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunters filmed their aircraft flying directly into the eye of the ‘monstrous’ Hurricane Michael as it was making landfall on the small tourist town of Mexico Beach, Florida on Wednesday afternoon
Michael shattered buildings, brought down power lines and ripped trees as it crashed ashore and caused deep seawater flooding when it made landfall on Mexico Beach, Florida (pictured above) on Wednesday afternoon
Michael was downgraded to a Tropical Storm on Thursday as it took its drenching rains to Georgia and the Carolinas – just one day after unleashing deadly fury on Florida with its 155 mph winds
‘This morning, Florida’s Gulf Coast and Panhandle and the Big Bend are waking up to unimaginable destruction,’ Florida Governor Rick Scott said.
‘So many lives have been changed forever. So many families have lost everything. This hurricane was an absolute monster.’
It was not yet known what had happened to about 280 residents of Mexico Beach who authorities said had ignored evacuation orders as the storm approached the state’s northwest.
Michael was a Category 4 storm, just shy of a rare Category 5, when it came ashore. It weakened steadily as it traveled inland over the Panhandle.
By 8am Thursday it had been downgraded to a tropical storm with 50 mph winds as it pushed through Georgia into the Carolinas, the National Hurricane Center said.
Though weakened into a tropical storm, it continued to bring heavy rain and blustery winds to the Southeast as it pushed inland, soaking areas still recovering from last month’s Hurricane Florence.
Under a perfectly clear blue sky, Florida families emerged tentatively from darkened shelters and hotels to an unfamiliar and perilous landscape of shattered homes and shopping centers, beeping security alarms, wailing sirens and hovering helicopters.
Over 900,000 homes and businesses in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas were without power.
Rescuers searched the Mexico Beach area on Thursday morning after the hurricane made a direct hit on the small town
Kathy Coy stands among what is left of her home on Thursday after Hurricane Michael destroyed it in Panama City. She was in the home when it was blown apart and said she is thankful to be alive
Buildings were completely flattened in Panama City – 20 miles northwest of Mexico Beach where the hurricane made landfall
Boats washed up among the debris of houses in Mexico Beach on Thursday following the devastating hurricane
Keito Jordan (left) comforts his neighbor Hector Benthall after remnants of Hurricane Michael sent a tree crashing into his home in Columbia, South Carolina
The full extent of the damage was only slowly becoming clear, with some of the worst areas difficult to reach. An 80-mile stretch of Interstate 10, the main east-west route along the Panhandle, was closed because of debris.
One of the hardest-hit spots was Mexico Beach where entire blocks of homes near the beach were washed away, leaving nothing but concrete slabs in the sand. Rows and rows of other homes were reduced to piles of debris or crumpled and slumped at odd angles.
Trees were stripped to stalks, roofs were shredded, trucks toppled and boats pushed into buildings. Downed power lines lay nearly everywhere, while pine trees were stripped and snapped off about 20 feet high.
Hundreds of cars had broken windows and twisted street signs lay on the ground.
Scott said the National Guard got into Mexico Beach and rescued 20 people who survived the direct hit. The town was under a mandatory evacuation order as the rapidly developing storm closed in, but some people were determined to ride it out.
The governor pleaded with people in Florida not to go home yet.
‘I know you just want to go home. You want to check on things, and begin the recovery process (but) we have to make sure things are safe.’
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard said it rescued at least 27 people, mostly from homes damaged along the Florida coastline, and searched for more victims. Among those brought to safety were nine people rescued by helicopter from a bathroom of their Panama City home after their roof collapsed.
Thousands of National Guard troops, law enforcement officers and medical teams are working their way into damaged communities to search for survivors.
Florida officials also said they were moving patients from damaged health care facilities.
Hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 45 miles from the center and were tearing buildings apart in Panama City Beach after the hurricane made landfall on Wednesday afternoon
Boats lay sunk and damaged at the Port St. Joe Marina. Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle with terrifying winds of 155 mph Wednesday
Shredded trees, derailed train cars and a sunken trailer are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael in Panama City
Destruction: The sun sets on a wreckage-littered street after Hurricane Michael passed over Panama City, Florida
Damage to a McDonald’s in Panama City, downtown area after Hurricane Michael made landfall along Florida’s Panhandle
Damages to the Presbyterian school in Panama City, downtown area after Hurricane Michael made landfall Wednesday
An American flag battered by Hurricane Michael continues to fly in the in the rose colored light of sunset at Shell Point Beach
Hurricane Michael barreled into the Florida Panhandle with winds of 155mph Wednesday, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake, as it became the most powerful storm to ever hit the region – and the fourth strongest to make landfall in the US
Bo Lynn’s Market starts taking water in the town of Saint Marks as Hurricane Michael pushes the storm surge up the Wakulla and Saint Marks Rivers
Hurricane Michael’s eye approaches the coast of Florida
In terms of wind speed, Michael is the fourth strongest storm ever to hit the US after Andrew in 1992, Camille in 1969 and an unnamed Labor Day Hurricane in 1935 which had winds of 184mph.
Scientists say it was so strong because warm waters of 84F (29C) extended unusually far up the northern Gulf Coast for this time of year after Florida had its warmest September ever.
Why was Hurricane Michael so strong?
Scientists say it was so strong because warm waters of 84F (29C) extended unusually far up the northern Gulf Coast for this time of year after Florida had its warmest September ever.
It was also strong because the eyewall – the ring around the eye of the storm – formed late.
This meant that there was not enough time for an eyewall replacement – a second ring formed of rainclouds – to form and weaken the storm.
Normally, the so-called eyewall replacement cycle weakens a storm by 20-30mph – but Michael was at its strongest when it made landfall.
The winds were so strong they brought down a billboard in Florida’s Panama City, tore down a Texaco gas pumping station canopy in Inlet Beach and caused a storm surge that completely knocked a house off its foundations in Mexico Beach.
Beachfront structures could be seen collapsing and metal roofing materials were blown away amid the heavy rain. Murky water was so high that roofs were about all that could be seen of many homes.
Hours earlier, meteorologists watched satellite imagery in complete awe as the storm intensified.
‘We are in new territory,’ National Hurricane Center Meteorologist Dennis Feltgen wrote on Facebook. ‘The historical record, going back to 1851, finds no Category 4 hurricane ever hitting the Florida panhandle.’
The University of Georgia’s Marshall Shepherd called it a ‘life-altering event’. More than 370,000 were ordered to evacuate but many refused.
By Wednesday night, the storm had moved north into South and North Carolina after sparking flash foods and property damage in Georgia. The tropical storm moved across southwestern Georgia at about 20mph Wednesday night as it made its way northeast towards the Atlantic.
The storm was expected to move across North Carolina and Virginia and push into the Atlantic Ocean by late Thursday or early Friday.
The National Weather Service said tornadoes were possible across the Florida Panhandle, southeast Georgia and southern South Carolina through Thursday morning as the hurricane now moves inland.
Forecasters warned rain could reach up to a foot and the life-threatening storm surge could swell to 14 feet.
