November 29 and 30, 2016


News and Views


Alt-right Goals


http://www.vox.com/world/2016/11/28/13716038/alt-right-policy-platform-trump

What the alt-right actually wants from President Trump
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Nov 28, 2016, 8:20am EST

Photograph -- Richard Spencer. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Photograph -- They expect Trump to act on his campaign promises about immigration, An angry-looking Trump at a lectern, (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The KKK newspaper’s endorsement of Trump.



The so-called “alt-right” is a loose online movement made up mostly, though not entirely, of white nationalists. They’ve gotten famous recently for being some of Donald Trump’s earliest and most vocal backers, seeing him as the first presidential candidate in modern history open to their ideas about the need to protect the white race — by reducing the numbers and influence of African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews.

At a November 19 conference of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist “think tank,” the organization’s leader, Richard Spencer, saluted Trump’s victory: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Footage of the speech, taken by the Atlantic, is quite chilling.

Most of the coverage of the group has focused on the alt-right’s most blatantly offensive language or, somewhat bizarrely, the fact that Spencer is moderately well-dressed — Mother Jones described him as “an articulate and well-dressed former football player with prom-king good looks and a ‘fashy’ (as in fascism) haircut — long on top, buzzed on the sides.”

But there’s a crucial point missing here: Now that their hero Trump is about to be president, what do they actually want him to do come January?

Turns out they have some pretty clear ideas.

The alt-right’s priority, first and foremost, is preserving America’s status as a white-majority nation. To that end, they want Trump to follow through on the most extreme immigration ideas he’s discussed — such as deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and banning Muslim immigration. These steps, they think, will slow what they call the “dispossession” of America’s whites.

But the alt-right wants Trump to go even further. They want him to slash rates of legal immigration and defund groups that advocate for immigrants, like La Raza. Ultimately, they want Trump to push the boundaries of acceptable opinion to the point where the nakedest of naked racism becomes permissible in mainstream public discourse.

Under President Trump, those goals are plausible, even if unlikely. That means we need to understand the ideology of the alt-right — and the things its members will be working to enshrine in federal law.

The day after the election, I called up Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist website American Renaissance and a leading alt-right thinker. I asked Taylor what he wanted, in policy terms, now that a Trump presidency was no longer hypothetical.

“The policies onto which [Trump] has stumbled, in a kind of innocent, America First way, are ones that will slow the dispossession of whites,” Taylor told me. “I’m very much in favor of him implementing those policies, for whatever reasons.”

The policy that Taylor is most excited about is Trump’s idea of deporting every undocumented immigrant, all 11 million of them. This isn’t quite an official campaign policy — it’s something Trump floated repeatedly in TV interviews but that his campaign has attempted to downplay. Official policy is that they’ll start by deporting the roughly 2 to 3 million with criminal records and then will see how things stand with the rest.

Taylor doesn’t believe Trump will follow through on the full deportation plan, though he says, “If he actually did those things, I’d very much applaud.” Nonetheless, he believes a few high-profile deportation raids on innocent families could go a long way.

He explains why in a 2015 article titled “Is Trump Our Last Chance?”:

The key, however, would be a few well publicized raids on non-criminal illegals. Television images of Mexican families dropped over the border with no more than they could carry would be very powerful. The vast majority of illegals would quickly decide to get their affairs in order and choose their own day of departure rather than wait for ICE to choose it for them.

Even if Trump doesn’t go for mass deportations of families, Taylor thinks there’s a lot to like about Trump’s proposed agenda. A few of the Trump policies Taylor has praised include:

** Tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents
** Ending federal payments to “sanctuary cities,” cities that protect undocumented immigrants from deportation
** Banning immigration from “terror-prone” (read: heavily Muslim) countries
** Cutting off federal benefits, like food stamps, for undocumented immigrants

These aren’t pipe dreams. They’re all policies you can find on Trump’s campaign website or in his speeches. Taylor and other alt-righters are attracted to them because, for them, the first priority is the numbers game: Make sure that whites remain a majority in America for as long as possible. Trump’s policies would both slow the rate of nonwhite immigration and actually make nonwhites leave the country. From the alt-right point of view, this is just what the doctor ordered.

This is why Trump’s border wall is less popular among some alt-righters than you might think. They like it, to be sure — but it’s a less direct way to reshape American demography than deporting people or slowing down immigration.

“We might not even need the wall Mr. Trump plans to build, though it’s certainly a good thing to have,” Taylor writes in his 2015 article.

To make the alt-right happy, then, Trump just needs to do a lot of what he’s already said he’ll do.

Ideally, they want Trump to redefine what’s acceptable in America

In Taylor’s ideal world, Trump’s anti-immigration policies would go even further than his official plan does.

Taylor wants Trump to push for a “pause” in issuing green cards, a step that Trump has gestured at but never fully spelled out. He wants Trump to end federal funding for Latino rights groups like the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). He wants him to use executive authority to limit the number of immigrants admitted for the purpose of family reunification.

“There is no end to the good a president could do if he were really convinced that immigration should benefit us rather than foreigners,” Taylor writes.

But alt-rightists’ ambitions for Trump go beyond mere policy. They want him to rewrite the boundaries of the politically possible.

The alt-right believes, at its core, that the American government has been poisoned. Poisoned, specifically, by the ideology of tolerance and multiculturalism. So long as the United States is officially committed to the idea that all people should be treated equally, regardless of race or creed, then it cannot take the steps necessary to make America a nation for whites.

“There hasn’t been a government on our side for 150 years,” Sam Dickson, an attorney who has represented the Ku Klux Klan, said in a 2011 speech to Spencer’s NPI. “The US government — the system in America — is the greatest enemy our race has for its survival.”

Undoing this means going further than shifting immigration policy, even dramatically. It means shifting the lens through which Americans see politics — ushering in a new, racially polarized discourse in which openly racist arguments once again become acceptable to make.

