Knarf's Knewz Channel

[knarf]

Risky big business, like grabbing all the valuables out of a burning house.

It is a National Geography good/long website, but well worth seeing the massive memes of our day, global warming vs billionaires - head to head.      

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/sabetta-yamal-largest-gas-field/?sf209814638=1   

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[knarf]

When Gazans declare: 'We Want To Live,’ Hamas smears them as traitors, junkies and fools – then beats them up. No wonder Gazans find it hard to distinguish between the repression of Hamas, Abbas and Israel

For four days in a row, thousands of Gazans from the politically neutral, decentralized popular movement "We Want To Live" have taken to the streets, protesting the ever-worsening living conditions in the Strip, despite the unimaginable bone-breaking brutality inflicted on demonstrators by Hamas.

The movement’s activists officially emphasized that they're not targeting any party in particular, but are standing against the inhumane policies of all parties involved with Gaza. That long list includes the recent Hamas tax hikes on basic consumer goods, the Palestinian Authority’s economic sanctions on Gaza, Israel's the blockade, the intra-Palestinian divisions. Young people simply declared: We’ve had enough of it all.

Hamas, a significant player in sustaining Gaza’s unlivable status quo, deployed all its tricks to suppress this 'unlicensed,' guerilla popular movement.

Hamas leaders, officials and activists deliberately propagated the message that the protests were "pushed from the outside," "controlled by Israel and the PA intelligence" and want to bring down the "Palestinian armed resistance."

That delegitimization campaign paved the way for Hamas security forces to repress the masses in every way possible. Protesters were demonized as suicidal, junkies, traitors and drug-addicts, and their "accomplices" - the media, and human rights organizations - were branded as paid shills of foreign, outsider actors and their agendas.

Even the moderates within Hamas – who acknowledged that the protests were a genuine expression of frustration and anger – eventually justified the brutal repression and abuse of protesters by saying that either they were "protesting the against wrong people."

They declared that if the demonstrators really wanted a better life, they should instead protest Israel’s blockade and Abbas’ sanctions, or, even more cynically, that the masses are docile, easy to infiltrate and manipulate against their own "best interests."

Every party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now trying to define the Palestinians' "best interests." Curiously, those interests always coincide with the party in question's own interests, whether contingent or longer-term.

When those protests turned against Hamas, Israel and the PA suddenly praised the heroism of Gazan protesters, condemned Hamas’ violence in dealing with the protests, and supported the protest’s demand of seeking freedom, dignity and basic rights. Suddenly, Netanyahu’s Arabic media spokesperson, Ofer Gendelman, stated his unprecedented belief that Gazans "deserve to live."

Gendelman, like Hamas, chose to ignore that many of those protesters were the same people who’ve been marchingagainst Israel’s blockade for almost a year at the separation fence, and incurred the death of 259 and injury of about 29,000 protesters.

Once the discourse shifts to the Great March of Return, then those in Netanyahu’s inner circle instantly forget the suffering of Gaza and brand the protests as a fake "Hamas-orchestrated movement."

Similarly, when Palestinians in Ramallah protested Abbas’ economic sanctions on the besieged enclave, they were violently dispersed by the PA security forces, and they, along with similar protests in Gaza, were branded as a "Hamas-orchestrated movement."

So, it should be no surprise when the same Hamas which was only too delighted to oversee the Great Return March suddenly pretends that there’s no genuine motive for Gazans to be angry and furious when the masses stood to it, while crying crocodile tears about Gaza’s misery when they want to attack Israel or the PA.

ust as Israel is now encouraging Gazans to exercise their right to protest their slow death (but only if it's against Hamas), while shooting at those who dare face IDF soldiers at the separation fence, Hamas’ mosques in Gaza were calling on people to engage in anti-Abbas protests and to participate in the weekly Great Return March, while simultaneously its security forces were crushing the bones of the anti-Hamas protesters.

This disgusting amnesia and selective demonization/praise of Gazan masses only shows that, when it comes to Gaza’s suffering, nobody wants to look into the mirror and see their contribution to this manmade disaster.