A collapsed boat housing after the arrival of Hurricane Michael which hit with winds of 150mph on Wednesday afternoon
A woman and her children wain near a destroyed gas station after Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Florida
Wrecked boats sit near a pier after the arrival of Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Florida
Hurricane Michael formed off the coast of Cuba carrying major Category 4 landfall in the Florida Panhandle. Surge in the Big Bend area, along with catastrophic winds at 155mph
A hubcap blows by as a man runs to his car during Hurricane Michael in Panama City, Fla., Wednesday
A view of storm damage during Hurricane Michael which slammed into the Florida coast on October 10 as the most powerful storm to hit the southern US state in more than a century
Pam Heckstall surveys the damage as the remnants of Hurricane Michael move through Panama City, Flaorida
Hotel employees look at a canopy that had just collapsed as Hurricane Michael tore through Panama City Beach on Wednesday afternoon
The president (pictured at a rally on Wednesday) has come under fire for failing to visit Florida or the Carolinas as they are battered by the storm
Debris goes flying as Hurricane Michael makes landfall in Florida
More than 375,000 people up and down the Gulf Coast were ordered or urged to evacuate as Michael closed in.
But it moved so fast and intensified so quickly that people didn’t have much time to prepare, and emergency authorities lamented that many ignored the warnings.
A Red Cross official said it’s possible that as many as 320,000 people on Florida’s Gulf Coast did not evacuate and likely rode out the storm.
Emergency managers said they don’t know how many left the area, but there were about 6,000 people in 80 shelters in five states, including nearly 1,200 who are still in shelters following Hurricane Florence.
President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency for all of Florida, freeing federal assistance to supplement state and local disaster responses.
About 3,500 Florida National Guard troops were deployed, along with more than 1,000 search-and-rescue personnel to the area immediately after the hurricane hit.
Meanwhile, Trump came under fire for failing to visit Florida or the Carolinas as they were battered by the storm.
Speaking in a interview with Fox News on Wednesday night, Donald Trump explained that he’d wanted to attend his Wednesday rally instead because he didn’t want to let down his supporters.
‘If I didn’t go, they would also criticize,’ he explained. ‘This was set up a long time ago. We had thousands of people lined up from yesterday. I mean literally they stayed 24 hours and sometimes more than that to go to these rallies. They like them. You probably saw the pictures on television tonight.
‘Thousands and thousands of people outside after the arena. It was a big arena. But it was full. We had 15 or beyond that thousand people outside. If I didn’t go, that would have been the wrong thing too.’
Trump said that he’d been in ‘constant communication’ with Florida governor Rick Scott and the governor of Alabama, and has ‘people in Florida’.
He added that it had been a ‘tough’ storm, offering the insight: ‘ The wind was probably more dangerous than anything else.’
Panama City slammed by strong winds from Hurricane Michael
Wild road rage incident caught on camera outside Pizza restaurant
Cameras outside the International Space Station captured views of Hurricane Michael on Wednesday as the storm made landfall as a category 4 hurricane
Amazing footage shows Hurricane Michael from the inside
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A damaged condo building is seen after hurricane Michael passed through the downtown area in Panama City
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Boats that were docked are seen in a pile of rubble after hurricane Michael passed through Panama City on Wednesday
Hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 45 miles from the center and were tearing buildings apart in Panama City
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A storm chaser climbs into his vehicle during the eye of Hurricane Michael to retrieve equipment after a hotel canopy collapsed in Panama City Beach on Wednesday
Mike Lindsey stands in his antique shop after the winds from hurricane Michael broke the windows in his shop in Panama City
A business in Port St. Joe, Florida lay in ruins after taking a direct hit from the hurricane on Wednesday afternoon
Collapsing building structures brought down power lines in Panama City from the strong winds brought about by Michael
Emily Hindle lies on the floor at an evacuation shelter set up at Rutherford High School near Panama City Beach on Wednesday
People wait for breakfast as they and others seek safety in a shelter in Panama City on Wednesday
“The dumbest thing I’ve ever done in 77 years.” These are the people in Panama City, Florida, who chose to ride out a Category 4 hurricane. USA TODAY
LAKE CITY, Fla. — Hurricane Michael leaves behind a treacherous, dangerous landscape that will likely pose risks to human health for weeks to come, experts say.
While the storm’s winds and rain have passed, flooding remains widespread across the Florida Panhandle, along with thousands of downed trees, severed power and gas lines, and road-blocking debris. And those are just the visible dangers: The water itself can carry bacteria and viruses that pose a major health hazard.
Authorities are pleading with residents to shelter in place, keeping the roads clear for emergency vehicles and reducing the risk of additional casualties. At least one man has died in the storm, after a falling tree crashed into his house in Greensboro, Florida.
Leaving home now raises the risks of injury, experts said. Many roads remain closed and impassible, most stores are closed and power is out for an estimated 500,000 people across three states, authorities said.
Among the medical dangers are cholera, Hepatitis A and vibriosis, said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency room physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Glatter said storm victims need to stay focused on staying healthy while they await recovery efforts. That may mean not rushing outside as soon as the skies clear.
“Don’t panic— try to take things one step at a time when you feel overwhelmed,” he said.
Flooding from hurricanes often brings increased risk of gastrointestinal disease as people accidentally ingest contaminated water, a potentially disgusting mix of saltwater, rain, runoff and anything those waters have touched as they rushed through homes, sewer lines and buildings.
“One of the things we’re concerned about is standing water because we have no idea what’s in the water,” said Holly Kirsch, program administrator for the Department of Health-Leon County. “There could be power lines, there could be debris, there could be glass, there could be animals such as snakes.”
An army of contractors and government workers will swing into action Thursday morning to begin clearing roads and downed power lines, clearing any clogged drains and trying to restore power to as many people as possible. Experts say people who lost power must be careful to monitor whether any refrigerated foods have spoiled.
Workers who are restoring power will be wearing special voltage detectors to ensure they don’t get electrocuted, said Tammy Kent, owner of One Source Restoration, which has about 450 contractors working in the Florida Panhandle.
“Electricity can track through water from a downed power line that is still energized,” Kent said. “I recall a story a few years back where three members of a family were killed from a wire down on the fence at their home.”
Story 2: Stock Market Correction or Crash of 2018 — World Wide Stock Price Declined — Recession? — Videos
Watch NEC Director Larry Kudlow’s full interview
Stockman on Trump Blaming Fed for Correction: Rates Still Underwater, Carnage Just Getting Started
Larry Kudlow says we’re in a booming economy, believes sell-off was a correction
Schiff: Bear Market has Begun
News Wrap: Stock market selloff ripples around the world
Dow tumbles over 500 points, bringing 2-day losses to more than 1,300 points
Investors fled riskier assets like stocks and loaded up on traditional safe havens like bonds and gold.
The Dow fell as much as 698.97 points at its lows of the day, after dropping 831 points on Wednesday.
“It’s a momentum correction, not a portfolio correction,” says Joe Terranova, chief market strategist at Virtus Investment Partners. “While we have a bias to believe 2008 could happen again, I don’t think this is the case.”
Stocks are getting slammed. Five experts weigh in on what to do now
Stocks fell sharply on Thursday in a second straight scary day on Wall Street as investors dumped equities around the globe because of fears of rapidly rising interest rates, a possible global economic slowdown and overly ambitious tech valuations.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 545.91 points lower at 25,052.83, bringing its two-day losses to more than 1,300 points. The S&P 500 dropped 2.1 percent to 2,728.37 and posted its sixth straight decline. The broad index also closed below its 200-day moving average for the first time since April. The Nasdaq Compositepulled back 1.3 percent to 7,329.06 and briefly entered correction territory at its lows on Thursday.
The Dow fell as much as 698.97 points at its lows of the day. The indexes bounced after a report said President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping would meet at next month’s G-20 summit, briefly giving traders hope a full-blown trade war with the country could be avoided.