Trump, with his incendiary rhetoric about virtually every minority group — like calling Mexicans “rapists” and describing black communities as dystopian hellscapes — has helped push discourse in what alt-rightists see as the right direction. Because Trump has gotten away with saying offensive stuff, and seized the highest office in the land while doing it, they think they’ve made progress.

“What are we fighting for is a ‘new normal,’ a moral consensus we insist upon,” Spencer said in his recent NPI address (the “Hail Trump!” one). “Donald Trump is a step towards this new normal.”

Now they want Trump to go even further. They want him to continue using offensive rhetoric, and actually escalate it — to use his Cabinet appointments and the bully pulpit to normalize ideas that mainstream discourse shuns.

Taylor, again, is the clearest on this point.

“A change in tone would be as dramatic as a change in policy because a president and his cabinet have tremendous influence that goes well beyond policy,” he writes in his 2015 piece:

They can put a subject on the national agenda just by talking about it. They can make it respectable just by continuing to talk about it. Actually looking at the pros and cons of immigrants could open the door to looking at the pros and cons of different groups of people. White, high-IQ, English-speaking people obviously assimilate best, and someone in a Trump administration might actually say so. A Trump presidency could completely change what is said about the difference between a crowd and a nation, and what it means to be an American.

You actually are seeing a bit of this already. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, once tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” His attorney general pick, Jeff Sessions, once said of the KKK that “I used to think they're okay” until he found out that they’re “pot smokers” (Sessions has played this off as a joke). Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, reportedly once said that he didn’t want to send his kids to a school with too many Jews (Bannon denies this).

This kind of rhetoric from top Cabinet officials, in the alt-right’s point of view, doesn't go far enough. They want top-level American officials saying racially aggressive stuff — like discussing the (mythical) connection between race and IQ — to help bring their ideas back into polite conversations. Trump’s Cabinet appointments may indeed help further this goal, though he has made some picks — like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a child of Indian immigrants, for United Nations ambassador — that the alt-right might not love.

But Trump’s own Twitter account and public appearances will likely be supremely helpful with this too. Trump has a tendency to go off the cuff, and make offensive statements, in tweets, speeches, and interviews. What comes out of his mouth and Twitter account is extremely unpredictable — and, if history is any guide, tends to push the boundaries of acceptable speech in an alt-right direction.

To be clear, Trump did publicly reject the alt-right last week, saying, “I disavow the group.” But the phrasing was very weak, so the alt-right doesn’t see it as too much of a setback. Unless Trump stops saying Trumpy stuff, there’s a very good chance they’ll get at least some of the rhetoric they want.

This is all in service of the creation of a white ethno-state, accomplished through “peaceful ethnic cleansing”

The alt-right’s goals go beyond mere policy, to remaking the very nature of the American state itself.

The ultimate goal of the movement is to rebuild America along ethnic lines, turning it into an “ethno-state” for whites. This is why “white nationalist” is probably the most accurate description of the alt-right: They literally see themselves as giving birth to a new white nation in all or part of the continental US.

“The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent,” Spencer writes at Radix, his online journal. “Our task is to capture the imaginations of our people (or the best of our people) and shock them out of their current assumption of what they think is possible.”

But the movement isn’t especially clear on how this is supposed to happen.

Spencer insists that nonwhites and Jews will be “peacefully” made to leave the country. He rarely gets more specific than that. But given demographic trends in the US — birth patterns mean whites will likely be a minority by 2050 — mass ethnic cleansing is the only way to preserve a white Christian majority. And as history makes abundantly clear, ethnic cleansing is rarely ever accomplished “peacefully.” That’s one reason it is literally a war crime.

The most specific plan I’ve heard for achieving this comes from Dickson’s 2011 NPI address. He thinks the US missed an opportunity to enact a “racial partition” in the 1960s, when it could have taken over Cuba and forcibly transferred African Americans (or “our blacks,” as he refers to them) to Cuba, and moved all white Cubans to an enclave in southern Florida (it’s unclear why he believes this was an option back then and not now):

We would take over Cuba. We would take the remaining white people out of Cuba and settle them in South Florida, and give them a state of their own where they could have their own culture — Cuba Nueva, and rename Miami Havana Nueva.

And we would then settle our blacks in Cuba, in a civilized way. We would build roads, expressways, factories, schools. And we would build a state for them, and the Cuban blacks, and they could then have a state of their own, to express their own cultural needs and aspirations and desires.

This is worth mentioning not because it’s something the Trump administration might feasibly do — it obviously isn’t. Rather, it’s to make it abundantly clear what the alt-right truly stands for in its own words, and why so many people find it troubling they’ve so enthusiastically embraced Trump and his policies.

The alt-right believes that its white ethno-state is only possible if white Americans develop a stronger sense of white identity. Taylor calls it “racial consciousness,” the idea “that white Americans, as whites, have collective interests that are legitimate.”

Racial consciousness, they think, will emerge somewhat naturally — alt-rightists believe, incorrectly, that race is a biological category that will inevitably lead to social division between whites and nonwhites. But they also believe that government policy and statements from leading politicians can strengthen it by pitting the interests of whites against others.

This, ultimately, is the effect that many of Trump’s policies and actions could have — intended or not. Deporting millions of Latinos, banning Muslim immigration, and using the bully pulpit to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter create a sense of conflict between the whites who voted for Trump and the minorities who mostly opposed him. Whether Trump intends to sow racial division with these policies is irrelevant; that’s the inevitable consequence of implementing them.

This is why the alt-right is so excited by Trump’s victory. They believe that by electing Trump, whites have finally put their identities as whites front and center — an “awakening,” as Taylor calls it, of “white consciousness” itself.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_(website)

Vox (website)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Vox.com" redirects here. For the former blogging platform, see Vox (blogging platform).


Vox is an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media. The website was founded in 2014 by Ezra Klein. Vox is noted for its concept of "explanatory journalism"* and its use of "card stacks"* that define terms and provide context within an article. It has been described as having a liberal or progressive editorial perspective.[3]

[SEE EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM AND CARD STACKS BELOW.]

