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Saturday, Apr. 21, 2018
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
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They win again...and again1st place
The Truth...NOKOs announce freeze on nuclear, missile tests...Start of the deal
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has announced that the country will suspend nuclear and missile tests and shut down a nuclear test site in the northern area, state media said Saturday.
"From April 21, North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles," the Korean Central News Agency said.
"The North will shut down a nuclear test site in the country's northern side to prove the vow to suspend nuclear test," it added.
The decision was made at a plenary meeting of the central committee of the ruling Worker's Party of Korea (WPK) Friday, according to the KCNA.
Gordon Chang: NKorea's Kim 'Unnerved' by Syrian Airstrikes
By Todd Beamon
Author Gordon Chang said Friday that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was "unnerved" by the Syrian airstrikes President Donald Trump ordered last week, most likely leading to his announcement to suspend Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missiles tests.
"What President Trump did in the Syrian raid was say: 'Thou shalt not use chemical weapons,'" Chang, a longtime expert on North Korea, told David Asman on Fox Business.
"We've got to remember that Kim last year used chemical weapons on his half-brother."
Kim's half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, was killed in a February 2017 attack at a Malaysian airport by two unidentified women with "poisoned needles," according to news reports.
He complained to staff at Kuala Lumpur International Airport that his face had been sprayed while he was preparing for a flight to Macau.
Kim had $138,000 in cash in his backpack at the time of the attack.
In his Friday announcement, Kim Jong Un also said that North Korea would close its atomic testing site in a move that followed a secret meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo in Pyongyang over Easter.
Trump and Kim now are expected to meet in late May or June.
In last week's airstrikes, U.S. and forces from France and Britain fired 105 missiles on three Syrian targets in or near Damascus that developed, tested or stored chemical weapons.
The offensive came in response to President Bashar al-Assad's use of chlorine gas in an April 7 attack that killed as many as 70 people and injured 1,000 others.
In his Fox Business interview, Chang said that Pyongyang has played an active part in Syria's chemical weapons activities since the mid-1990s.
"The other connection here is that North Korea is the primary supplier to Syria of chemical weapons," he told Asman. "They've had this chemical-weapons relationship since the mid-1990s.
"There are two Syrian chemical facilities that the North Koreans built.
"North Koreans have been killed in Syria in connection with chemical-weapons events," Chang said.
"Kim certainly, I think, was unnerved by what happened last week."
San Diego's driest year ever: This year is in the running
San Diego is on pace to have its driest year on record
Robert Krier
San Diego has been exceptionally dry this year. Storm after storm has avoided or barely brushed the region.
Will this go down as the driest year in city history?
It’s a real possibility, although a bit of a longshot. The city has been this dry so late in the season only one other time since 1850, when rainfall records began in town.
The odds of breaking the dryness record are long, because there are still more than five months left in the season. But stranger things have happened.
Given the current rain-robbing, storm-deflecting weather pattern that stretches back 10 months and the city’s rainfall history, this could be the year when the longshot comes in.
The vast majority of the years, by this time, San Diego has already blown way past 3.33 inches of rain, the total in 2001-02, the record dry year. Average rainfall through April 30 is 9.95 inches; average for the entire rainfall year, which ends Sept. 30, is 10.34 inches.
This year, the season total after Thursday’s brief morning shower is just 3.19 inches. Only 2001-02, with 3.02 inches at the end of April, was drier.
To break the dryness record, the city would have to get no more than 0.13 of an inch of rain between now and the end of September.
Could it happen? There’s precedent. Seven times the rainfall total during that stretch was that low or even lower.
Three times the city has gone at least 164 days, starting in April and continuing the entire summer, without any rain at all. The city’s longest dry spell, 182 days, began on April 17, 2004, and it didn’t end until Oct. 16 that year.
The forecast
The Climate Prediction Center, which makes long-range forecasts, sees no tilt toward either dry nor wet for Southern California as the summer approaches. But San Diego’s averages during the summer months are virtually zero, said Mike Halpert, the center’s deputy director.
Under El Niño conditions, when the waters in the equatorial Pacific turn abnormally warm, the chances of San Diego getting summer rain from the remnants of a tropical storm off the west coast of Mexico increase. But the prediction center doesn’t expect El Niño to emerge over the summer, Halpert said.
For the shorter term, through the next 10 days or so, no storms are on the horizon.