October, a month known for major market sell-offs in the past, has been a brutal month for investors so far. The S&P 500 has lost 6 percent during the month so far and is now higher by just 2 percent for 2018.
The financials sector was the second-worst performer on the S&P 500, dropping nearly 3 percent. J.P. Morgan Chase fell 3 percent, while Citigroup dropped 2.2 percent. Wells Fargo slipped 1.9 percent.
Treasury yields pulled back from multiyear highs, with the benchmark 10-year yield sliding to 3.13 percent. The two-year yield also fell to 2.84 percent. The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) jumped 1.2 percent as investors clamored into bonds for safety.
The major indexes fell after some of the major tech names failed to recover from steep losses in the previous session. Netflix fell more than 1 percent after briefly trading higher. Apple also declined 0.9 percent, erasing earlier gains. Amazon dropped 2 percent after falling 6.2 percent on Wednesday.
“It’s a momentum correction, not a portfolio correction,” said Joe Terranova, chief market strategist at Virtus Investment Partners. “While we have a bias to believe 2008 could happen again, I don’t think this is the case.”
“Less is more in this environment,” Terranova added. “I think you need to be an observer of the guidance you get in earnings.”
Five market experts break down how to invest as interest rates spike
Gold futures surged 2.6 percent to $1,224.60 per ounce. The Cboe Volatility index (VIX), widely considered as the best gauge of fear in the market, rose to its highest level since Feb. 12 on Thursday.
“As markets slide further and investors seek other safe havens like options for protection, we could see higher VIX levels moving forward,” said Jeff Chang, managing director at Cboe Vest.
Tech shares fell more than 4.5 percent on Wednesday, marking their worst day since 2011. The sell-off led to the Dow sinking more than 800 points and the S&P 500 dropping more than 3 percent.
Run-up in rates
Investors had been fretting over a sharp rise in yields fears that rising borrowing costs could slow down the economy. Those fears were quelled slightly by the release of weaker-than-expected inflation data. The U.S. government said the consumer price index rose 0.1 percent in September, well below the expected gain of 0.2 percent.
“Net, net, the economy may be running hot, but it isn’t fast enough to kick up inflation pressures and calls into question the need for Fed policymakers to move interest rates to higher levels,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, said in a note.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Pedestrians pass in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
The recent downturn in equities comes as investors brace for the upcoming earnings season. J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup are among the companies scheduled to report Friday before the bell.
Expectations are high for this earnings season. Analysts polled by FactSet expect S&P 500 earnings to have grown by 19 percent in the third quarter.
“We look at this as a buying opportunity,” said Dryden Pence, chief investment officer at Pence Wealth Management. “I would have my shopping cart out here.”
“The question is whether the market bounces off a 5 percent or a 10 percent drop,” he said. “I think we’re going to bounce around here for a while.”
Thursday’s sell-off was accompanied by strong volume. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) traded nearly 260 million shares on the day, well above its 30-day average of 72.8 million.
Story 3: Democratic Destruction Derby — Alienating Independents, Republican and Even Democratic Voters With Shouting Protesters, Extreme Rhetoric and Mob Rule –Videos —
Hillary Clinton says Democrats can’t be civil right now
Conway tells Hillary Clinton to ‘tamp down the rhetoric’
Protesters shout down Democrat voting for Kavanaugh
Anti-Kavanaugh protesters bang on the doors of the Supreme Court
‘Restore order in the gallery:’ Anti-Kavanaugh protesters interrupt vote
Mitch McConnell SLAMS Hillary Clinton & The Lefts Fact Free Politics Of Fear & Intimidation 10/9/18
Ingraham: Hillary and the Democratic haters
The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party
Shapiro: ‘Pretty Disgusting’ for Dems to Turn Kavanaugh Controversy Into ‘Get-Out-the-Vote Effort’
How Will 2018 Midterms Turn Out?
Tucker Carlson: How America’s Ruling Class has Failed Everyday Americans
GOP decries Dems’ ‘mob rule,’ flipping the script
By ALAN FRAMyesterday
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., speaks after the Republican policy luncheon on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans are forecasting nightmarish Democratic “mob rule” to amp up GOP voters for next month’s critical midterm elections, flipping the script from complaints that it’s Trump and the tea party movement who’ve boosted rowdy and divisive tactics to dangerous levels.
Less than a month from voting in which GOP control of Congress is dangling precariously, Republicans are linking comments and actions by Democratic politicians, raucous protesters opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and even a gunman who shot targeted GOP lawmakers. The message to Republican voters: Democrats are employing radical tactics that are only growing worse.
“Only one side was happy to play host to this toxic fringe behavior,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday in the latest GOP attack. “Only one side’s leaders are now openly calling for more of it. They haven’t seen enough. They want more. And I’m afraid this is only Phase One of the meltdown.”
While the demonstrations were intense and some Republicans reported personal threats, liberal protesters’ tactics were broadly in line with those used by groups on the left and right during particularly passionate moments in Washington. The confrontational style harkened back to protests by the conservative tea party, which included angry face-offs with lawmakers and a massive Capitol demonstration far larger than last week’s rallies.
It’s not unusual for Republicans and Democrats alike to sharpen their rhetoric as elections approach in hopes of drawing loyal voters to the polls. But the GOP shift to disparaging descriptions of their opponents as unruly and sinister is a marked change from their messaging before the Kavanaugh battle, when they’d hoped to focus on the strong economy and the mammoth tax cut they pushed through Congress last December.
Both parties have detected a surge in engagement among GOP and conservative voters since the nation’s attention was grabbed by the confirmation battle over Kavanaugh, including allegations of sexual misconduct that he denied. While no one knows if that energy will last until Election Day, Democratic voters driven by an animus toward Trump until now were far more motivated.
Top Republicans have acknowledged that television scenes of anti-Kavanaugh protesters berating senators and interrupting Senate debate have helped them.
“It’s turned our base on fire,” McConnell said about the battle, which he’s called a political gift. Focusing on the “mob” has also let Republicans raise the subject without explicitly reminding voters about Kavanaugh himself, who polling showed was viewed unfavorably by the public.
So far, Republicans have shown no signs of abandoning that focus.
“The Democrats are willing to do anything, to hurt anyone, to get the power they so desperately crave,” Trump said at a rally in Minnesota last week. He added, “They want to destroy.”
Democrats argue that the party of Trump and the conservative tea party has nerve to decry such behavior.
“The last time I looked, the mocker-in-chief is in the White House,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii. Trump drew fresh ire last week when he ridiculed Christine Blasey Ford, the first of Kavanaugh’s three women accusers.
Democrats say Trump’s rhetoric since launching his 2016 campaign has been provocative, pugnacious and at times racist. They cite numerous comments about Mexicans, Muslims, African countries. They also noted his statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” after an anti-Nazi demonstrator was killed by a white supremacist at a violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois said Thursday that his response to GOP accusations of Democratic mob tactics “is to say three words: ‘Lock her up.’”
Crowds at Trump campaign rallies have long chanted that about 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. They’ve aimed it in recent days at Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who some Republicans have accused of leaking Ford’s letter claiming sexual assault by Kavanaugh. Feinstein has denied the leak.