History[edit]

Ezra Klein left The Washington Post in January 2014 for a position with Vox Media, the publishers of the sports website SB Nation, technology website The Verge, and video gaming website Polygon.[4] The New York Times described Vox Media as "a technology company that produces media" rather than its inverse, associated with "Old Media".[4] Klein expected to "improve the technology of news" and build an online platform better equipped for making news understandable.[4] The new site's 20-person staff was chosen for their expertise in topic areas and included Slate's Matthew Yglesias, Melissa Bell, and Klein's colleagues from The Washington Post.[4][5]

Vox launched in early April 2014 with Klein as its editor-in-chief. His opening editorial essay, "How politics makes us stupid", explained his distress about political polarization in the context of Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan's theories on how people protect themselves from information that conflicts with their core beliefs.[6]

The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2014, Vox took in $60 million in revenue and was profitable.[7]

As of August 2015, Vox Media, which owns Vox, had received funding valuing it at over $1 billion, thus becoming a startup unicorn. Of this amount, $200 million came from NBCUniversal, $100 million from the venture arm of Comcast (NBC Universal's parent company), and $46.8 million from General Atlantic.[7] Other investors included Accel Partners, Allen & Company, Khosla Ventures, and former AOL executive Ted Leonsis.[8]

In June 2016, Vox suspended contributor Emmett Rensin for a series of tweets calling for anti-Trump riots, including one on June 3, 2016 that urged, "If Trump comes to your town, start a riot." The tweets drew attention after violent anti-Trump protests took place in San Jose, California on the day of Rensin's tweet.[9][10][11][12]

Content[edit]

In order to reuse prior journalist work, Vox creates "card stacks" in bright "canary yellow" that provide context and define terms within an article. The cards are perpetually maintained as a form of "wiki page written by one person with a little attitude".[13] As an example, a card about the term "insurance exchange" may be reused on stories about the Affordable Care Act.[13]

The site uses Vox Media's Chorus content management system, which enables journalists to easily create articles with complex visual effects and transitions, such as photos that change as the reader scrolls.[13] Vox Media's properties target educated households with six-figure incomes and a head of house less than 35 years old.[13]

In March 2014, before it had officially launched, Vox was criticized by conservative media commentators, including Erick Erickson.[14]

The website's launch received significant media attention.[15] Websites noted that the launch came around the same time as other data and explainer websites like FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times' The Upshot.[16][17] Vox was described as using "Upworthy" style headlines to enhance shareability and to act as a "Wikipedia for ongoing news stories."[15]


[Please forgive my own “EMBEDDED” INFORMATION IN THIS VOX ARTICLE on yet another almost inexplicable term:
http://www.definitions.net/definition/UPWORTHY,

“Upworthy”

Upworthy is social media with a mission: to make important stuff as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof.”

Numerology

Chaldean Numerology
The numerical value of UPWORTHY in Chaldean Numerology is: 3

Pythagorean Numerology
The numerical value of UPWORTHY in Pythagorean Numerology is: 2”


FOR MORE ON NUMEROLOGY LOOK UP “666.” THE ENDING OF THE VOX ARTICLE IS BELOW.

Shortly after it launched, conservative writer David Harsanyi criticized the site's concept of "explanatory journalism" in an article in The Federalist titled "How Vox makes us stupid", arguing that the website selectively chose facts, and that "explanatory journalism" inherently leaves out opposing viewpoints and different perspectives.[18] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The Week argued that the website produced "partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise" and criticized the site for having a "starting lineup [that] was mostly made up of ideological liberals."[19] The Week's Ryu Spaeth described the site's operations as, "It essentially takes the news (in other words, what is happening in the world at any given moment in time) and frames it in a way that appeals to its young, liberal audience."[3]

The Economist, commenting on Klein's launching essay "How politics makes us stupid," said the website was "bright and promising" and the premise behind the site was "profoundly honourable," and positively compared the site's mission to John Keats's negative capability.*[6]”

In 2016, after Donald Trump was elected US president, Glenn Greenwald criticized media including Vox for "suppressing reporting that reflects negatively on them (the Democratic Party) and instead confines itself to hagiography.*" in the run-up and aftermath of the election.[23]”



EXCERPT -- www.vox.com -- “… Nonetheless, he believes a few high-profile deportation raids on innocent families could go a long way.”

Do you have the stomach for this? Please, as well-intentioned Americans who would like to be on the side of God rather than Satan, force yourself to read the VOX article. The news site vox.com has been characterized as “liberal,” but Beauchamp cites references which can be checked if you want to do it.

I’m not put off by the – to some, apparently insufferable “liberal bias” -- at VOX, however I am considerably annoyed by the use of certain words which are not only highly uncommon among OLDER and more ordinary non-computer-crazy 60 plus readers, who just want to see what the author is discussing on the subject of politics; I have persistently looked them up just to show the writers that I can’t be stymied by some roadblocks in their clever analytical treatises.

Their terms haven’t been easy to find on Google, either, because their ordinary meaning is entirely incorrect given the context. That kind of writing is like those who throw out a liberal quantity of French phrases, in order to make themselves sound like very high-ranking and particularly elegant people. Pardon my simple and “working class” background, but that is truly rude and boorish (to use a good Victorian word.)

FIRST, FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT CATHOLIC, I JUST LOOKED UP HAGIORAPHY ALSO, TO FIND THAT IT MEANS BIOGRAPHY AND OTHER REFERENCES TO THE CATHOLIC SAINTS. FROM THE ABOVE ALT-RIGHT ARTICLE, WHICH IS REALLY IMPORTANT IN ITS’ CONTENT, I FOUND THAT IN ORDER TO FULLY UNDERSTAND IT, ONE NEEDS A STREET LEXICON OF ALL THE NEWEST COMPUTER GADGETS AND APPS THAT ARE THE CURRENT STATUS SYMBOLS OF THE MOMENT.