Annual dry run
San Diego is on the cusp of its annual, long dry stretch, which often starts in late spring and lasts until early fall. April is the transition month. Storms from the north usually still arrive, but they are generally less frequent and weaker.
Until last Thursday, San Diego had recorded no rain at all in April. Thursday’s total was just 0.01 of an inch.
The dry pattern emerged last year. San Diego had its driest June-through-December period on record. January and early March brought some rain, but both were drier than normal.
In late March, it went back to extremely dry, at least locally.
San Diego was initially forecast to be on the southern fringe of strong storm systems hitting California, but eventually the city missed out on even the fringe. A couple of “atmospheric rivers,” long plumes of moisture a couple of hundred miles wide and more than a thousand miles long, drenched areas to the north but left San Diego alone.
“With the last couple of atmospheric rivers, the long-range forecasts looked promising,” National Weather Service forecaster Mark Moede said. “But with each succeeding forecast model run, the rivers shifted farther north.
“We had been hyping it (the last atmospheric river) days in advance, and it ended up being a non-event.”
What caused those plumes of moisture to stay far from San Diego is the question.
In the normal weather pattern, a ridge of high pressure in the eastern Pacific, roughly west of the southern tip of Baja California, waxes and wanes as storms drop down from the north Pacific and move east across the continent.
This year, it appears that subtropical high amplified, Moede said, and that could have helped repel the storms from Southern California.
The last two weeks, a series of storms, weaker than the ones that soaked California in March, continued to deliver more rain and mountain snow in Northern California. Again, San Diego remained on the outside looking in.
Making it through April with very little rain is key to breaking the record. After April, which averages 0.78 of an inch in San Diego, the monthly rainfall averages drop way off. And those small averages are inflated by the rare, wet month.
About a third of the years, May has recorded 0.04 of an inch or less. In June, about three-fourths of years had 0.04 or less. Most of the city’s Julys, Augusts and Septembers have recorded no rain at all.
September can catch early winter storms, but only one September in the last 13 years recorded more than a tenth of inch of rain.
The Climate Prediction Center’s Halpert said it’s not too hard to break daily records for temperature or rainfall, but topping a record for an entire year is difficult. Even with the current dry trends and past long dry stretches, the odds are long that San Diego’s will break the dryness record this year.
And writing about it will likely jinx it.
“This story is the kiss of death,” Halpert said. “The record probably won’t happen now.”
rob.krier@sduniontribune.com
Tom DeLay Tears Into Comey: 'Liar, Hack, Political Animal'
By Jason Devaney
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay ripped James Comey in a new interview with Newsmax TV, calling the ex-FBI director a "political animal."
DeLay, a Republican who represented Texas in the House from 1985-2006, said during a panel discussion on "Newsmax Now" that Comey has no credibility left.
"James Comey has proven to be a liar, a hack, a political animal that's in the pocket of [former President Barack] Obama and [former Attorney General Eric] Holder and all the rest of them," DeLay said. "Why in the world would he break the law and FBI protocols by coming out and playing the role of the attorney general and saying there's nothing there in the Clinton email investigation?
"And then his actions ever since then have shown that he's a liar, a liar and a liar. He's so self-absorbed and self-righteous."
Comey has appeared on several TV networks this week as he promotes his new book, which is critical of President Donald Trump and his administration. He documented some of his interactions with Comey via memos, which were leaked to the media Thursday night.
"How many of those kind of memos did he write on Obama meetings? How many on the meetings with Lynch and others than he had?" DeLay asked. "No, this was all for him to cover himself up and he's proven that on this book tour. He's absolutely, totally uncredible."
DeLay added later that Comey's criticisms of Trump and his insistence that the nation's 45th president may have been compromised by the Russians show he is trying to defend Obama, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and others by trying to justify the Russia probe.
"It's all about James Comey and also protecting the people that he works for, Obama, Lynch and the Democrats," DeLay said.
Trump Warns OPEC on 'Artificially Very High' Oil Prices
(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)By Newsmax Wires
President Donald Trump warned OPEC about its "artificially very high" oil prices Friday, saying they are "no good and will not be accepted!"
His warning came in an early morning post to Twitter.
Trump's rebuke of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries came after Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, after crude hit the highest level in more than three years.
"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices. We have seen prices significantly higher in the past — twice as much as where we are today," Faleh told reporters ahead of an oil producers' meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
"Energy intensity as you know has declined significantly ... this reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," Faleh said.