Grass roots tea party activists opposed to President Barack Obama’s health care bill noisily disrupted lawmakers’ town hall meetings across the country in summer 2009, booing and accusing Democrats of lying. One man in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, told a lawmaker that God will “judge you and the rest of your damned cronies on the Hill,” while a Boston woman demanded to know, “Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?”
That September, tens of thousands of tea party demonstrators ringed the Capitol to protest the health care law and what they considered a wasteful, oversized federal government. That crowd, which dwarfed the hundreds or several thousand anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators, vented anger at times, shouting “Liar, liar” and waving sings including one saying, “Bury Obama Care with Kennedy,” a reference to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who had recently died.
Black lawmakers said they were targeted by racial epithets and spat upon during a smaller rally by several thousand tea party supporters in March 2010, as Congress was voting on the health care legislation.
In remarks Thursday, McConnell described last week’s anti-Kavanaugh protesters as “literally storming the steps of the Capitol and the Supreme Court,” confronting Republicans at restaurants and airports and shouting from visitors’ galleries during Senate debates. Republicans have said some received death threats and were stalked at their homes.
McConnell criticized Clinton, who said on CNN this week that “civility can start again” after Democrats capture the House or Senate in next month’s elections.
He also criticized former Attorney General Eric Holder. In a video purportedly shot at a recent campaign event in Georgia, Holder says, “When they go low, we kick them,” paraphrasing former first lady Michelle Obama, who famously said during the 2016 campaign, “When they go low, we go high.”
McConnell noted that these activities followed last year’s shooting of GOP lawmakers at a morning baseball practice by “a politically crazed gunman.”
Gunman James Hodgkinson, killed at the scene by officers, was infuriated by Trump’s election. His social media posts suggest he targeted Republicans because of his political views.
___
AP researcher Rhonda Shafner and reporters Steve Peoples and Kevin Freking contributed.
EXCLUSIVE – Michael Savage: Left’s ‘Orchestrated Mass Hysteria’ Over Trump Must Be Stopped
Talk radio star and New York Times bestselling author Michael Savage has a prescient warning for America: Mass hysteria has overtaken rational political discourse and escalated to a crescendo following the election of Donald Trump.
If we don’t learn from past mistakes, Savage argues, the current “collective derangement” which, he says, is being used by power-hungry actors and channeled into “orchestrated mass hysteria,” will lead the country to a very dark future.
Savage sounds the alarm bells in his latest tome, Stop Mass Hysteria: America’s Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt, which will be released on Tuesday on Amazon and in bookstores nationwide.
“It’s not just mass hysteria,” Savage said in a radio interview with this reporter. “We are living in a time that is much worse than mass hysteria. Because mass hysteria can be dismissed. This is an orchestrated mass hysteria. As you well know, the money is coming from somewhere to organize these people who seem to have unlimited time to harass senators, chase people out of restaurants.”
“We are living in very dangerous times because the left has been motivated to become violent. And they are being paid to be violent.”
In his latest book, Savage traces historical “mass hysteria” movements going as far back as the days of Christopher Columbus to the Salem Witch Trials to revolutions led by Mao Zedong, Adolph Hitler and Fidel Castro. He identifies hatred and fear as key drivers of such hysterias, where political actors stir up the masses against enemies both real and perceived, as logic and reason get tossed out the window.
Listen to the interview here:
Domestically, Savage says that in his lifetime he never witnessed such mass hysteria as the left’s response to the candidacy and subsequent election of Trump. He references unhinged charges of racism and sexism, the baseless Russia collusion conspiracy and promotion of unfounded fears of dictatorship as a few recent examples.
“It is one thing for a bunch of young girls to become hysterical in Salem Massachusetts in the 1600’s and such. And have people condemned to death for being witches based upon pure hysteria. It is another thing for millions and millions and millions of so-called intelligent, so-called educated people to buy the propaganda in the numbers that they have been buying it. I have not seen such mass hysteria in this country in recent times.”
Savage says the left’s “mass hysteria” reached a boiling point after Hillary Clinton lost her 2016 presidential bid.
“They had the country almost under lock down,” the radio host said of Clinton’s expected win. “They were pretty sure that Hillary was a shoo-in, right? Once they got their girl in office that would have been the end of America as we know it.”
“All of a sudden out of nowhere, there comes a business man, a showman. And here we are. They have gone insane.”
Savage zeroed in on the “mass hysteria” surrounding the recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who was officially confirmed to the Supreme Court on Saturday.
Savage stated:
What is it about Kavanaugh that has so agitated all of those leftists? Let’s see. White male. Check those two boxes. White and male. Check three. Heterosexual. That is strike three. Check four. Married. That is strike four. Oh, throw in Christian. You combine all of those five elements and these are the enemy points of the American left. Christian, white, heterosexual, male. He is a symbol, by the way, of that exact demographic in America that they would like to conveniently think has gone away.
Savage predicted that the left’s histrionics could potentially backfire and result in an even more right-wing revolution. “If they keep this up, more and more people on the independent middle will demand law and order,” he said.
Yet he warned that mass hysteria movements tend to spiral out of control and eventually turn against the orchestrators as warring factions use the ensuing chaos to vie for power.
“The guillotine is a thirsty blade,” Savage noted. “It has no political affiliation. And when the left starts dropping it on the right and then the women start dropping it on the men they don’t understand what will happen next.”
“Study any revolution,” he added. “Whether it be that of Mao’s China, the Bolshevik Revolution or Castro’s Cuba. After they got done killing their enemies they started killing each other. Struggling for power. … We are all potential victims of hysteria. It doesn’t matter what side you are on. And what I am suggesting … is take a deep breath before you vilify your enemy. Because tomorrow it may be you.”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.
Story 4: Kanye West’s White House Rant and Hugs – Blacks Thinking For Themselves Threaten Lying Lunatic Leftist Losers — Big Lie Media Meltdown — Videos
Dear Celebrities: No One Cares What You Think
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Kanye West on Donald Trump
Trump is ‘on his hero’s journey’ and I’m ‘a crazy motherf***er’: Kanye’s 10-minute Oval Office rant as he pounds the Resolute Desk, says his MAGA hat is ‘a Superman cape’ and jokes about 2024 run – with president responding: ‘Wow, that was impressive’
The rapper lunched with Donald Trump, the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner and Ivanka
Also present at the lunch: Jim Brown, the NFL Hall of Fame running back
White House called Kanye ‘award-winning Rapper, Producer, and Fashion Designer’ and published the lunch menu of caprese salad and roast chicken
Agenda was said to includes’record highs in African American employment, the creation of manufacturing jobs… and the massive violent crime surge in Chicago,’ as well as prison reform
West has been a prominent supporter of the president despite public criticism and came to the meeting sporting a “Make America Great Again” ball cap
He angered SNL cast members when he went on an unscheduled rant last month at the end of the show about Trump; his latest rant, in the Oval Office, is sure to turn a few more heads
‘They tried to scare me to not wear this hat, my own friends, but this hat it gives me, it gives me power,’ West said of the red hat bearing the president’s campaign slogan
He said the hat is like a Superman cape and said that Trump inspired him to become a billionaire
Compared the amendment that ended slavery to a trap door and pushed for it to be abolished
‘Because why would you keep something around that’s a trap door?’ he said. ‘Would you build a trap door that if you mess up and you accidentally, something happens, you fall and you end up next to the Unabomber?’