I PERSONALLY HATE THAT KIND OF THING. IT’S AN OLD, BUT GOOD RULE THAT IF WE USE ANY WORD IN A SPECIALIZED SENSE, WE SHOULD AT LEAST INFORMALLY, DEFINE IT. THAT’S GOOD BASIC INFORMATIONAL WRITING PROCEDURE. IF YOU’RE WRITING POETRY, THAT’S DIFFERENT. BELOW ARE SEVERAL MORE OF THE INSCRUTABLE INGROUP WORDS FROM THE ARTICLE ABOVE THAT ONE LEARNS ONLY ON THE INTERNET, OR AT JUST THE RIGHT COCKTAIL PARTIES:

“EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM,” FROM MY OWN DIGGING FOR EXPLANTIONS ON GOOGLE, IS WHAT Wikipedia and MANY other websites do in order to lead one forward from one possibly unknown term to another. Now that would usually be what I call “in depth reporting.” It’s the kind of thing that makes NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post and such thorough presentations a true treat to me.

IN THE CASE OF VOX, they do it by means of what they call “Cards.” I Googled that, too, and after a while found clear references to the term in APP advertising sites, along with the term “Tinder.” Likewise, the term “CARD STACKS” seems to refer to those images on smart phone touch screens which will move aside when touched and “swiped” to present another one in an established succession on a related topic, as in Wikipedia with its’ neon blue “links.” What has caused those to be called “cards,” is beyond me.

The term “TINDER” is apparently an App that is used by the lovelorn to hook up with somebody fast and uses photos to be chosen on their relative beauty. Being personally out of the “hooking up” generation, I had to look all that up. It’s like a whole new language.

Finally, AS FOR THE TERM “NEGATIVE CAPABILITY,” SEE THE FOLLOWING:

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability

John Keats and ‘negative capability’
Article by:
Stephen Hebron
Theme:
Romanticism

Stephen Hebron explores Keats’s understanding of negative capability, a concept which prizes intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge. . . . .”

November 28, 2016


News and Views


http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/11/27/miss-minnesota-contestant-halima-aden-hijab-birkini/94521240/

Pageant contestant wears hijab for all rounds of Miss Minnesota USA
Carly Mallenbaum , USA TODAY
7:04 a.m. EST November 28, 2016

Photograph -- Halima Aden will be the first to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA contest while wearing a hijab and other modest Muslim clothing that keeps her fully covered. (Photo: Alishba Kazmi, AP)


The traditional "swimsuit competition" has seen some new interpretations this year: Miss Teen USA made waves this summer by replacing it with a round filled with workout clothes, and a Miss Minnesota USA contestant has competed this weekend in that part of the beauty pageant in a hijab and burkini.

Halima Aden, 19, is the first contestant to wear a traditional Muslim headpiece in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant. The Somali-American teenager, who lives in St. Cloud, is wearing the hijab for the entire competition, and pairing it with a full-body bathing suit and a covered-up evening dress for different rounds of the contest.

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Aden told TEGNA station KARE that wearing more modest clothing makes her feel most like herself.

“A lot of people will look at you and will fail to see your beauty because you’re covered up and they’re not used to it. So growing up, I just had to work on my people skills and give people a chance to really know me besides the clothing," she said. “Be who you are. It’s easy to feel like you have to blend in, but it takes courage to live your life with conviction and embrace the person that you are."

Aden, one of 45 contestants in the pageant that continues Sunday, is competing to represent Minnesota in the Miss USA pageant in 2017.



I’m happy to see that at least some Islamic people are emerging as well-known and talented individuals, engaging freely in American society. In a time period like this it must be threatening for people of distrusted groups to step forward in life and do business in the presence of often hostile “natives.” One young woman who had on an Islamic style bathing suit popularly called a “burkini,” on the beach at Nice, France, was detained by police. Fifteen towns in France have a ban on any religious garb on the beach.

The Burkini, rather than resembling a bathing suit at all by modern standards, covers every inch of skin, and looks more like a yoga outfit with a long, flowing head scarf and long sleeves. The ban has been overturned by the French Court. In the US and elsewhere, mainly because of ISIS on the one hand and of the Alt-Right groups on the other, ordinary citizens are becoming pretty darned paranoid, and potentially dangerous. Even as I understand certain kinds of human frailty, the hatred of other groups for instance, I still think they are pointless, deeply wrong and damaging to our whole society.

See CNN article below.


http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/europe/france-burkini-ban/

Burkini ban in Nice overturned by French court
By Lauren Said-Moorhouse, CNN
Updated 10:07 AM ET, Fri September 2, 2016

Play – CNN news video
PLAY -- Marine Le Pen: 'The burkini is a fundamentalist uniform' 02:57
Photos: Burqa, hijab, niqab: What's what?


Several towns along France's southeastern coast have implemented the bans
Critics say the order is discriminatory and unconstitutional


(CNN)A court in Nice suspended the city's burkini ban, citing insufficient grounds to justify the controversial decree.

In the ruling Thursday, judges from Nice's administrative tribunal court said the full-length swimsuit worn by some Muslim women did not pose a risk to public order on the French Riviera city's beaches.

The case was brought by the Collective Against Islamophobia -- a group of human rights activists who have been helping a number of women challenge fines. They argued that the ban is discriminatory, unconstitutional and that there has been no evidence to suggest that wearing a burkini has contributed to any acts of public disorder.

Over 30 towns -- largely situated along France's southeast coastline -- initially imposed a ban on the divisive swimwear.

The arguments for and against

Authorities in Nice had counter-claimed that the request to the ban the swimwear -- which covers the entire body apart from the face, hands and feet -- should continue in the wake of the Bastille Day terror attack, in which at least 86 people were killed.

Officials said many people in Nice were deeply traumatized by the attack and that "wearing (an) outfit ostentatiously showing religious beliefs may be interpreted as affiliation with religious fundamentalism."

Nice authorities added that the ban had been limited to the summer of 2016 in the aftermath of the horrific truck attack along the city's popular Promenade des Anglais.

