Category Archives: Viva!

Hundreds of activists and pets march in Cuba against animal abuse

3500.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Protests were authorized by the communist government, pointing to an expanding tolerance for Cubans to express their views

Hundreds of Cubans have marched through Havana calling for an end to animal cruelty, in what organizers believe was the first independent march authorized by the one-party state.

Related: Cuba’s churches reject gay marriage before vote on new constitution

Continue reading…

Monday Open Thread | Sean Hannity Appears To Be In Legal Trouble As He Gets Caught In Russia Investigation

As it turns out, the indictment and impending prosecution of Roger Stone doesn’t just mean trouble for Stone himself, or even just for Donald Trump, who it has been said is likely to be the “senior Trump campaign official” named in the charging documents.

Inside the indictment, one passage spells out that Stone’s contact inside WikiLeaks, the primary conduit for releasing the illegally-hacked DNC emails, told him via email on August 2, 2016 to publicly begin focusing on the health of Hillary Clinton as a method of harming her competing campaign for the presidency.

“Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke, neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus.”

Stone, however, had no major outlet through which to release information, and aside from that, could not appear to be getting information from outside sources.

At the time of that instruction, not even the Trump campaign had begun talking about Clinton’s health. Not even WikiLeaks had publicly begun their trickle of information about Hillary’s health yet. But somehow it shortly became a major talking point.

So how did that message start making the rounds? Fox News’ number one anchor, Sean Hannity, started talking about it just days later. And unless you believe that Hannity randomly guessed that her health would become a talking point — and we just don’t give Sean that much credit, honestly — it means that he got the information from somewhere. He certainly didn’t have anyone “inside” the Clinton campaign, or we’d have known it by now. Hell, we’d have known it by the day after the election, because he would have bragged about it.

So it’s likelier than not that WikiLeaks — who started the talk about it to begin with — gave information to Stone, who then passed it on to Sean Hannity, a man who has not just proven to be a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, but who Trump regularly consults with via telephone.

And although it’s a big “if,” the fact remains that this would make Sean Hannity a conspirator with Roger Stone to publish and disseminate illegally harvested private information from WikiLeaks, a group that was designated as a hostile foreign entity by our intelligence agencies before any of this ever happened.

And now that we’re at the end of the article, it’s time to remind you who Michael Cohen’s third client was at his legal practice, and how hard that client — Sean Hannity — worked to keep his name off the record in court.

If Hannity got word from Stone and knew it was from WikiLeaks, two things are true: It’s in the Mueller report, and Hannity is going to prison.

Trump administration sabotages major conservation effort, defying Congress

1600.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Revealed: federal support to research centers cut off as scientists fear years of successful work will go ‘down the drain’

Scientists and officials around the US have told the Guardian that the Trump administration has withdrawn funding for a large, successful conservation program – in direct contradiction of instructions from Congress.

Unique in scale and ambition, the program comprises 22 research centers that tackle big-picture issues affecting huge swaths of the US, such as climate change, flooding and species extinction. They are known as Landscape Conservation Cooperatives – or were, because 16 of them are now on indefinite hiatus or have dissolved.

Continue reading…