Israel’s blockade, the PA’s sanctions and Hamas’ ruthless totalitarian rule all create a uniquely insufferable abyss where two million Gazans, the majority of whom are children, have been subject to unparalleled brutalities over the last 12 years with no way to escape or end their nightmare. All three parties are dedicated to preventing Gazans from having a say in the course of their lives, or actualizing any sense of agency.

It's hard to tell the difference between Hamas’ latest arbitrary arrests, night raids and harsh beating of women, children and elderly and those of the Israel and the PA.

Similarly, Hamas’ latest news fabrications, its dehumanization of popular protests and its targeting and kidnapping of journalists, paramedics and human rights activists, is just the same as Israel’s and the PA’s entrenched practices, aimed at containing and controlling the occupied Palestinian population.

https://www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/.premium-how-hamas-became-an-enemy-of-the-palestinian-people-1.7025609

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[knarf]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has reignited the debate over the Electoral College — she wants to get rid of it, naturally. I say “reignited” because this is a very old argument. But I’m going to skip rehashing the usual — and to my mind, persuasive — arguments in favor of the Electoral College.

Arguments against it tend to boil down to two gripes: It’s very old-fashioned, and it’s undemocratic.

In 2016, the last time we had this kerfuffle, “Handbook of Electoral System Choice” author Josep Colomer wrote in The Washington Post: “The US electoral college is a medieval relic . . . The United States is the only country in the world to still use the system to elect a president.”

Warren says she wants to get rid of the Electoral College because she wants “every vote” to matter. The widespread insinuation — or the assumption — is that this is how most enlightened democracies do it: a direct election of a single national leader.

That’s nonsense. First, most democracies don’t have presidents like we do (or at all). We combine the head of state (the symbolic, generally weak representative of the nation) and the head of government (the person who actually calls the shots in politics).

The UK has a monarch (head of state) and a prime minister (head of government). Sometimes a legislative body picks the head of government or head of state. Sometimes voters pick one but not the other. In the Netherlands, the head of state is a monarch and the head of government is elected by the legislature (i.e., the majority party).

In New Caledonia the head of government is elected by the legislature, and the head of state is the president of France. Go figure.

There are countries that combine both roles in one person — Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Ghana, Brazil, Benin and a few others — but no Western European country has a unified leader directly elected by the people.

Even this is misleading. As Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution has observed, America is the only advanced democracy that has decided to strip its political parties of the power to select their own candidates. Until 1972 — through conventions, smoke-filled rooms, etc. — the parties, not the voters, determined who their presidential candidates would be. This function is among the informal checks and balances that make democracy workable around the globe; we scrapped it in favor of ever more open primaries.

America now suffers from a political paradox: This is one of the most partisan times in American history, but the parties have never been weaker. Abolishing the Electoral College would make parties even weaker by further incentivizing populist politicians to work outside the system to cultivate celebrity and cults of personality.

I think the way the Electoral College forces candidates to build broader coalitions across the nation is valuable. The way it minimizes the risks of interminable recounts and voter fraud (a single national tally would be a nightmare logistically) is important. But none of these things are essential by themselves.

What’s essential is the ability to have some check on direct democracy and the centralization of power that comes with it. Our specific constitutional architecture isn’t necessarily sacred, but the underlying idea behind it should be.

The founders understood that democracy depends on some undemocratic mechanisms to maintain liberty. For instance, the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court are not purely democratic. You can’t vote away my right to free speech.

Most of our political problems today are a result of our political gatekeepers surrendering to the mob. All extreme political movements are hostile to restraints on their will. This is what unites the progressives who want to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College and “reform” the “undemocratic” Senate and those on the right who celebrate President Trump’s emergency declaration and other attempts to rule by fiat.

In a healthy democracy, leaders are answerable not just to voters but to legislatures, the courts, the states and parties. The decades-long trend has been to dismantle this arrangement to make presidents answerable to no one but the slice of electorate that voted for them.