However, French judges dismissed these counter claims, ruling that: "In the absence of such risks, the emotion and concerns arising from terrorist attacks, including those committed in Nice on July 14, are not sufficient to legally justify the contested ban."
Burkinis: liberating or repressive?

Play -- Burkinis: liberating or repressive? 07:10

The decision in Nice comes as other French courts determined that mayors in Villeneuve-Loubet and Cannes, among others, had no legal right to impose such dress codes. Bans in other cities also face challenges in court similar to Nice.

Meanwhile, cases in Menton and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin have now been dismissed, as the bans have been withdrawn by both municipalities.

French towns maintain ban despite court rulings

What is the feeling in France?

In France, opinion has been largely divided on the issue. Some see the ban as an infringement on religious freedom, while others says that the overt style of Islamic dress is inconsistent with France's rigorously enforced secularism.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls stood by the bans, calling the burkini a "symbol of the enslavement of women." And Marc Etienne Lansade, mayor of the seaside town of Cogolin, defended his town's position, telling CNN: "If you don't want to live the way we do, don't come.

"You have to behave in the way that people behave in the country that accepted you, and that is it."

Why are the burqa and burkini being banned?

What makes the burqa and burkini so controversial?

Fierce debate around the subject was reignited last week after photographs emerged appearing to show French police ordering a woman to remove part of her clothing on a beach in Nice.

The series of images sparked an international debate on social platforms, with many mocking what they saw as France's attempt to tell people how to dress and behave.


Opinion: France wrong on burkini ban

CNN's Sheena McKenzie and journalists Angela Dewan and Sandrine Amiel contributed to this report.



CAMPAIGN SCHOOLS – GOOD IDEA FOR BERNIE’S PARTY, TOO, TO “GROW” OUR MEMBERSHIP FROM THE LOCAL LEVEL UP

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-will-the-green-party-jill-stein-use-election-recount-donations/

How will the Green Party use election recount donations?
By REENA FLORES CBS NEWS
November 25, 2016, 5:56 PM

Play VIDEO -- Jill Stein pushing for election recount in 3 states


Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee, has raised more money for an effort to recount the votes in three states, than she did during her entire presidential campaign. Online donations stacked up $5 million online in a few days, as of Friday afternoon, and she just upped the target to $6 to 7 million.

That’s enough, the party says, to fund audits in three states critical to Donald Trump’s victory: Pennsylvania, where the president-elect won by about 68,000 votes; Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump edged out Hillary Clinton by just over 27,000 votes; and Michigan, where Mr. Trump has a slight lead but where the votes are still too close to call.

How much of those millions will be used to fund the recount efforts?

Filing recount petitions in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will run up a hefty tab, the Green Party says. In Wisconsin, where the deadline to file is Friday at 5 p.m., the price tag is estimated to be $1.1 million; in Pennsylvania, the cost to recount ballots is approximately $600,000; and in Michigan, the bill will be about $500,000.

Jill Stein recount efforts in Wisconsin: What you need to know
Additional funds, she and the party say, will be used to fund legal challenges. George Martin, a member of the Wisconsin Green Party’s coordinating council, said Friday Stein will submit appropriate paperwork for a recount in Wisconsin by the deadline.

If there is extra money in the donation fund -- or if Stein’s petition fails to pass muster with the election commissions in any of the states -- Martin promised that the money will be used to fund the Green party’s local “campaign schools,” meant to groom local candidates for public service.

“As a national party, our commitment is to build at the local level,” Martin said. “That’s where these dollars and excess dollars will go.”

On her website, however, Stein’s donation page says that any extra dollars not devoted to the recount will “go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.”

As for the recounts, Martin said at a press conference that they are the first step to finding out “whether our electoral system is working,” emphasizing that it’s “not about the outcome -- it’s about the process.”

Martin, who said there is “no smoking gun” about voter fraud, nevertheless pointed to forensic and computer expert testimony to say there is “enough peripheral evidence to warrant that our system should be investigated.” Earlier this week, a group of election lawyers and researchers also urged Clinton to ask for a recount in the three states Stein’s campaign is currently looking at.

The Green Party official also pointed to the discrepancy in votes for Mr. Trump, according to Wisconsin exit polls (where he received 44.3 percent of the vote share) versus the official vote count (where he earned 47.9 percent).

The Wisconsin Republican party is panning the effort as “absurd and nothing more than an expensive political stunt that undermines Wisconsin’s election process.”



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jill-steins-pennsylvania-recount-efforts-what-you-need-to-know/

Jill Stein's Pennsylvania recount efforts: What you need to know
CBS NEWS
November 28, 2016, 6:08 AM

Play VIDEO -- Third-party candidate raises millions to fund vote recount
Play VIDEO -- Trump keeps watch dogs on recount effort


Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein addressed Pennsylvania supporters in a video on her website, appealing to them to pitch in on her call for a recount -- the system in Pennsylvania, she said, means “we are going to jump through some hoops.”

Stein has already filed in Wisconsin, where a statewide hand recount is expected to start near the end of the week.

But of the three states in which Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is pursuing recounts, Pennsylvania may have the highest hurdles to a recount. For one, it’s the only state in which candidates can’t file direct requests -- they can only file a legal appeal that would be decided by the court.

So instead, Stein and the Green Party plan to join a voter-initiated recount in Pennsylvania. Stein has come up with the $500,000 she needs for this effort, but as it turns out, that was the easy part.

As she points out in a video appeal on her website, Pennsylvania is “especially complicated,” in that it “is the only state in which the recount process has to be initiated by actually thousands of voters.”

Jill Stein raises $4 million for 3-state recount effort

In Pennsylvania, a statewide recount can occur if at least three voters per precinct or election district submit affadavits. There were some 9,175 election districts in Pennsylvania as of June, 2015, according to Citizens for Election Integrity (CEI), a group which advocates for accuracy in elections. In her video, Stein makes a plea for volunteers from each district to file these affadavits, and she walks through the steps necessary to file the paperwork. There’s downloading the affadavit from her website, and filling it out -- did you vote on an optical scanner or electronic touchscreen, she asks, explaining the difference between the two machines.

