Category Archives: Fail!

Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun – The New York Times

For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline.Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too.These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt. Moreover, the high seas interfere with the drainage of storm water.

Source: Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun – The New York Times

Black Americans on ‘what they have to lose’ if Trump becomes president | US news | The Guardian

Lou Gehrig’s disease has robbed Leroy Peete, a 72-year-old Detroit native and Vietnam veteran, of speech. He communicates by moving a pen toward letters printed on a sheet, spelling out words.Asked about Trump’s visit to Detroit, an acquaintance read aloud his response.“Don’t want his ass here.”Asked about Trump’s outreach to African Americans, Peete moved the pen again over the letters.“Bullshit.”

Source: Black Americans on ‘what they have to lose’ if Trump becomes president | US news | The Guardian

The Trolling of Mayanti Langer Shows Us Being a Woman in Sports Journalism Is No Easy Job – The Ladies Finger

In being trolled for her husband’s performance, she is not alone: actor Anushka Sharma was trolled by cricket fans when then-boyfriend Virat Kohli failed to deliver in the 2015 World Cup semi-final against Australia, and in October that year, against South Africa in an ODI in Mumbai.  Freelance writer and social media editor Susie Verrill, girlfriend of British track and field Olympian Greg Rutherford, recently spoke up about the endless, sometimes violent abuse she receives on social media whenever Rutherford is in the news.But the cons of being the spouse of a sportsperson aside, being a woman in sports journalism is a tough game. Mandira Bedi knows this, as one of India’s first female cricket anchors. Her clothes received more attention than her sports commentary did in the early 2000s, and in an interview in 2008, she said that starting out in cricket hadn’t been easy. “People were not used to seeing a woman fielding question on cricket,” she said, and when asked about being “controversy’s favourite child” as an anchor, she said, “It was all the handiwork of people who had difficulty in accepting a woman doing well in a field that was known to be dominated by men.”In the TV game, unfortunately, as former cricket editor for NDTV 24×7 Anjali Doshi pointed out in 2013, women are set up to fail. For the IPL, women with little experience in sports journalism are selected to be presenters based on their looks, and blamed for asking weak questions, while women with experience as sports journalists are sidelined. Doshi quoted Neeraj Vyas, business head at MAX as saying the women anchors change each year because they have to be “younger and fresher”. Senior sports journalist Sharda Ugra in  pointed out in a 2013 piece about sexism in the IPL that Isa Guha, former fast bowler on the England women’s team, was asked by Navjot Sindhu and Sameer Kochchar which IPL player she found hottest and which of them was the best dancer. Vyas also reportedly said, “The focus is on fun and entertainment and not on serious cricket … The girls are not chosen for their knowledge of cricket.”When TV bosses aren’t afraid of airing these views, perhaps its no surprise that cricketers like Chris Gayle think it’s acceptable to openly flirt with a TV journalist and say, “Don’t blush, baby” when she asks him about his game during the Big Bash League. Offscreen, Gayle told journalist Charlotte Edwardes he had a “very, very big bat” while she was interviewing him.In her essay “Inside Sexism” for The Cricket Monthly, Trinidad-based editor of UWI Today Vaneisa Baksh detailed her tussles with the old boys’ club of Caribbean cricket through her career, mentioning how she was deliberately excluded by male journalists and denied membership of Queen’s Park Cricket Club for being a woman. Heartbreakingly, she even included a lewd calypso sung about her, called “I Want to Be a Member”, that ends like this:Also Read:  The Most Important Thing about a Woman is Her Clothes, and Other Rubbish Lessons from SportsNow you heard the storyAbout Vaneisa versus PappyGo and get married quickly and forget about QPCCOr go and join the nunnery and keep your virginityA Parkite means men, you must knowWe don’t want no woman to spoil we show

Source: The Trolling of Mayanti Langer Shows Us Being a Woman in Sports Journalism Is No Easy Job – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

Lebanese MP Hadi Hobeish Destroys A Forest In Akkar To Build His Villa | A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