And even there, those voters are increasingly more interested in seeing their leader “win” than in holding them accountable. Abolishing the Electoral College would be another step toward a kind of national absolutism, which is an even worse medieval relic.

https://nypost.com/2019/03/22/the-electoral-college-may-be-medieval-but-its-a-bulwark-of-our-democracy/?utm_campaign=partnerfeed&utm_medium=syndicated&utm_source=flipboard

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[RE]

More like a Bullwark of our Fascist Plutocracy.

RE

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[knarf]

The African-American civil rights group, which shepherded the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, endorsed adding LGBTQ people to those the act protects.

The NAACP, the country’s oldest African-American civil rights organization, publicly endorsed the Equality Act, a federal LGBTQ anti-discrimination bill.

“We support what it does — and we support it now,” Hilary Shelton, the organization's D.C. bureau director, told NBC News on Friday. “It’s important that it gets through.”

Shelton said the group had previously endorsed the bill in meetings with two of its sponsors, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I.

The NAACP, which was founded in 1909, was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin; enforced desegregation of schools and the right to vote; and required equal access to public places and employment.

Reintroduced in Congress last week, the Equality Act would modify that same Civil Rights Act to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of protected classes.

“We believe the same protections that we have worked for so hard over the 110 years of the NAACP should be extended to all Americans, particularly members of the LGBTQ community,” Shelton said.

Shelton pointed to previous NAACP support for LGBTQ discrimination protections in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and in the Affordable Care Act. The group also supported expanding hate crimes legislation to cover crimes committed because of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The organization’s support came into question earlier this week after Gregory T. Angelo, the former president of gay conservative group Log Cabin Republicans, implied the NAACP was not behind the bill. In an opinion piece titled "Don't Fall for the 'Equality Act,'" Angelo stated that "African American legacy civil rights groups are absent" from an "exhaustive list" of organizations supporting the Equality Act. He specifically cited the NAACP.

Angelo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/we-support-it-naacp-endorses-lgbtq-equality-act-n986476

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[Eddie]

More like a Bullwark of our Fascist Plutocracy.

RE

I'm with RE on this one. I do NOT agree that the major parties have given up any power in the electoral process. The primary process has changed, the way we choose Electors has not.

If you want to see an American political landscape not dominated by the current parties, you have to go back to the time prior to the Civil War.

The Electoral College is how the Democrat elites and the Republican elites have cemented their overwhelming power. I'm happy to to see it scrapped, because whatever it was supposed to protect us from is a lesser threat than being dominated by entrenched interests the way we are now.

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[Eddie]

More than 500 cities, counties, and Native American tribes just slapped the Sackler family with another lawsuit.

More than 500 cities, counties, and Native American tribes across the country filed a class action lawsuit Monday that argues the billionaire family behind Purdue Pharma “initiated and perpetuated” an entire generation of opioid users for their own financial gain by marketing their drug, OxyContin, as safe to prescribe.
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The nearly 200-page lawsuit — which devotes 11 pages to listing the places suing — names eight people in the Sackler family, including Richard Sackler, the scion who’s come under increased scrutiny for the marketing methods he pushed while president of Purdue. The family made billions off OxyContin, first introduced to the market in 1996.

Thousands of lawsuits against Purdue Pharma already allege the company played an outsized role in stoking the opioid epidemic. But the Sacklers — rarely named in the early lawsuits — have increasingly become a target for ire. With their communities steeped in an overdose crisis that’s cost the nation hundreds of thousands of lives over the past several years, cities and other players want someone to pay.

As the Sacklers become more and more tied to litigation about the opioid crisis, their non-drug-related pursuits have come under fire too.

In the lawsuit filed Monday, the 500 plaintiffs argue the Sacklers should’ve done more to stop their company from continuing its allegedly deceptive marketing and that Purdue had an “obligation to report suspicious prescribing ran head-on into the Sackler Defendants’ marketing strategy.”

“Purdue and the Sackler defendants manipulated and misrepresented medical science to serve their own agenda at great human cost,” the lawsuit alleges.
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Massachusetts’ attorney general has also sued the Sacklers and argues the family led doctors to believe, incorrectly, that OxyContin was a weaker, safer drug than morphine. And New York City added the Sackler family to its existing lawsuit against Purdue Pharma in January. On Thursday, Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, along with Republican Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, requested documents from Purdue relating to the Sacklers’ level of involvement in ratcheting up sales.