After all of this, she warns the volunteer voters not to sign their affadavits until they’re in the presence of a notary public. And afterwards, they’ll have to submit their affadavits to the clerk in their individual election districts.

That’s not all -- the deadline varies from district to district, Stein notes in her video. It could be Monday or it could be Tuesday, Stein says, and in some districts, “the deadline has already passed.” As she talks through all the steps, it’s evident that she knows that she’s asking for a lot, and the odds are long for a statewide recount -- over 27,000 individual voters in these precincts in every corner of Pennsylvania would have to follow these instructions perfectly, notwithstanding the districts where the deadline has already come and gone (but there aren’t many of those, she said).

There would have been an automatic recount triggered in Pennsylvania if the margin of victory had been 0.5 percent or less. In fact, though, in the three states in which Stein is pursuing recounts, Donald Trump had the largest margin of victory in Pennsylvania -- 70,638 votes (a 1.17-percentage-point difference) -- according to the results published by Pennsylvania’s secretary of state.

President-Elect Trump tweeted on the topic several times over the weekend -- he called the recount efforts “sad” and declared that “nothing will change” despite the time and money that will be spent.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has agreed to participate in the recount effort. “We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states - Michigan - well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount,” Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias wrote, adding that “we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.”

If Stein does succeed in getting a recount in Pennsylvania, it may resemble the one undertaken in 2004 in Ohio, initiated by the Green Party. The New York Times noted at the time that the statewide recount of Ohio’s 88 counties resulted in a net difference of 285 votes, meaning that George W. Bush beat John Kerry in Ohio by 118,457 votes, instead of 118,775. The recount concluded on Dec. 28, 2004, nearly two months after the election took place.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/halima-aden-minnesotta-miss-usa-semi-finals-muslim-hijab-burkini/

Minnesota woman competes for Miss USA with hijab, burkini
CBS/AP
November 28, 2016, 11:07 AM

Photograph -- Miss Minnesota USA 2016 Bridget Jacobs, right, poses with Halima Aden, 19, from St. Cloud, the first fully-covered Muslim contestant participating in the Miss Minnesota USA competition in Burnsville, Minnesota, on November 26, 2016. MISS MINNESOTA PAGEANT/HANDOUT

BURNSVILLE, Minn. - A Muslim woman has become the first to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant while fully clothed.

Halima Aden made the semifinals of the competition over the weekend while wearing a hijab. CBS Minnesota reports she also wore a full-body outfit called a burkini during the swimsuit competition.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports Aden’s swim outfit stood in contrast to those of the other 44 contestants, most of whom wore bikinis.

Before the competition, the 19-year-old Somali-American woman told CBS Minnesota she wanted to use the Miss Minnesota USA stage as an opportunity to change misconceptions about Islam.

“For a really long time I thought being different was a negative thing. But as I grew older, I started to realize we are all born to stand out, nobody is born to blend in,” Aden said. “How boring would this world be if everyone was the same?”

Aden didn’t win the contest this year. Meridith Gould of Minneapolis was crowned Miss Minnesota. She will go on to compete in the Miss USA pageant in 2017.



http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/trump-abandons-promise-lock-hillary-clinton

Trump Abandons Promise to Lock Up Hillary Clinton
KEVIN DRUM
NOV. 22, 2016 1:17 PM

During the 2016 election, the chant of "Lock her up" followed Donald Trump everywhere he went. And he reveled in it. He promised on national TV to do exactly that, and during the final days of the campaign—after James Comey released his calamitous letter—he practically spoke about nothing else. Hillary Clinton was the most corrupt person ever in history, and when he became president he'd make sure she spent the rest of her natural days behind bars.

His fans loved it. But apparently they're going to be disappointed:

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump essentially said: "never mind," signaling that he does not intend to pursue investigations into his rival's use of a private email server or the financial operations at the Clinton family's global foundation.

In an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump campaign manager and a senior adviser to his transition, said the president-elect wanted to "move beyond the issues of the campaign" and confirmed that Mr. Trump did not want his promised Clinton investigations to take place.

"If Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that's a good thing," Ms. Conway said.

Isn't that sweet? Trump is going to help Hillary Clinton "heal." What a guy.

Of course, he's also signaling that he won't undertake the most corrupt use of the Justice Department since Watergate. So that's a positive, I guess.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that shipping Hillary off to Sing Sing was never something Trump planned to do in the first place. It just sounded good and made his crowds happy. Once the election was over, he didn't care anymore. I wonder how many more of Trump's promises fall into that category? His supporters are about to find out just how far the Trump con goes.


Trump's wildly abusive language and anti-logic made his crowds "happy." One of the things I am most concerned about, and disgusted by, is the lowbrow grade of our "crowds here." Those people should be few in number rather than populous. Perhaps we have become the mobs that the Founding Fathers feared. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't work to eliminate the silly, cumbersome, unfair Electoral College immediately or sooner.



http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-has-attended-only-two-intel-briefings-steep-drop-n687916?cid=eml_nnn_20161124

Donald Trump Has Attended Only Two Intelligence Briefings
by KRISTEN WELKER, KEN DILANIAN and ALEXANDRA JAFFE
POLITICS NOV 24 2016, 7:46 PM ET


President-elect Donald Trump has had only two intelligence briefings since he won the election more than two weeks ago, intelligence sources told NBC News on Wednesday — a much lower number than his predecessors had and fewer even than Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

A senior intelligence official cautioned that it was too early to gauge the significance of Trump's sparse briefing schedule, given that he is in the middle of his transition process.

But the news, first reported by The Washington Post, will likely fuel critics who've questioned Trump's knowledge of foreign affairs and national security issues.