Wife Kim Kardashian has been the White House two times to discuss prison reform and pardons and secured release of narcotics felon Alice Johnson
PUBLISHED: 09:09 EDT, 11 October 2018 | UPDATED: 17:43 EDT, 11 October 2018
Kanye West went on an extended rant in the Oval Office on Thursday at the beginning of a working lunch with Donald Trump, where he dropped the F bomb, talked about his Bipolar Disorder diagnosis, pounded on the Resolute Desk and gave the president a hug.
West said that he has come to understand that ‘bravery helps you beat this game called life’ and that he was misdiagnosed with a mental health disease when he was really just sleep deprived in a 10-minute speech, followed by nearly 10 minutes of questions, in which he labeled himself a ‘crazy motherf***er’ and called the amendment that ended slavery a ‘trap door’ and said it should be abolished.
He also joked about running for president in 2024 and said that Trump ‘is on his hero’s journey’ in the astounding remarks that seemed to amuse the former reality TV show hosting president, who told him: ‘That was pretty impressive.’
West showed up to the meeting that the White House opened up to reporters at the last minute wearing a “Make America Great Again” ball cap.
They tried to scare me to not wear this hat, my own friends, but this hat it gives me, it gives me power,’ West asserted. ‘You know, my dad and my mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that, you know – not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though,’ he said, breaking into nervous laughter as he spoke about his wife Kim Kardashian West and her family.
The rapper said that he loves Hillary Clinton but the slogan ‘I’m with her’ didn’t empower him to be the kind of man or father he felt his son deserved.
‘I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign “I’m with her” just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son,’ he said. ‘It was something about, when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. That’s my favorite super hero.’
Kanye West went on an extended rant in the Oval Office on Wednesday at the beginning of a working lunch with Donald Trump, where he dropped the F bomb, talked about his Bipolar Disorder diagnosis, pounded on the Resolute Desk and gave the president a hug
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Oval Office talks: Kanye West sits in front of the Resolute Desk to open talks with Donald Trump, with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump also present
‘Genius’: The president praised Kanye in a Fox News interview earlier in the morning, then greeted Kanye in the Oval Office
MAGA: Kanye has made wearing the president’s Make America Great Again slogan his recent trademark – earning criticism from some quarters
Sit-down: Jim Brown, the NFL Hall of Famer, was also part of the talks, which center of African-American employment, prison reform and violence in Chicago, the White House said
Rapport: Kanye and Trump shared a laugh at one point in the meeting which was attended by reporters
‘I think it’s the bravery that helps you beat this game called life.’
‘You know, they tried to scare me to not wear this hat. My own friends. But this hat, it gives me – it gives me power in a way.’
‘I’m married to a family that, uh, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful, though.’
‘I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign, “I’m with her,” just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son.’
‘It was something about, when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman – that’s my favorite super hero. And you made a Superman cape for me.’
‘There’s a lot of things affecting our mental health that makes us do crazy things, that puts us back into that trap door called the 13th Amendment. I did say “abolish,” with the hat on. Because why would you keep something around that’s a trap door?’
‘I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was connected with a neuropsychologist that works with the athletes in the NBA and the NFL. And he looked at my brain, it’s equal on three parts. I’m going to go ahead, drop some bombs to you: 98th percentile IQ test. I had a 75 percentile of all human beings but it was counting eight numbers backwards off, there was repeating. So I’m going to work on that one. The other ones, 98 percent? Tesla. Freud.’
‘What I need Saturday Night Live to improve on, or the liberals to improve on, is: If he don’t look good, we don’t look good. This is our president.’
‘As black people, we have to take a responsibility for what we’re doing. We kill each other more police officers.’
‘You think racism can control me? Oh, they don’t stop me. That’s an invisible wall.’
‘I don’t answer questions in simple sound bites. You are tasting a fine wine. It has multiple notes to it. You better play 4-D chess moves like “Minority Report.” I mean, it ain’t that simple. It’s complex.’
He said the hat is like a Superman cape and said that Trump made him a billionaire.
‘No bulls***t,’ he added, advising networks to slap a five-second delay on his remarks. ‘Just goes in and gets it done. Right now, you gave me the heart to go to Adidas,’ he told Trump, referring to his Yeezy shoe deal.
West said his company as valued at $14 billion in 2015 and operating at a loss of $2 billion a year.
‘Now we have a $38 billion market cap. It’s called the “Yeezy Effect.” And I went to Casper. We had a meeting in Chicago. And I said, “You have to bring manufacturing onshore.” And not even shore. Into the core! It’s that about the borders, the core of Adidas,’ he stated. ‘And Chicago is the core of middle America. We have to make middle America strong. So I had the balls. Because I have enough the balls to put on this hat. I mean, this Adidas thing made me a billionaire.’
Tying his success into prison reform, he said, ‘It’s habilitation, not rehabilitation, because we didn’t have the abilities in the first place. We never had anyone who taught us. They didn’t teach us….So it’s more important than any specific deal, anything, that we bring jobs into America. And that we provide a transition with mental health and the American education curriculum, that Jim worked on, Larry Hoover also has a curriculum that he’s worked on.’
‘There’s a lot of things affecting our mental health that makes us do crazy things, that puts us back into that trap door called the 13th Amendment. I did say “abolish” with the hat on,’ he said of his prior support for getting rid of the constitutional amendment.
West said earlier this month that he wants to ‘abolish’ the amendment that’s credited with abolishing slavery. He clarified later that he actually wants to ‘amend it’ to prevent African-Americans from becoming involuntary servants for any reason.
The 13th Amendment allows for involuntary servitude if an American citizen is convicted of a crime. West contends that blacks are being locked up in massive numbers in order to justify enslaving.
He says that ‘in order to make a freed man a slave, all you have to do is convict them of a crime’ and jail them.
‘There’s people getting paid $0.08 a week working for companies that are privately owned and a lot of them are first-time offenders. A lot of them are nonviolent crimes. And then also we deal with, we’re not dealing with the mental health and the therapy,’ he told TMZ.
In the Oval Office he went back to claiming that he wants the 13th amendment totally disposed of.
‘Because why would you keep something around that’s a trap door? If you’re building a floor, the Constitution is the base of our industry, right? Of our country, of our company? Would you build a trap door that if you mess up and you accidentally, something happens, you fall and you end up next to the Unabomber? You end up – you’ve got to remove all that trap door out of the relationship.’
West told Trump, ‘I love you,’ as he came around to give him a hug. The president informed him that the didn’t want to put him in a bad spot. ‘I’m standing in this spot, I love this guy right here,’ West volunteered
Showing the president his phone, West said, ‘This right here is the I-plane One. It’s a hydrogen-powered airplane, and this is what our president should be flying in’
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were almost as amused by West’s tirade as the President of the United States
When he was finished with the 10-minute speech the president said it was ‘amazing’ and that the impromptu remarks were ‘pretty impressive.’
‘That was quite something. That was quite something,’ Trump told the rapper as he suggested they move on to lunch. West responded, ‘It was from the soul. I just channeled it.’
And he wasn’t done. West took questions from reporters for another 10 minutes in which he expounded on Chicago’s crime and murder rate. ‘The problem is illegal guns. Illegal guns in the problem. Not legal guns. We have the right to bear arms,’ he said.
‘You know, we talk about police murders, which we definitely have to discuss, and we have to bring nobility to the police officers and make them – the police officers are just like us. But there’s this whole hate building, right? And that’s a major thing about racial tension. And we also, as black people, we have to take a responsibility for what we’re doing,’ he said at another point in the discussion.