The allegations in the lawsuits largely relate to the Sacklers’ involvement in Purdue’s marketing of the high-dose drug. Purdue settled with the Justice Department in 2007 over allegations relating to its marketing practices and agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines. As part of the settlement, three of the company’s executives pleaded guilty to misleading the public about OxyContin’s potential for addiction, which physicians sold as a less-addictive alternative to other painkillers.

Significant portions of the lawsuit relating to Purdue’s alleged misconduct post-2007, however, are redacted.

The name of the family, made up of prominent philanthropists, also graces museum halls, university buildings, and hospital wings. Now, some recipients of Sackler money have considered cutting ties. The Tate institution, of the Tate Britain and Tate Modern galleries, said this week that it’s not accepting any further donations from the Sacklers. And London’s National Portrait Gallery, under pressure from activists, dropped talks with the Sackler Trust for a $1.3 million donation.

Last month, during a busy Saturday night at New York City’s Guggenheim museum, protesters dropped thousands of fake prescriptions into the institution’s famous atrium to protest its Sackler ties.
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Purdue and the Sacklers have repeatedly denied the claims against them, and Purdue has specifically argued that it’s being blamed for an addiction problem too complex to pin to one actor. Drug overdoses have risen exponentially in the U.S. for decades, even as prescriptions for opioids like OxyContin have dropped off. Pain patients, meanwhile, have also argued their drugs are being unfairly demonized.

Synthetic opioids like fentanyl are now considered to be the primary culprit behind overdose deaths, but those deaths often involve more than one substance.

https://news.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/evewqk/the-billionaire-family-behind-oxycontin-is-finally-having-its-moment-of-reckoning

This is just going after the money. The American system of justice.

I'm going to continue to maintain that you won't end a drug epidemic by "protecting" people who claim to be victims and spending billions to interdict the flows of legal and illegal drugs, or by brow-beating doctors into not prescribing pain-killers for people with acute pain (my biggest gripe at the moment  impacts me directly).

As long as demand exists for drugs, people will find a way to get them. Oxycontin is a decent drug that a lot of people abused I'm sure the people who sold it were happy to make money off it. Why not, it was legal. It was approved by the FDA. But they didn't intend for people to dissolve it in something and shoot it up.

What a silly world where people can claim they aren't at fault for their own bad decisions and their own self-destructive behavior. Fucking ridiculous.

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[knarf]

It’s all about “Us” this weekend.

Jordan Peele’s follow up to “Get Out” scored a huge $29 million Friday including $7.4 mil from Thursday previews. By Sunday night, the modern horror film could have $70 million in the bank.

This is despite some disappointing reaction from social media last night. A lot of Tweets I read didn’t find “Us” as compelling as reviewers did. But that’s not going to stop the momentum. People want to see this movie.

“Us” will not top last fall’s “Halloween,” which had an opening weekend of $76.2 million. But it will do twice the business of “Get Out”– that’s kind of weird factoid because no one knew what “Get Out” was when it opened.

Still, the important thing here is that Jordan Peele has become a top filmmaker, he’s using top black actors, and he’s part of the quickly changing landscape of cinema.

keep refreshing…

https://www.showbiz411.com/2019/03/23/modern-horror-rules-as-jordan-peeles-us-brings-in-29-million-opening-eyes-60-70-mil-weekend

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[knarf]

13 PICTURES IN CANT CAPTURE.

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — More than 450 passengers were airlifted off a cruise ship that got stranded off Norway’s western coast in bad weather before the rescue operation was suspended Sunday so the vessel could be towed to a nearby port, Norwegian authorities said.

Five helicopters flying in the pitch dark took the evacuated passengers from the tossing ship in a painstaking process that continued throughout the night. The rescues took place under difficult conditions that included wind gusts up to 38 knots (43 mph) and waves over 8 meters (26 feet).