Related: Clinton's Popular Vote Lead Now More Than 2 Million

While a team of intelligence analysts remains ready and waiting to deliver briefings to the president-elect, sources told NBC News that he has accepted them only twice. Instead, Trump has turned the briefings down to focus on meetings with potential Cabinet members, media executives and business associates.

Pence, on the other hand, has received the briefings nearly every day, the sources said.

The President's Daily Brief is a document that includes top-secret information and is meant to provide presidents-elect with an overview of security developments and the workings of the U.S. intelligence community and defense apparatus.

Play -- Trump Scrutinized Over Cabinet Picks, Intelligence Briefings 2:38

It could offer Trump an opportunity to study up on foreign policy, a key issue in which his lack of knowledge during the campaign drew criticism even from Republicans and prompted a number of GOP national security experts to speak out against him and sign letters denouncing him.

During the campaign, Trump showed a lack of understanding of basic foreign policy concepts, and he was at separate times unable to distinguish between the Iranian Quds Force and the Kurdish people or to define the nuclear triad.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump was unable to distinguish between Hamas, the Sunni militant group in Gaza, and Hezbollah, the Shiite group in Lebanon and Syria.

At the time, Trump told Hewitt that he'd learn the difference "when it's appropriate," and boasted, "I will know more about it than you know."

"And believe me, it won't take me long," he added.



Even as Trump seems to me to be less aggressive and scattered in his attention span lately, he still isn’t applying himself to the things he needs to learn. Maybe he thinks he doesn’t need to know anything personally as long as he has his bevy of personal assistants and spokesmen. I see above that Pence is diligently attending the briefings, so maybe he will be the real President behind the showman pretending to be President. It is really unbelievable to me.



http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/long-reach-to-find-precedent-for-2016-popular-vote-gap-in-us-past-816737347527

Long reach to find precedent for 2016 popular vote gap in US past
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 11/23/16

View video of Maddow’s commentary 13.21

Rachel Maddow looks back 140 years to Reconstruction era U.S. history to find a remotely comparable gap between the popular vote and the electoral vote winner, and warns against leaping to conclusions about the significance of the 2016 popular vote.



http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/watch/should-electoral-college-be-abolished-818386499566

VIEW VIDEO -- POLITICSNATION WITH AL SHARPTON 11/27/16

Should electoral college be abolished?

When the votes have all counted, Hillary Clinton will likely win the popular vote by over 2 million votes, but Donald Trump will still be president because of the electoral college. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-NY, is fighting to change this. Duration: 5:28



MEDICINE --

(SEE ALSO: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-preview-alzheimers-disease-colombia-lesley-stahl/)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-alzheimers-disease-medellin-colombia-lesley-stahl/

The Alzheimer's Laboratory
An extended family in Colombia with a genetic mutation causing Alzheimer’s may help scientists prevent the disease someday. Lesley Stahl reports on the groundbreaking study

November 27, 2016

The following script is from “The Alzheimer’s Laboratory,” which aired on Nov. 27, 2016. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shari Finkelstein, producer.

UNCUT

Nobel-prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote of a mythical town in the middle of the jungle whose residents suffer from a mysterious affliction that erases their memories. Today, in a region of Colombia called Antioquia, reality appears to be imitating fiction -- in a way that may answer questions for all of us.

Antioquia is home to the largest concentration in the world of people who carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them 100 percent certain to develop Alzheimer’s disease. And as devastating as Alzheimer’s is anywhere, this is a particularly cruel version -- it strikes when people are in their mid-40s and leads to death about a decade later. It is a tragic situation, but a perfect scientific laboratory. And it’s now the center of a multimillion dollar, NIH-backed study trying to find out for the first time whether Alzheimer’s disease may be preventable.

Photograph -- alzmain.png, These are the Andes Mountains and lush countryside of Antioquia, Colombia, whose capital city, Medellin was once famous for murder and the drug cartel of Pablo Escobar. Today Medellin -- or “Medejin” as it’s pronounced here -- is peaceful. But for some families here, there’s still a battle going on, a battle against an insidious disease. This family, mother Cecilia, her seven children, and grandchildren, lost its patriarch, Alonso.

Freddie: For me, my father was number one.

Freddie, the oldest, remembers his dad always eager to join in and play with him and his friends.

Video -- Drug trials to prevent Alzheimer's 60 MINUTES OVERTIME

Cecilia: He was a very joyful person. He loved to dance. He was a really nice person, a very good father, before the disease.

Lesley Stahl: When it first started, what were you noticing that made you think he’s-- he’s different?

Cecilia: He started asking, “What is the date today? Do I have to go to work?” And we got concerned.

Alonso at the time was in his mid-40s, so the memory loss and confusion made no sense. His doctor suggested exercise and vitamins, but Alonso just got worse -- forgetting the names of his children, getting lost and disoriented. His son Victor had to help him get dressed.

Victor: I gave him his shirt, I told him “Dad, come, I’ll help you put your shirt on” and the first thing he did was to grab it and put it on through his feet.

Lesley Stahl: Did he understand what was happening to him?

Victor: There were moments of lucidity where he would ask me and say, “Son, what’s happening to me? Why don’t I remember? I don’t remember my children, or my wife. I don’t know who I am.”

His son Julio took him back to see the doctor:

Julio: When I asked the doctor I told him “Doctor, I am not leaving here--” Sorry. “Until you tell me what is wrong with my father.”

The doctor sent them to Francisco Lopera, a neurologist at the University of Antioquia who knew exactly what was wrong with Alonso, because he’d become the local authority on a rash of early-onset Alzheimer’s cases in and around Medellin.

Photograph -- drlopera.png, Dr. Francisco Lopera CBS NEWS
Francisco Lopera: They were getting disease very early in the life.

It all began many years earlier, back in the 1980s when Lopera was a young medical resident. He had read about small numbers of people scattered around the world who’d developed Alzheimer’s in their 40s. So when a 47-year-old man came into his Medellin clinic with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms, he was intrigued and decided to investigate.

Lesley Stahl: You met this one man and you decided to go to where he was from?