‘We kill each other more than police officers. And that’s not saying that the police officers are not an issue…because they are in a position of power,’ he asserted.
West has pushed for the abolition of the 13th Amendment, which formally abolished slavery. ‘We don’t have the reparations but we have the 13th Amendment. We gotta open up the whole conversation.’
Addressing the condemnation he’s received for supporting Trump, who his liberal friends say is a ‘racist,’ he said, West, said, ‘You think racism can control me? Oh that don’t stop me That’s an invisible wall.’
To pressing his for a direct answer, West said, ‘I don’t answer questions in simple sound bites.’ He told journalists, ‘You are tasting a fine wine. It has multiple notes to it. You better play 4-D chess moves like “Minority Report.” I mean, it ain’t that simple. It’s complex’
Trump said that West ‘gets it’ in remarks after and he hates ‘to see what’s happening’ in West’s hometown.
West told Trump, ‘I love you,’ as he came around to give him a hug. The president informed him that the didn’t want to put him in a bad spot. ‘No, I’m standing in this spot, I love this guy right here,’ West volunteered.
‘That’s really nice. Come here. That’s really nice. And that’s from that heart. I didn’t want to put you in that position. But that’s from the heart. Special guy,’ Trump said. ‘These two are special people. Whether you like it, whether you don’t like it, they’re special people. And I appreciate it. Jim, Kanye, I appreciate it,’ he said of West and NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown, who was also at the White House for the lunch.
West said in the conversation that he wouldn’t challenge Trump in 2020 for president – but he could seek the Oval Office for himself in 2024.
‘Let’s stop worrying about the future all we really have is today,’ he said. ‘Trump is on his hero’s journey right now. And might not have thought he’d have a crazy mother-f***er like Kanye West’s support.’
Trump said he’d be happy to have West on the trail with next year. ‘He can speak for me any time he wants. He’s been there. Great guy. Smart cookie. Smart. He gets it.’
MIGHT WANT TO CHANGE THAT: Cameras caught West entering the passcode to his phone as he was talking to Trump. He tapped the ‘zero’ button repeatedly
West said in the conversation that he wouldn’t challenge Trump in 2020 for president – but he could seek the Oval Office for himself in 2024
West showed up to the meeting that the White House opened up to reporters at the last minute wearing a “Make America Great Again” ball cap. ‘They tried to scare me to not wear this hat, my own friends, but this hat it gives me, it gives me power,’ West asserted
The president said earlier in the day that they could be pairing up for more than just a White House visit.
Trump says he ‘could see’ himself campaigning with the rapper. ‘Well, I could see it. I could see it,’ the president said on ‘Fox & Friends’ on Thursday morning.
Trump called West a ‘genius’ in the interview. ‘Those in the music business say he’s a genius, and that’s OK with me, because as far as I’m concerned, he is,’ the president said. ‘He’s not asking anything for himself. He’s not saying, ‘Hey, gee, I want to do this or that.”
‘He’s a private guy and he wants to help people, and maybe more than anything prison reform.’
Trump told Fox that he and Kanye would pick up where the president and West’s wife left off in their White House conversation. She’s visited the White House twice this year to advocate specific clemency cases.
Kanye West had a clemency case of his own that he said at the beginning of the lunch that he’d be pursuing, that of Chicago street gang leader Larry Hoover, whose lawyer attended the meeting with West. The 68-year-old convict is serving six life sentences in a supermax prison in Colorado.
‘It’s very important for me to get Hoover out because in an alternate universe I am him, and I have to go and get him free,’ he said. ‘Because he was doing positive inside of Chicago, just like I’m moving back to Chicago and it’s not just about, you know, getting on stage and being an entertainer and having a monolithic voice that’s forced to be a specific party. You know, people expect that if you’re black, you have to be Democrat.’
Also present: Ivanka Trump lunched with Kanye West, as well. She was wearing white as he left home for the White House this morning
Arrival: Jim Brown, the NFL Hall of Famer who was part of the lunch with Kanye, declined to answer questions when he arrived at the White House on Thursday
Lunch with the president: Brown, the Hall of Fame running back, didn’t get to talk very much in the lunch with Trump where Kanye stole the show
West said that ‘welfare is the reason why a lot of black people end up being Democrat,’ because they can’t find jobs.
Kanye West has been hit with extreme criticism over his support for Trump, a Republican. He’s pictured in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat
The president credited Kanye with his own surge in support among African Americans when he spoke to Fox on Thursday – and he told DailyMail.com earlier in the week that the backing stems from his dedication to raising black unemployment.
‘I will say this, when Kanye came out very strongly a number of months ago, something happened. My polls went up like 25 percent. Nobody’s ever seen it like — he’s got a big following in the African-American community,’ Trump said. ‘A big, big following. And I think he has in a lot of communities. But the polls went through the roof. And I have not seen that — I think I have — I can honestly say, I’ve never seen that before to that extent.’
Trump hailed West as a ‘smart guy’ as he responded to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Tuesday and said the artist ‘loves’ what this administration is doing for African-Americans.
‘He’s been a terrific guy. He loves what we’re doing for African-American jobs, for so many different things. Median incomes…is at all-time high. Poverty level at the best rate, meaning the lowest rate. And Kanye is a smart guy and he sees that,’ the president said on the South Lawn.
‘And also coming with him. He said, “You mind if I bring Jim Brown?” Big Jim Brown. Boy, would he be making a lot of money today, right? He was unstoppable. And he’s been a friend of mine. He’s been really with us because he gets it, he really gets it,’ Trump said.
Brown is a former Cleveland Browns running back and a Football Hall of Famer.
‘He sees that African-American, and by the way, Hispanic and Asian have never done better in this country, and he likes it,’ the president said of West.
Reporters were not initially invited to attend the Thursday lunch with the ‘award-winning Rapper, Producer, and Fashion Designer Kanye West’ that the White House said would take place in the Oval Office’s private dining room.
‘The discussion will be centered on President Trump’s historic work to benefit all Americans such as urban revitalization, the creation of Opportunity Zones, new workforce training programs, record highs in African American employment, the creation of manufacturing jobs, ideas from his meeting with African American pastors, potential future clemencies, and addressing the massive violent crime surge in Chicago,’ deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement that was meant to serve as a readout.
One man’s White House visit is another man’s marketing opportunity: Local tour guide Don Folden said he wanted to show Kanye the capital’s African-American heritage
But then, suddenly they were invited to step into the Oval Office for the sit down with West, who recently wiped all of his social media.
West insisted in the Oval Office that he does not suffer from mental health issues and was misdiagnosed, according to a neuropsychologist he saw that works with professional athletes.
‘And he looked at my brain, it’s equal on three parts. I’m going to go ahead, drop some bombs to you: 98th percentile IQ test. I had a 75 percentile of all human beings but it was counting eight numbers backwards off, there was repeating,’ West asserted. ‘So I’m going to work on that one. The other ones, 98 per cent. Tesla. Freud. You know, so he said that I actually wasn’t bipolar. I had sleep deprivation which could cause dementia 10 to 20 years from now, where I wouldn’t even remember my son’s name.’
West had very little trouble recalling information about new factories opening up on the United States, including a deal the president helped broker that made Wisconsin the site of technology manufacturing company Foxconn’s new headquarters. Foxconn produces the iPhone.