Some 17 people were hospitalized with injuries, police said.

Passenger Alexus Sheppard told The Associated Press in a message sent from the Viking Sky that people with injuries or disabilities were winched off the cruise ship first. The atmosphere onboard grew calmer after the rescue operation’s first dramatic hours, Sheppard said.

“It was frightening at first. And when the general alarm sounded it became VERY real,” she wrote.

Photos posted on social media showed the ship listing from side to side, and furniture smashing violently into walls.

“We saw two people taken off by stretcher,” another passenger, Dereck Brown, told Norwegian newspaper Romsdal Budstikke. “People were alarmed. Many were frightened but they were calm.”

The Viking Sky carried 1,373 passengers and crew members when it had engine trouble in an unpredictable area of the Norwegian coast known for rough, frigid waters. The crew issued a mayday call Saturday afternoon.

Police said the crew, fearing the ship would run aground, managed to anchor in Hustadvika Bay so the evacuations could take place.

Coast guard official Emil Heggelund estimated to newspaper VG that the ship was 100 meters (328 feet) from striking rocks under the water and 900 meters (2,953 feet) from shore when it stopped.

The ship was visiting the Norwegian towns and cities of Narvik, Alta, Tromso, Bodo and Stavanger before its scheduled arrival Tuesday in the British port of Tilbury on the River Thames. The passengers mostly were a mix of American, British, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian citizens.

The airlifts continued at a steady pace Sunday morning, as the vessel was being prepared for towing by two tugboats to the nearby town of Molde, according to Per Fjerd at the Joint Rescue Coordination Center.

The helicopters stopped taking people off the ship when the ship was ready for the trip to shore, and 463 passengers had been evacuated by that time, the Joint Rescue center said. Three of the ship’s four engines were working as of Sunday morning, the center said.

The Viking Sky, a vessel with a gross tonnage of 47,800, was delivered in 2017 to operator Viking Ocean Cruises.

https://apnews.com/a45c3b5a085a402e9242f5152dc77474

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[knarf]

Austin Spivey, a 24-year-old woman in Washington, has been looking for a relationship for years. She's been on several dating apps - OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge, Tinder, Bumble. She's on a volleyball team, where she has a chance to meet people with similar interests in a casual setting. She's even let The Washington Post set her up.

"I'm a very optimistic dater," Spivey says, adding that she's "always energetic to keep trying." But it can get a little frustrating, she adds, when she's talking to someone on a dating app and they disappear mid-conversation. (She's vanished too, she admits.)

Spivey has a lot of company in her frustration, and in her singledom. Just over half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 - 51 percent of them - said they do not have a steady romantic partner, according to data from the General Social Survey released this week. That 2018 figure is up significantly from 33 percent in 2004 - the lowest figure since the question was first asked in 1986 - and up slightly from 45 percent in 2016. The shift has helped drive singledom to a record high among the overall public, among whom 35 percent say they have no steady partner, but only up slightly from 33 percent in 2016 and 2014.

There are several other trends that go along with the increase in young single Americans. Women are having fewer children, and they're having them later in life. The median age of first marriage is increasing. And according to a 2017 report from the Pew Research Center, among those who have never married but are open to it, most say a major reason is because they haven't found the right person.

Of course, not everyone who's under 35 and single is looking to change that. Caitlin Phillips, a 22-year-old student at the University of Georgia, is open to love if it walked into her life, but she's not actively looking for it. "I'm too busy, honestly. I travel a lot and I have a great group of friends that I hang out with," Phillips said in a phone interview, adding that she's working in addition to studying for a degree in journalism.

Ford Torney, a 26-year-old man in Baltimore, does want a steady partner - he just hasn't found the right connection yet. Torney says he occasionally feels isolated in his social circle, because most of his friends are married or in serious relationships. He has to remind himself, he says, "that most people my age aren't married, and I just have an outlier in terms of my social group." Among his guy friends who are single and around his age, most of them aren't looking for relationships, he says.