Faleh insisted OPEC does not have a price target for oil.
"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying that "volatility is our enemy."
Because of OPEC's efforts to curb supply in a successful bid to revive oil prices, there’s no longer a global glut of oil.
Since January 2017, OPEC and other nations led by Russia have been slashing supply. OPEC’s compliance with the agreement reached a record 164 percent last month, and non-OPEC adherence gained to 85 percent, according to Bloomberg calculations. The partners have been meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this week to discuss furthering their cooperation after the deal expires at the end of this year.
The amount of crude oil in floating storage globally has declined to 40.7 million barrels as of April 13, from 97.2 million barrels at the end of 2016 -- a 58 percent drop -- according to data from Vortexa Ltd. In addition, the curve for Brent crude has moved to a market condition called backwardation -- when near-term contracts are more expensive than those at a later date -- indicating that there’s not an oversupply.
Oil inventories in developed nations are just 30 million barrels above their five-year average, the measure that OPEC is using to gauge whether markets are balanced, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said in its latest market report this month. That’s down from more than 300 million barrels when the group started its cuts.
In recent weeks oil analysts have pointed to the fact that the diminished glut has reduced a buffer for the market, meaning that any geopolitical events -- such as the renewal of U.S. sanctions on Iran -- would have a more dramatic effect on oil prices. Trump has until May 12 to determine whether to re-impose those measures.
Material from Reuters, Bloomberg, and AFP were used in this report.
Persecution of Chinese Christians Worse Now Than Under Bloody Mao
Bibles are being confiscated, decorative crosses destroyed, churches closed, and attendance monitored by government authorities
Persecution of Christians in China “has become the worst since the end of the Cultural Revolution” under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership, Pastor Bob Fu said Friday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”
Noting that Xi “already revoked the constitutional limit of his terms” in March by revoking term limits altogether, Fu said that “religious freedom and human rights in general [have] become the worst since the end of the Cultural Revolution” in the 1970s.
“Really President Xi — or Emperor Xi — has launched wars against the church, against the crosses, against really the children, of Sunday schools,” Fu said. “Now we have seen really in the past few months after this new regulation on religious affairs took effect, we have seen a tremendous increase in more persecution.”
Fu also said “the leaders in different villages are searching home by home for every Christian family to confiscate their Bibles, [and] any Christian signs, including a cross on the wall, would be confiscated.”
In addition, every church pulpit is now asked to install facial recognition cameras so that the pastors’ sermons can be monitored, recorded and every attendant at the church or mass can be recorded. Estimates of the number of professing Christians in China range from 100 million to 200 million.
Host Laura Ingraham noted that Chinese Christian advocates say President Xi “has a particular animosity against Christianity” because “the government, the regime, Communism is the religion in China, and you must not deviate from that.”
“Really President Xi — or Emperor Xi — has launched wars against the church, against the crosses, against really the children, of Sunday schools,” Fu said. “Now we have seen really in the past few months after this new regulation on religious affairs took effect, we have seen a tremendous increase in more persecution.”
Fu also said “the leaders in different villages are searching home by home for every Christian family to confiscate their Bibles, [and] any Christian signs, including a cross on the wall, would be confiscated.”
In addition, every church pulpit is now asked to install facial recognition cameras so that the pastors’ sermons can be monitored, recorded and every attendant at the church or mass can be recorded. Estimates of the number of professing Christians in China range from 100 million to 200 million.
Host Laura Ingraham noted that Chinese Christian advocates say President Xi “has a particular animosity against Christianity” because “the government, the regime, Communism is the religion in China, and you must not deviate from that.”
Ingraham said that this issue “frankly never gets enough coverage as we talk about our relationship with China and these businessmen going over there and making all this money in China or sending factories over to China.”
“In my mind, it’s no different from how the Soviet Union treated Christians back in the 1970s, 60s and into the 1980s, except it’s probably worse in many ways,” Ingraham said.
Fu, the founder and president of China Aid, a non-profit Christian human rights organization, told Ingraham that she was “exactly right” in her assessment of China’s persecution of Christians and squelching of religious freedom.
Authorities also recently banned online sales of Bibles and "now this week we just learned of that the government has started to shut down the Catholic churches,” Fu said.
“They want this to be complete loyalty to the regime. And this is where Pope Francis has made a critical mistake in working with the Chinese government and allowing the Chinese government to have a say on who gets to be bishop and who doesn’t get to be a bishop" Ingraham said.
