Friday, Dec 12th
Last update08:39:16 AM GMT
In an emotional speech that was by turns tearful, defiant and humorous, Meryl Streep doubled down on her harsh criticism of Donald Trump, and spoke of having become a target since she first took him on in her Golden Globes speech in January.
Addressing a cheering audience at a fundraising gala for the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBT group, on Saturday night, Streep referred to Trump’s tweet after her Globes speech, in which he called the celebrated actress “overrated”.
President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with its ambassador to the U.S. before the president took office last month even though officials claimed he didn’t, The Washington Post reported late Thursday night.
Current and former U.S. officials told the Post about the conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. When asked in an interview with the Post Wednesday if he had discussed sanctions with the ambassador, Flynn repeatedly said, “No,”
The president’s 3 a.m. phone call is typically a metaphor. It’s a symbol of the president’s ability to handle a crisis. But in the case of President Donald Trump, it appears to be a revealing reality.
According to the Huffington Post, Donald Trump recently placed a late-night phone call to Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, to ask if a strong dollar or a weak dollar is better for the U.S. economy. In the early rounds of commentary on television and Twitter, several people have mocked the president for staying up late, pondering questions that might appear on an Econ 101 exam.
But this conversation, if it’s true, is concerning for completely different reasons.
TVNL Comment: Strange question, despite the hour, from this 'fabulous' business success.
There's a glacier in Antarctica so immense that, if it melted, would raise sea levels globally by 3.5 metres.
It's melting. Right now.
"The facts around climate change are undeniable. It's happening," Australian glaciologist Ben Galton-Fenzi told The Huffington Post Australia. "The research we do now isn't about trying to convince ourselves it's real, because it's irrefutable. What we're trying to do is understand what the response time of the system is going to be into the future, so we can adapt to it."
The Totten glacier is the biggest in east Antarctica. The glacier itself is around 120 kilometres long, 30 kilometres wide and drains some 538,000 square kilometres of the continent. That's an area bigger than California. The ice is kilometres thick, but it's melting at 70 metres a year in some spots. A study released in December reported warmer water was melting the Totten ice from below.
Nearly half a million tourists annually walk past two fenced-in minefields to visit Qasr al-Yahud, meaning Castle of the Jews in Arabic - the site where Jesus was believed to have been baptised in the River Jordan.
A $4m project launched last year by the de-mining charity Halo Trust is hoping to make the site safer, after the group struck an agreement with Israeli authorities, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and local churches that own plots in Qasr al-Yahud. The deal allows Halo Trust to work on de-mining the site, located several kilometres from Jericho.
But Israel, whose army peppered the site with mines after the 1967 war, is not paying for these de-mining efforts, observers note.
At least 14 people were killed in an avalanche that buried several houses in the village of Sher Shall, part of the town of Chintral, located in the Hindu Kush mountains in northwestern Pakistan.
According to CNN, six women, six children and two men were among the dead. Officials fear more people are trapped beneath the thick wall of snow.
The Pakistani state media said rescue personnel are doing their best to search for bodies and deliver recovery supplies, like blankets, stoves and food. Inclement winter weather has made search and rescue efforts difficult. Many of the local roads are blocked by snow and ice.
The Mexican government on Wednesday denied reports that Donald Trump threatened the Mexican president with U.S. troops during his phone call with the foreign leader.
In a radio interview Wednesday, Peña Nieto spokesman Eduardo Sanchez insisted he knows with absolute certainty there was no threat.”
“The things that have been said are nonsense and a downright lie,” Sanchez added.
From the election of Fucko the Clown to his inauguration, I’ve started … and stopped … seven “moments”. I can’t finish them. I’ll type out what I think is a pretty good sentence or paragraph, but when I read it again it just seems like so much junk. The stuff I write reads like the purple prose H.P. Lovecraft would crank out for Weird Tales magazine at a penny per word. But what the hell … we’re inside a Pulp Fiction world where every day is another issue of Amazing Stories. Just because something sounds like an article from Famous Monsters of Filmland doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
About a week ago, a friend of mine sent me an email with this subject line, “We are headed towards the demise of our Democracy.”
Consider this a major bureaucratic uprising on the part of career foreign service officers against the President on his executive order on refugees.
Numerous Foreign Service officers and other diplomats have drafted a dissent memo expressing opposition to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States. ABC reported this morning on the draft, which is likely to be submitted today.
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