The GSS survey reflects similar trends from the federal Current Population Survey as analyzed by the Pew Research Center. The CPS data asked about living with a spouse or partner as opposed to simply having one. The Pew analysis found 42 percent of American adults who did not live with a spouse or partner in 2017, up from 39 percent in 2007. It also found an increase in the share of adults under 35 who didn't live with a spouse or partner over that period, from 56 percent to 61 percent.

According to the General Social Survey data, 41 percent of Democrats are without a steady partner, compared with only 29 percent of Republicans. Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to not have a steady partner: 51 percent vs. 32 percent, respectively.

The share of non-partnered Americans is also higher among those unemployed - 54 percent, up from 44 percent in 2016. Just under a third - 32 percent - of employed adults don't have a steady partner.

The General Social Survey was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago using in-person interviews of a random national sample of 2,348 adults from April 12 to Nov. 10, 2018. Results on the partner question is based on a subsample of 1,181 interviews and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Laura Lane, co-host of the podcast "This Is Why You're Single" and co-author of a book by the same name, says in an interview that her brother and his girlfriend got together when he was looking for a job and living with his parents. But Lane has also seen unemployment affecting a person's confidence and, in turn, torpedoing their efforts to find a steady partner. In her early 20s, she dated someone who had recently finished graduate school and was wondering what he was going to do with his life. "He was very much struggling with his sense of self," Lane recalls, and as a result their budding connection didn't turn into something solid. "Now he has a start-up and is doing great."

Lane says a lot of people who write in to her podcast looking for love advice are unhappy with their lives - and they think another person will fix that. "You really have to find that yourself," she says, adding that nothing really clicked, romantically, for her or for her co-host Angela Spera "until we had something personally exciting that we were doing. I think it was an energetic thing where we attracted people into our lives."

They're both in happy relationships now.

https://www.sfgate.com/lifestyle/article/It-s-not-just-you-New-data-shows-more-than-half-13706291.php#photo-6627923

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[knarf]

Black Smoke Towers Over Houston Amid Petrochemical Blaze

(Bloomberg) -- Oil byproducts from a damaged storage facility contaminated the Houston Ship Channel and created a cloud of cancer-causing benzene over the waterway, the latest mutation of one of the worst Gulf Coast chemical disasters in more than a decade.

The U.S. Coast Guard is forbidding vessel traffic on a stretch of the key industrial shipping route after a wall collapse and fire at Intercontinental Terminals Co.’s already-damaged chemical storage complex on Friday. A mix of toxic gasoline ingredients, firefighting foam and dirty water flowed from the site into the channel, and a benzene plume above the water poses a threat to ship crews, said Coast Guard Capt. Kevin Oditt.

Residents look on at the plume of smoke rising from a fire at the ITC petrochemical storage.

The channel, which is not a source of drinking water for Houston or its suburbs, is the newest victim of a calamity that began unfolding almost a week ago when tanks holding byproducts of the oil-refining process at ITC’s facility erupted in flames. A mile-high plume of inky black smoke towered over the fourth-largest American city for days until crews extinguished the blaze on March 20.

That was followed by benzene alerts that shut down Deer Park and other suburbs for half a day, the collapse of a containment wall and Friday’s new fires in three wrecked storage tanks and a drainage ditch.
‘Never-Ending’

Nausea, headaches and other symptoms drove about 1.000 people to seek treatment at a pop-up clinic, with 15 of the most-severe cases loaded onto ambulances and hauled to hospital emergency rooms.

“It’s been a never-ending, re-occurring case of things not working out as planned,” Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton said during a media briefing on Saturday.

Weary residents are on edge, wondering what’s next and when normal life will return. For many Houstonians, it’s the worst industrial disaster since the 2005 explosion at BP Plc’s Texas City refinery that killed 15.

“There’s more tanks in there. Is it going to reignite? It’s very uncertain,” said Mercy Reyna, 50, who’s been suffering from headaches, eye discomfort and chest tightness. “The trust is not there. We feel like we’re not being told the truth of what’s going on.”