"So now it’s just the Communist bishops. And these Communist fake Catholic bishops end up becoming the official Catholic bishops in China. That’s another problem. And then they’re just going to report everybody who comes to the services.”
Fu agreed, saying “it’s just so sad ... signing this deal allowing the Communist Party to have the nomination power of all the Catholic bishops in China. That is really, I think, nothing but a betrayal of especially many persecuted believers in China.”
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at kathryn.blackhurts@lifezette.com. Follow her on Twitter.
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at kathryn.blackhurts@lifezette.com. Follow her on Twitter.
After Giuliani Joins Trump, Comey Admits Ordering Investigation Because of Rudy
BY JOE SAUNDERS
Call it a pre-emptive smear.
With former FBI Director James Comey’s book tour going from media blitz to media bust, interviewers are trying to breathe some life into it by opening a new attack on the Trump administration.
But Comey’s latest slam of Rudy Giuliani just might be a mistake.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday, only hours after the news broke that the former New York mayor is officially joining President Donald Trump’s legal team, Comey reiterated what he’d told a Senate panel last year only a week before he was fired.
He told Maddow he had ordered an investigation of potential leaks from the FBI, based on statements Giuliani had made in the final days of the campaign that indicated he’d known the bureau was going to reopen its investigation of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
The statement came after Maddow played several clips from Giuliani appearances on Fox News in October of 2016, including one where Giuliani flat out said he’d known the re-opening was coming.
“This has been boiling up in the FBI…,” Giuliani told “Fox & Friends” at the time. “I did nothing to get it out. I had no role in it. Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it. And I can’t even repeat the language that I heard.” (The interview can be seen here. It’s all interesting, but that specific quote comes about the 6-minute mark.)
Statements like that were enough to trigger an FBI investigation, Comey told Maddow — an investigation that appears to have ended only with Trump firing Comey from the FBI.
“… I saw that same publicity and so I commissioned an investigation to see if we could understand whether people were disclosing information out of the New York office or any other place that resulted in Rudy’s report on Fox News and other leaks that we were seeing in the media,” Comey told Maddow.
“I don’t know what the result of that was. I got fired before it was finished, but I know that I asked that it be investigated.”
If nothing else, the incident proves just how politicized the nation’s premier law enforcement agency had become under Comey’s leadership:
Besides the now notorious actions of FBI special agent Peter Strzok and bureau lawyer Lisa Page to influence the FBI’s Clinton investigation in Hillary’s favor, Comey’s own FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was orchestrating leaks to The Wall Street Journal about the bureau’s handling of the Clinton investigation — which he later lied about.
But Comey’s statements to Maddow about Giuliani might be something else too: A pre-emptive strike to cast suspicion on the one of the most familiar figures in American politics, just as he joins the president’s team in its dealings with an aggressive special counsel’s office.
There’s no way of knowing whether Comey knew Maddow’s question was coming — considering how publicity tour interviews generally work, it’s a good chance they’d discussed it in advance of the show.
And the investigation itself was already a matter of public record. As reported by the New York Post among other news outlets, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3 of last year, that he had ordered an investigation into Giuliani's remarks. That was six days before Trump fired Comey.
Comey’s book doesn’t hide his feelings. According to Vox, Comey writes in the book that Giuliani is “dangerous” with a style that can cause “resentment.”
(Now, what former FBI director does that sound like to you?)
It’s also clear that Giuliani’s long experience as a federal prosecutor who worked with special counsel Robert Mueller and his reputation as the tough former New York mayor whose tenure in the 1990s brought the city back to a world-class location after the dismal tenure of Democrat Dinkins will be an invaluable asset to Trump’s legal team in its dealings with Mueller.
And his stand as New York’s mayor after 9/11 is an indelible part of the history of that dark time.
Comey’s statement to Maddow amounted to dragging Giuliani down into the tangle of charges and counter-charges that are surrounding the so-called “Russia collusion” probe now.
It was a pre-emptive smear, aimed at tarnishing Giuliani’s presences on Trump’s team before it even takes hold.
But organized crime figures, liberal Democrats, and even Islamist terrorists have learned through Giuliani’s career that he’s not a man to be taken lightly.
Comey’s latest slam of Giuliani might be a big mistake. It won’t be Comey’s first one.