The Ministry of Agriculture allowed the MP to cut down: 295 pine trees, 578 Oak trees and 55 Pistacia trees. All of the trees that he was allowed to cut down were thousands of years old. The fact of the matter is, however, that he didn’t only cut down those but he destroyed thousands more in order to build his mansion and make the road as efficient as possible.The end result is a Lebanese MP getting what he wants, destroying an entire forest in doing so, and the Lebanese government not only letting him do that but almost rolling down the red carpet for such an atrocity to take place.Hadi Hobeish pretends to want what’s best for his hometown, which is why he throws around annual summer festivals bringing in Lebanese singers who wouldn’t visit that area otherwise. When the attention cools down, however, he proceeds to do what everyone else does and bend the laws at his will, destroy whatever he can destroy in order for him to have his way.Not only did MP Hobeish destroy the forest, but he did it using governmental money because the decree stipulated that the road needed to be done for “public reasons.”The road only leads to his house.Welcome to the jungle.

Source: Lebanese MP Hadi Hobeish Destroys A Forest In Akkar To Build His Villa | A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

Trump launches new personal attacks against ‘Morning Joe’ co-host Mika Brzezinski – The Washington Post

Donald Trump launched a new round of aggressive personal attacks against MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski Friday morning, airing an unsubstantiated claim before his more than 11 million Twitter followers.”Just heard that crazy and very dumb @morningmika had a mental breakdown while talking about me on the low ratings @Morning_Joe. Joe a mess!” Trump tweeted.

Source: Trump launches new personal attacks against ‘Morning Joe’ co-host Mika Brzezinski – The Washington Post

A Deep, Shady Dive Into Trump’s Alleged Mob Ties: Gothamist

Trump’s connection to Shapiro was scrutinized again in 1984. Shapiro told a grand jury that he funneled thousands of dollars in contributions from Trump to Atlantic City mayor Michael J. Matthews, who Trump was barred from contributing to on his own because of his casino ownership. While Trump denied the charge, telling the Journal “I’m not interested in giving cash, OK?”, Shapiro’s brother Barry said that Trump never reimbursed Kenneth for his illegal contributions on Trump’s behalf. Trump refusing to pay a bill is of course, more believable than Trump not being interested in donating money to politicians.There was also the case of Robert LiButti, a major horse race gambler who talked about John Gotti as his “boss” and was a major gambler at Trump Plaza in the late 80s. Trump denied having anything to do with LiButti in an interview with the paper, but LiButti’s daughter told Yahoo that she rode on Trump’s helicopter and yacht, and that Trump came to her 35th birthday party. “I like Trump, but it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father. That hurts me,” she told the site earlier this year.And while most of Trump’s mob connections happened back in the 1980s, the Journal also brought up the case of Felix Sater, who worked with Bayrock Group, a real estate company that leased space in Trump Tower. Bayrock helped Trump brand his name on properties like the Trump SoHo condos and a Florida hotel, and the Journal reports Sater described himself as the number two person in the company. Sater also had been convicted in 1998 as part of a Mafia-linked boiler room scheme.Added up, it doesn’t suggest that Trump knows where the bodies are buried. On the other hand, for a man who’s been making his case that as a businessman and political neophyte he’ll just hire the right people to help him make decisions, it’s part of a pattern of a startling lack of vetting by the man. But hey, I’m sure that when he needs contractors and cheap labor for his big beautiful wall he’ll do the the most fabulous vetting we’ve ever seen.

Source: A Deep, Shady Dive Into Trump’s Alleged Mob Ties: Gothamist

Gretchen Carlson Reportedly Recorded Roger Ailes’ Grossness With Her iPhone: Gothamist

Sherman details how Carlson’s decision to fight back started two years ago:Taking on Ailes was dangerous, but Carlson was determined to fight back. She settled on a simple strategy: She would turn the tables on his surveillance. Beginning in 2014, according to a person familiar with the lawsuit, Carlson brought her iPhone to meetings in Ailes’s office and secretly recorded him saying the kinds of things he’d been saying to her all along. “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better. Sometimes problems are easier to solve” that way, he said in one conversation. “I’m sure you can do sweet nothings when you want to,” he said another time.After more than a year of taping, she had captured numerous incidents of sexual harassment. Carlson’s husband, sports agent Casey Close, put her in touch with his lawyer Martin Hyman, who introduced her to employment attorney Nancy Erika Smith. Smith had won a sexual-harassment settlement in 2008 for a woman who sued former New Jersey acting governor Donald DiFranceso. “I hate bullies,” Smith told me. “I became a lawyer to fight bullies.”