Since the initial blaze was squelched earlier in the week, ITC made two unsuccessful attempts to drain a charred tank that’s holding pygas, a petroleum derivative composed largely of benzene. Early on Friday, ITC executives estimated they would have that tank emptied in about 12 hours; then the wall failed and flames erupted nearby.
Fortifications

Crews launched a third attempt to empty the tank around 3:30 p.m. local time on Saturday, the Mitsui & Co.-owned company said. Executives are watching weather forecasts and wind gauges because anything that disturbs the layer of protective foam atop the chemicals could allow fires to break out and benzene to waft across the city.

“The same number of tanks need to be drained as yesterday,” said Brent Weber, ITC’s incident commander.

Reyna and her 18-year-old daughter Rebecca had been waiting for 2 1/2 hours at the pop-up medical center when the new fire erupted. They left without being seen because they didn’t want to get marooned there if the city ordered everyone to stay indoors.
Burning Sensation

“I was filling out the paper work inside, and my eyes were running and running with tears,” Mercy Reyna said. “It was just that desperation of wanting to get your eyes out and just rub them and rinse them and put them back. It’s just that burning sensation.”

Although the company said Friday that there were about 60,000 barrels (2.52 million gallons) of hazardous chemicals still held in the damaged section of its complex, by Saturday morning it no longer knew how much remained. Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he’ll file a lawsuit accusing ITC of violating clean-air laws.

The ship channel is one of the busiest commercial shipping facilities in North America, connecting Houston’s manufacturing and oil-refining nexus to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It remained closed on Saturday.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board announced late Thursday it will be investigating the blaze. The Texas National Guard dispatched troops to assist local authorities with air monitoring after cancer-causing benzene wafted across the area, prompting take-shelter alerts and road closures.

(Adds third attempt to empty flammable liquid from damaged storage tank in 10th paragraph.)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/houston-disaster-spills-into-channel-as-illness-proliferates/ar-BBV6T6R#page=2

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[knarf]

CAIR has a long history of affiliation with the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. CAIR members have often defended the actions of Hamas in Gaza.

A large protest was held outside the Hilton hotel in Los Angeles where Ilhan Omar will be speaking Saturday night at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of Greater Los Angeles’s fourth annual Valley Banquet.

VIDEO I CANT COPY

The protesters lined the sidewalks waving Israeli and American flags and held up signs saying “Omar equals hate” and various other slogans, supporting Israel and denouncing Omar.


Protesters staying at the Hilton hotel waved large banners saying “CAIR hates Jews” and “Ilhan hates Israel” from their balconies.

A smaller counter-protest rose up in support of Omar. Minor confrontations and verbal exchanges were reported by NBC 4 Los Angeles.


Los Angeles Police were notified ahead of time of the protest and were in the area to maintain order. The streets around the hotel were closed until later Saturday night.


The CAIR event, titled “Advancing Justice: Empowering Valley Muslims,” is awarding Jewish Voice for Peace the “2019 Champion of Justice” accolade.


CAIR has a long history of affiliation with the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. CAIR members have often defended the actions of Hamas in Gaza.


FBI investigators previously uncovered evidence establishing CAIR's place in the "Palestine Committee," which was a Muslim Brotherhood-created network aimed at helping Hamas in the United States, according to a report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. In 2009, US District Court Judge Jorge Solis ruled that there is "at least a prima facie case as to CAIR's involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas."


Moreover, the organization was officially designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates in 2014, placing it in the company of al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others.


Omar will be a keynote speaker at the CAIR event alongside Hassan Shibly, the executive director of CAIR-Florida, who is vehemently anti-Israel, who has said he believes that Hezbollah and Hamas are not terrorist organizations, and is known for openly discriminating against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

In 2014, Shibly claimed that the Hamas terror tunnels uncovered in Operation Protective Edge in the northern Gaza Strip were “being used in the defense of Palestine.”


The Conservative Review reported that director of CAIR-Los Angeles Hussam Ayloush has suggested that the US is “partly responsible” for the San Bernardino terrorist attacks.


“Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy – as Americans, as the West – has fueled that extremism,” he said.


The revelation of Omar’s upcoming address comes after a major Twitter storm in which she accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.