Unpublished CDC Study Confirms over 2 Million Annual Defensive Gun Uses
by AWR HAWKINS
An unpublished Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study confirms Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck’s findings of more than two million defensive handgun uses (DGUs) per year.
Since the early 1990s, Kleck has maintained that there is a minimum of 760,000 DGUs annually. That is his low estimate; Kleck and research partner Marc Gertz have contended the actual number is closer to 2.5 million.
Kleck reaffirmed his numbers on February 17, 2015, explaining that while plenty of naysayers have criticized his findings, none have been able to offer empirical evidence to counter them.
Now, a CDC study conducted on data from 1996, 1997, and 1998 has been uncovered. The study, which was never released to the public, shows approximately 2.46 million DGUs per year.
In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale national surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU). They never released the findings, or even acknowledged they had studied the topic. I obtained the unpublished raw data and computed the prevalence of DGU. CDC’s findings indicated that an average of 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense in each of the years from 1996 through 1998 – almost exactly confirming the estimate for 1992 of Kleck and Gertz (1995). Possible reasons for CDC’s suppression of these findings are discussed.
On April 20, 2018, Reason magazine quoted Kleck’s reaction to the unpublished CDC findings; he explained that a figure of 2.46 million DGUs a year “[implies] that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
Broward Sheriff Scott Israel Faces ‘No Confidence’ Vote from Deputies
by KATHERINE RODRIGUEZ
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who bragged about his leadership during the Parkland, Florida, shooting, is facing a vote of no confidence from the union.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who bragged about his leadership during the Parkland, Florida, shooting, is facing a vote of no confidence from the union.
Jeff Bell, the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association president, announced Friday that members of the union would move forward with the vote, which began Friday night and will end April 26, for the first time in the union’s history.
“This has never been done in the history of BSO. So, is it symbolic more than anything? Yes it is,” Bell told the Miami Herald. “However it will send a strong message. He’s gone off the radar. We’re like a ship out at sea with no power right now.”
Bell said the no confidence vote would let Israel know the union is not pleased with his handling of both the Parkland shooting that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and an upcoming union contract.
The sheriff, who holds an elected office, has been slammed for his department’s response to the February 14 shooting.
Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran and many others criticized him for ignoring warning signs that shooter Nikolas Cruz could be a danger to the public, failing to release surveillance video of the attack to show how law enforcement responded to the shooting, and other issues.
Israel, who was elected sheriff in 2012, called the union vote “a shameless ploy by a union boss to get a 6.5 percent raise [for union members] when everybody else got a 3 percent raise.”
The sheriff added that union members were exploiting the Parkland tragedy for political gain.
Although Israel is an elected official, Florida Gov. Rick Scott has the power to suspend the sheriff, as the position is not subject to Impeachment under the Florida state Constitution.
Special to our son Arthur...I feel bad for both coaches and all their players. Sounds like the winner tried to show sportsmanship.
Massachusetts High School Baseball Team Beats Opponent 82-0, Winning Coach Felt ‘Sick’
A Mattapoisett, MA, high school baseball coach feels “sick” after watching his team travel 88 miles to Notre Dame Cristo Rey to win 82-0, setting a new state record for margin of victory.
Old Rochester baseball coach Steve Carvalho told the Boston Herald, “I’m sick to my stomach over this. We really tried everything possible. We told the kids don’t take extra bases, no sprinting – we even had kids bunting and they couldn’t make the routine plays. We had kids hitting balls 300 feet and jogging to first.”
He added, “We even asked that they stop the game after four innings and they said no. Believe me, we exhausted all options in our power.”
The two teams from different divisions reportedly ended up playing each other due to a scheduling error.
Carvalho took the blame, saying, “We had 18 games and we were searching for a 19th game. We looked at the MIAA website and saw Cristo Rey was looking for a game. I noticed they were 11-8 and made the tournament. I didn’t realize at the time that there were two Cristo Reys.”
The schools meet again May 19 and Carvalho plans to use his junior varsity team with hopes to prevent another beatdown.
Per the Boston Herald:
Winning pitcher Don King tossed a no-hitter, striking out 16 and helped his own cause by going 15-for-17 at the plate. Even more incredulous is the fact losing pitcher John Gustim pitched all eight innings (the game was stopped after eight), allowing 92 hits and watching as his defense committed 22 errors.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
Ciao…….Helen and Moe Lauzier
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