‘And one of the things we’ve got to set is Ford, to have the highest design. The dopest cars. The most amazing. I don’t really say “dope.” I don’t say negative words and try to flip them. We just say positive, lovely, divine universal words,’ West said of Trump’s efforts to bring jobs back from overseas. ‘So the flyest, freshest, most amazing car. And what we want to start with is, I brought a gift with me right here. This right here is the I-plane One. It’s a hydrogen-powered airplane, and this is what our president should be flying in.’
West typed in his phone’s passcode – a repeated tapping of zeros – and showed the plane to Trump.
‘We’ll get rid of Air Force One. Can we get rid of Air Force One?’ the president asked. ‘No? You don’t like that.’
West told him that Apple, the creator of the iPhone and Mac computers, would be working on the high-tech plane.
‘But you know what I don’t like about – it’s not that I don’t like – what I need Saturday Night Live to improve on, or the liberals to improve on, is: If he don’t look good, we don’t look good. This is our president,’ West said.
Pleased with the remark, Trump commented, ‘It’s true.’
‘He has to be the freshest, the flyest, the flyest planes, the best factories. And we have to make our core be empowered. We have to bring jobs into America. Because our best export is entertainment ideas. But when we make everything in China and not in America, then we’re cheating on our country. And we’re putting people in position, to have to do illegal things to end up in the cheapest factory ever, the prison system.’
In the months before Trump took office, West came to congratulate him on his victory at Trump Tower in New York City.
West’s wife, the reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, has since visited the White House to meet with Trump and Kushner to discuss prison reform and push for clemency for a first-time drug offender.
LUNCH WITH KANYE
Appetizer
Caprese Salad with Balsamic Glaze
Main Course
Roasted Chicken with Fingerling Potatoes and Sautéed Asparagus
Source: The White House
Their May meeting led the president to grant clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, whom Kardashian West had become a prominent supporter of after reading about her case online.
Kardashian visited the White House in September for a second time. She’s not known to have spoken to the president during that trip. She participated in a prison reform panel with Kushner and the president’s daughter, also a senior White House adviser, Ivanka Trump.
West, 41, has deleted his social media accounts following a string of controversial stunts including wearing a Make America Great Again cap during an appearance on Saturday Night Live.
He was also booed while making a pro-Trump speech when the cameras stopped rolling on the late-night show in September.
The unscheduled rant led to Pete Davidson, Ariana Grande’s finance and an SNL castmate, to publicly slam West.
During last Saturday’s show he said: ‘Kanye is a genius, but like a musical genius. Like Joey Chestnut is a hot dog-eating genius. But I don’t want to hear Joey Chestnut’s opinion on things that are not hot dog related.
‘I know Kanye is saying, this is the real me. I’m off the meds. Take them! There’s no shame in the medicine game. I’m on them. There’s nothing wrong with taking them.
Larry Hoover, the Gangster Disciples kingpin jailed for murder and drug conspiracy
Rapper Kanye West is asking President Trump to pardon Gangster Disciples kingpin Larry Hoover. West brought up Hoover during an appearance in the Oval Office with Trump while surrounded by reporters.
As West put it: ‘There’s theories that there’s infinite amounts of universe, and there’s alternate universe, so it’s very important for me to get Hoover out because in an alternate universe I am him, and I have to go and get him free.’
The critically acclaimed rapper continued: ‘Because he was doing positive inside of Chicago just like I’m moving back to Chicago and it’s not just about, you know, getting on stage and being an entertainer and having a monolithic voice that’s forced to be a specific party.’
Hoover is facing six consecutive life sentences, and is incarcerated at a Supermax facility in Colorado. He was charged with murdering a drug dealer in 1973 and later convicted, serving time in an Illinois prison.
West, who great up in Chicago, surprised audiences when he wore a ‘Free Hoover’ sweatshirt during a recent appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ where he delivered an extended rant to the audience following the show.
The Gangster Disciples seized control of the drug trade on Chicago’s South Side.
Inside the prison system, Hoover continued to recruit members, but also became known for discouraging violence and urging members to gain education and seek jobs.
Through wiretaps, prison officials were able to learn he continued to run the gang from inside the system, according to the Biography.com website.
He was convicted on drug conspiracy charges in 1997 and given the six life sentences.
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Missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancee Hatice (L) and her friends wait in front of the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, on 3 October 2018 (AFP)
Istanbul is home to virtually the entire gamut of the Egyptian opposition, secular and Islamist (AFP)
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![President Donald Trump tweeted after international press reported Brunson's release that he was '[w]orking very hard on Partor Brunson, later adding his 'thoughts and prayers' and a prediction that he will have a safe return to the United States](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2018/10/12/18/4995118-6268415-President_Donald_Trump_tweeted_after_international_press_reporte-a-1_1539363884018.jpg)
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Story 1: American People Demand Enforcement of All Immigration Laws — Deport and Remove All Illegal Aliens — All 30-60 Million — If Trump Cannot Cannot Build Big Beautiful Barrier and Enforce The Law — Find Someone Who Will! — Videos
US reaches deal with Mexico to stop migrant caravan: Fox News report
Ingraham: The caravan of lies and manipulation
A Nation of Immigrants
Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs – NumbersUSA.com
Tucker Carlson Tonight 10/18/18 | Breaking Fox News Today | October 18, 2018
Donald Trump Suggests Someone Is Paying Migrants in Caravan
President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that someone was paying migrants in the caravan traveling to the United States from Honduras.
“We’re starting to find out, and I won’t say 100 percent, I’ll put a little tiny question mark at the end … but a lot of money has been passing through people to come up and try to get to the border by election day,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Montana.
The group of over 4,000 migrants is currently traveling through Guatemala, although the president did not cite evidence on Thursday to back his claim that some of them could be paid.
The president said the caravan would be stopped before they reached the border, mocking Democrats for trying to influence the immigration issue.
“They wanted that caravan, and there are those who say that caravan didn’t just happen,” Trump said.
He told supporters the Mexican government would “hopefully” stop the caravan before it reached their own Southern border.
If Mexico failed, he reassured the crowd, he would send the military to the Southern border.
He ripped Democrats for favoring illegal immigration, accusing them of wanting to import more voters into the United States.
“Hey, they’re not so stupid when you think about it,” he said. “But they are crazy.”
Trump repeated that he needed more Republicans in Congress to help him change the immigration laws, calling them the “worst in the world” for allowing migrants to claim asylum and get released into the country.
He admitted that the flood of migrants coming into the country was “his fault.”
“I caused it because I have created such an incredible economy and I have created so many jobs, I have made this country so great that everybody wants to come in!”
INVASION USA
BORDER CARAVAN PUTS TRUMP LEGACY ON THE LINE
Pat Buchanan: How president handles issue will determine November election, 2020
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East.
Yet far more critical to the future of our civilization is the ongoing invasion of the West from the Third World.
Consider the impact of the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 to throw open Germany’s doors to 1 million refugees from Syria’s civil war.
Last weekend, in a crushing blow to Merkel, the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of her CDU, won its smallest share of the vote in half a century, 37 percent. Her coalition party, the SPD, saw its share of the Bavarian vote fall to a historic low of less than 10 percent.
The right-wing Alternative for Deutchland saw its support rise to 10 percent and has become a force in German politics. Some conservatives are urging the CDU to adopt the AfD hardline on illegal immigration.
The message sent by the Bavarian electorate is the message voters across Europe have been sending to their own capitals for years: You are failing in your first duty – defense of the homeland from foreign invasion. Mass migration of unassimilable peoples and cultures from a global South represents an existential threat to our Europe.