Omar received heavy backlash for the comments and was accused of antisemitism, with leaders on both the Right and Left condemning her remarks.


Just a few days later, she was also caught up in a controversy over whether or not she would be speaking alongside an official known for his antisemitic comments at an emergency gala dinner for Yemen on February 23 in Tampa, Florida.


It was revealed that she would give the keynote address at an Islamic Relief USA dinner alongside Yousef Abdallah, who has advocated for violence against Jews and expressed antisemitic sentiments on his social media pages. Omar's public relations team pushed back and the event’s marketing materials and online invitations were changed. 


The public relations team claimed that it was a clerical error and that she was never set to speak alongside Abdallah in the first place.

https://www.jpost.com/American-Politics/Heavy-protests-against-Ilhan-Omar-speech-at-Los-Angeles-CAIR-event-584403?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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[K-Dog]

You can't copy the video because it is hosted at Facebook and presented in an iframe.  An iframe is a web page that runs inside a box in another web page and it has it's own URL.  Facepalm uses a lot of them.

If I could get down to the actual HTML I could put it in.  Like all embeds the video remains posted at the source and is never downloaded.  It can vanish at any time.

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[knarf]

Mount Everest expedition operators are finding increasing numbers of climbers' dead bodies on the world's highest peak as high temperatures melt glaciers and snow.
More than 200 mountaineers have died on the peak since 1922, when the first climbers' deaths on Everest were recorded. The majority of bodies are believed to have remained buried under glaciers or snow.
"Due to the impact of climate change and global warming, snow and glaciers are fast melting and dead bodies are increasingly being exposed and discovered by climbers," Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of Nepal Mountaineering Association, told CNN.
"Since 2008 my own company has brought down seven dead bodies of some mountaineers, some dating back to a British expedition in the 1970s."

'It's getting worse'
Studies suggest that glaciers in the Everest region are melting and thinning.
Sobit Kunwar, an official of Nepal National Mountain Guides Association, told CNN: "It's a very serious issue because it's increasingly common and affects our operations.

"We are really concerned about this because it's getting worse," he added. "We are trying to spread information about it so that there can be a coordinated way to deal with it."
The association's treasurer, Tenzeeng Sherpa, said that climate change is affecting Nepal rapidly, saying that in parts glaciers are melting by a meter every year.
"Most of the dead bodies we bring to the towns, but those we can't bring down we respect by saying prayers for them and covering them with rock or snow."
He lamented the authorities' lack of action in dealing with dead bodies encountered on the mountain. "We have not seen the government taking any responsibility," he said.
'Herculean task'
Recovering and removing bodies from the higher camps can be both dangerous and expensive.
Ang Tshering Sherpa, one of the first pupils to study at a mountaineering school built by the New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and a pioneer of Everest tourism, said that one of the most dangerous recoveries was at 8,700 meters, near the peak.

"The body weighed 150kg [23.6 stone] and it had to be recovered from a difficult place at that altitude. It was a Herculean task," he said.
He added that it takes a long time to get funding from the government to remove bodies. "But we, the operators, feel it is our duty and so whenever we find them, we bring the bodies down."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/asia/everest-glacier-dead-bodies-scli-intl/index.html?cid=web-alerts&nsid=96301346

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[knarf]

The Venezuelan Army has deployed S-300 air defense missiles to a key airbase south of Caracas the Capital of Venezuela , the Image Sat International reported on Sunday, March 24.

According to Image Sat, the Venezuelan armed forces activated their S-300 missiles after completing their military drills in February.

The source reveals through satellite imagery that the additional S300 missiles that have been deployed to the Captain Manuel Rios Airbase in the Guarico state of Venezuela.



In addition to activating their S-300 missiles, the Venezuelan Armed Forces received a major boost on Sunday when the Russian Air Force and their military personnel arrived inside the country.

It remains unclear how active the Russian military is going to be in Venezuela, as despite the protests and sporadic violence, there has been really no real attempt to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro.

https://muraselon.com/en/2019/03/s-300-missiles-venezuela-us/

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