Source: Gretchen Carlson Reportedly Recorded Roger Ailes’ Grossness With Her iPhone: Gothamist

Trump visit to Mexico: I have never seen a Mexican begging in the US | In English | EL PAÍS

Rather than undocumented, 40% of Mexican and Central American immigrants are  really refugees. They are boys and girls fleeing hunger, rape, extreme poverty and threats against their lives by criminal gangs back home. They have been denied a job and a safe and dignified life by their own countries. Rather than a problem of security and terrorism, it is a humanitarian crisis.Yet never in my life have I seen a Mexican begging on the street in the United States. They are honest, hardworking people who contribute to and benefit the economies of both countries in invaluable ways. But, in the interests of both sides, they will remain a community of 11 million invisible people.Rather than undocumented, 40% of Mexican and Central American immigrants are refugeesOur government should have named Trump ‘persona non grata’ a long time ago. Because he preaches hate and division in his own country and shamelessly distorts reality, countless US television stations, international corporations, heads of states and members of his own party have ended relationships and contracts with an individual whose terrifying sociopathic and fascist outbursts have polluted the world and hurt the fundamental values that Americans are proud of.Yet, unexpectedly, our president has asked him to visit our country, giving him an opportunity and a platform that Trump has used to crown himself in Arizona, jokingly promising his followers that the “amigo” who had just opened the door of his house to him did not know yet that he was going to pay for a wall, or that Trump was going to send him back millions of his dirty and criminal people.Our president, with his insubstantial shyster language, did not articulate or demand anything specific from his visitor. Trump has had the unprecedented honor of being the first American presidential candidate to visit our country, thus soiling the memory and history of our nation.One hundred and sixty-eight years ago, Antonio López de Santa Ana gave away almost half of our territory. President Peña Nieto has just given away the little bit of dignity that was left us.

Source: Trump visit to Mexico: I have never seen a Mexican begging in the US | In English | EL PAÍS

Oil Fires in Iraq : Image of the Day

For the past few months, a smoke plume has shifted with the winds over northern Iraq. In recent years, periodic oil fires have cast a dark pall over this arid landscape. They are one consequence of ongoing war in the region.On August 17, 2016, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired an image (above) of dense smoke plumes roughly 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Mosul. There appear to be multiple sources of fire, most likely oil wells from the Qayyarah oil field. The images in the grid below show the plumes changing direction and thickness since they were first spotted by Landsat 8 on June 14.

Source: Oil Fires in Iraq : Image of the Day

Kurds Fear the U.S. Will Again Betray Them, in Syria – The New York Times AKA: TIK, TOK – trust in Kurds, trust only Kurds.

So, many Kurds shuddered when Turkish tanks and soldiers recently rolled into northern Syria, with American support, to push back against Kurdish gains. They saw it, perhaps prematurely, as a replay of a century of betrayal by world powers, going back to the end of World War I, when they were promised, then denied, their own state in the postwar settlement.“The Kurds are going to scream betrayal at every turn when they think things are not going to go their way, because they’ve had a century of it,” said Joost Hiltermann, the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, and a longtime expert on the Kurds.The Syrian Kurds say their aim is to establish an autonomous region, not their own state, where their rights are protected, in whatever settlement comes from the long Syrian civil war. And they say they hope that the United States will support them in that desire.To accomplish that, though, they need to connect two of their territories: Afrin, in the west, and Kobani, in the east, an effort that Turkey sees as a national security threat to be thwarted at virtually any cost.

Source: Kurds Fear the U.S. Will Again Betray Them, in Syria – The New York Times