As Merkel’s chancellorship approaches its end, French President Emmanuel Macron, her progressive EU partner, has seen his approval fall to below 30 percent.
The U.S.-led NATO alliance may guard the Baltic and Black Sea regions against a Russian invasion from the east. But in Central, Southern and Western Europe, the more feared invaders are the peoples of Africa and the Muslim world, whose numbers are expected to triple or quadruple by this century’s end.
And as their numbers grow, so, too, does their desperation to escape, even at risk of their lives, the poverty, wars and repression of their homelands to cross the Med and fill the empty spaces left by a depopulating Europe.
It also now appears that the U.S. elections, not three weeks away, may be affected by another immigration crisis on the U.S. border.
As of Thursday, a caravan of 4,000 refugees without visas had crossed from Honduras into Guatemala and was heading toward Mexico. By Election Day, it will either have been stopped, or it will be here. And this caravan is a portent of things to come.
According to the Washington Post, during FY 2018, which ended last month, 107,212 members of “family units” crossed over into the U.S., “obliterating the previous record of 77,857 set in 2016.”
Citing DHS figures, the Post adds, “Border patrol agents arrested 16,658 family members in September alone, the highest one-month total on record and an 80 percent increase from July.”
When Trump, under intense political fire, ended his “zero tolerance” policy of separating refugees from their children, this message went out to Mexico and Central America:
Bring your kids with you when you cross the border. They will have to stay with you, and they cannot be held for more than 20 days. Thus, when they are released, you will be released to await a hearing on your claim of asylum. The odds are excellent that you can vanish into the U.S. population and never be sent back.
Enraged, Trump has threatened to cut off aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala if they do not stop the caravans and has warned Mexico he will use the U.S. military to secure our border.
Unwanted mass migration is the issue of our time, as there is no foreseeable end to it before it alters America irremediably.
As these migrants are almost all poor, not highly skilled and do not speak English, most will join that segment of our population that pays no income taxes but qualifies for social welfare benefits like food stamps, medical care and free education in our public schools.
They are thus a net drain upon the resources of a nation that is already, at full employment, running a deficit of $779 billion a year.
These migrants, however, are a present and future benefit to the Democratic Party that built and maintains our mammoth welfare state, and which, in presidential elections, routinely wins 70 to 90 percent of the votes of people whose trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Not without reason, Democrats believe that if they can change the composition of the American electorate, they can control America forever.
If Donald Trump was elected on any one issue, it was immigration and his promises to secure the border, build the wall and halt the invasion.
How he deals with the impending crisis of the migrant caravan may affect both the fate of his party in November and his presidency in 2020.
https://www.wnd.com/2018/10/border-caravan-puts-trump-legacy-on-the-line/#pmkuiiM0qr6G9cjL.99
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Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats want to repeal Trump’s tax cuts and replace them with cash payouts for the poor and working class
CNBC.com
With midterm elections 2½ weeks away and the 2020 presidential race around the corner, prominent Democrats are embracing an ambitious idea: Repeal and replace the $1.5 trillion Republican tax plan.
The proposals would get rid of the tax cuts and, in turn, funnel that money into government-guaranteed cash for low- and middle-income households.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., announced a plan this week that would give working families up to $6,000 each year, with the option of receiving monthly payments. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., outlined a similar idea last year. A bill from Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., would allow family caregivers and students to receive the money as well.
“The idea was to provide a clear contrast with Donald Trump,” Khanna told CNBC in an interview. “You know what you could actually do with this money? You could give anyone making under $75,000 a raise.”
The measures are significantly more dramatic than some previous Democratic proposals – a reflection of the proximity to the midterm elections and the early interest surrounding the presidential race in 2020. Harris and Brown are potential contenders for the White House, and Democrats have been seeking bold ideas to present to their energized electorate.
“There’s all kind of evidence that voters are not looking for incremental solutions,” said Adam Ruben, campaigns director at the Economic Security Project, a liberal think tank that has pushed the idea. “They’re looking for a big vision of how to pick up all the people who have been left behind in this economy.”
Harris’ plan would create a new tax credit of up to $3,000 for individuals or $6,000 for households. They could opt to receive the money in a lump sum after filing their annual tax return or in monthly installments of $250 to $500, which Harris said could help reduce reliance on payday lenders. The credit would be refundable, which means workers would receive the money even if they don’t owe any taxes. Households earning up to $100,000 would be eligible.
The bill shares many of the same elements of an earlier bill from Brown and Khanna. Their proposal would expand the existing earned income tax credit up to roughly $12,000 for a family with three children. The money could also be paid monthly, but it would only cover households earning up to about $76,000. The lawmakers introduced the bill last fall with more than 50 co-sponsors in the House; no other senators signed on to the measure at the time.
“We’ve seen the debate shift,” Khanna said. “My hope is that other presidential candidates will look at the Brown plan and embrace it as the alternative to Trump.”
Ruben said his organization has spoken with other potential Democratic candidates about the idea but declined to specify whom. Earlier this year, Senate Democrats announced a more modest proposal to roll back the GOP tax cuts: Move the top tax rate for individuals back to 39 percent, raise the corporate tax rate 4 percentage points to 25 percent and reinstate the alternative minimum tax.
Rep. John Delaney, D-Md., who has announced he is running in 2020, has called for nudging the corporate tax rate up to 23 percent to pay for $1 trillion in infrastructure spending. He told CNBC he also supports expanding the earned income tax credit but did not say by how much.
“We must reform our tax code in a way that is fiscally responsible, addresses our long-term economic competitiveness needs and helps working families,” he said in a statement.
Indeed, the new tax credits come with a hefty price tag. Brown and Khanna’s plan is expected to cost about $1.4 trillion – just about what the Republican tax plan costs. Harris’ bill is likely to be in the same ballpark. That’s why liberals say repealing the current law is a critical component of their plan.
Yet Democrats have repeatedly attacked the GOP tax cuts for ballooning the deficit. And while they argue that the new credits would support long-term economic growth, they are not claiming such a plan would pay for itself.
Republicans are preparing for battle.
The conservative Heritage Foundation released an analysis this week showing repealing the tax cuts in 2020 would cost the average household nearly $27,000 in lost take-home pay over the next decade. Some of the decline is due to higher individual tax rates, said Adam Michel, a policy analyst at Heritage and one of the authors of the report. But most of it is the result of lower economic growth because of higher corporate rates, he said.
“That’s where a lot of the juice comes from,” Michel said. “That’s the thing I’m frankly most concerned about.”
Democrats have also criticized the GOP for passing its sweeping tax plan with a party-line vote. Yet it seems unlikely that any Republicans would support repealing and replacing what GOP leadership has dubbed the “crown jewel” of its legislative agenda.
“The tax cuts launched our booming economy into the stratosphere and anybody advocating for repeal will have to explain why they want to reverse the jobs and wage growth our country has seen since the law passed,” said John Ashbrook, a Republican strategist who worked under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The Nov. 6 elections will be a testing ground for the Democratic agenda, and Economic Security Project’s Ruben said the Democratic Party will need fresh thinking to connect with voters in 2020.
“People want to feel the confidence that someone is going to fight for them and push for big changes and not let classic Washington gridlock or the constrained sense of what is acceptable in politics get in the way,” he said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/kamala-harris-democrats-push-to-repeal-and-replace-trump-tax-cuts.html
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