Francisco Lopera: I decided to go to the town where he was living.

Lopera learned that the man’s father and grandfather had also lost their memories in their 40s. Then, a few years later, another similar patient came into the clinic, this time a 42-year-old woman from a town 40 miles away. Dr. Lopera’s then-nurse, Lucia Madrigal, asked if any of her relatives also started losing their memories when they were young.

Lucia: They told us yes, that the father, the uncles, the grandfather, the great grandfather, so I started making a little family tree, on one page, and I showed it to Dr. Lopera and I told him “Look what we have here. What is this? So many with the same disease…”

And so began a detective hunt that lasted more than a decade. Lopera and Madrigal traveled all over the region, finding more and more people afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s and compiling family trees.

They thought it might be genetic, so Madrigal spent days at parish churches, poring over heavy ledgers where priests for generations had recorded village births, marriages, and deaths. Thanks to these meticulous records, she was able to trace the disease back hundreds of years, and to make an important discovery -- the different families were actually one huge extended family, connected generations back by common ancestors who had died young, with an unusual cause of death written down by the priest: “softening of the brain.”

This is what “softening of the brain” looks like in real life. Fernando is 46 years old, a descendant of that second patient years ago. He started forgetting things when he was in his late 30s, and now can no longer speak, feed himself, or do just about anything on his own. His aunt takes care of him round the clock just as she did with his mother when she got the disease at the same age.

Norelly is at an even later stage of the disease. Despite her appearance, she is just 58 years old. Patients were going from mild symptoms to complete dementia and then death within about a decade -- as Dr. Lopera showed us in these cognitive test results.

Francisco Lopera: You can see, at 38…

Even at age 38, this man struggled -- as many older Alzheimer’s patients do -- to copy a complex drawing accurately.

Francisco Lopera: At 45.

And things got worse from there.

Francisco Lopera: He lost more. At 50.

Lesley Stahl: Ah! Oh!

Francisco Lopera: At 51.

Lesley Stahl: Oh!

Dr. Lopera was convinced that what he and Madrigal were discovering was scientifically important, but even as they found more patients and more related families, he couldn’t get anyone outside Colombia to take notice. Until 1993, when a Harvard professor came to give a talk about Alzheimer’s in Bogota, several hours away.

Ken Kosik: There was a person in the audience, Francisco Lopera, who came up after the talk and said, “You know, there’s-- I have a family here that w-- has-- early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

Ken Kosik, now at UC Santa Barbara, was that professor.

Lesley Stahl: A family. Could’ve been four people.

Ken Kosik: It could’ve been just four people. But he started to tell me how many it was. And as I listened to him, I became just so absorbed and taken with what he was telling me that I changed all my plans, went with him to Medellín. And, we began a collaboration that goes on to this day.

They showed Kosik what Lucia Madrigal showed us -- the family tree they had compiled based on all that searching through church records, for just one of the affected families, going back all the way to the 1800s.

Lesley Stahl: This is one family?

Lucia: Una sola! (Only one!)

It just kept unfolding and unfolding. Covering these pages are small squares representing men, circles for women. The colored-in squares and circles mean the person got sick with Alzheimer’s at an early age.

Lesley Stahl: Look, she had these sons and a daughter. And then it just kept going down-- through the generations—

Lucia: Si.

Ken Kosik: When we looked at the family trees, about 50 percent of the offspring were getting the disease. That’s a clear signature of a gene.

But what gene? Kosik connected Dr. Lopera with leading geneticists in the U.S., and they started collecting blood samples and searching. Within a year, a major breakthrough. They found a specific mutation in a gene on chromosome 14 – one tiny flaw in the DNA responsible for all this family’s suffering. The discovery was published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Lopera had identified the largest concentration of early onset Alzheimer’s cases in the world.

Lesley Stahl: If a person has that mutation, do they get Alzheimer’s?

Ken Kosik: Yes, they do.

Lesley Stahl: If they have it, they definitely get the disease.

Ken Kosik: Right. There are some mutations where you don’t definitely get it. But this is a bad one. And if you have this mutation, you get it.

For families like Alonso’s, discovering the mutation was a blessing – a crucial first step toward finding a way to fight the disease. But it was also a curse, because it meant that anyone whose parent had the mutation has a 50/50 chance of having inherited it too.

Lesley Stahl: Do any of you know if you have that mutation? Do you know?

Victor: No.

Freddie: Nobody knows.

Lesley Stahl: Nobody knows.

Well, somebody knows. Dr. Lopera and his team have been testing for the mutation and compiling a database, but their policy is not to tell family members if they have the mutation or not -- and not even to reveal the results to Dr. Lopera -- since at this point there is nothing that can be done to help.

Cecilia: Sometimes I ask, which one will get it? But I throw that thought away, because I don’t want to think about that. I pray a lot to God that none of them gets it. I don’t want to see my children with that disease.

Lesley Stahl: Each one of you knows, because of your father, that you have a 50/50 chance. So what kind of a weight does that put on you, day in and day out?

Julio: I’ve even prayed to God that if there’s one person who has to have the disease, I say to God, “Let it be me.”

Sara: I thank God that I’m a nurse and that I would be able to take care of them, but I tell myself, “First I had to go through it with my dad, the experience of the disease, and I may have to go through it with one of my siblings, or with several, we don’t know.”

Sara told us she would love to have children of her own, but given her risk of developing the disease, she’s decided against it.

Sara: So that my children don’t have to go through my same experience.

Lesley Stahl: You’ve been working on this 30 years. How do you cope with all this pain?

Francisco Lopera: [breaks down]

It was not the response we had expected.

Lesley Stahl: It’s that hard? It’s that hard.

But Dr. Lopera knew that even in the midst of all this tragedy, there might just be a glimmer of hope. Because what he had discovered in these families -- hundreds of people destined to develop Alzheimer’s, and easily identifiable with a simple genetic test -- presented a unique scientific opportunity to test whether it’s possible to step in and stop early-onset, and maybe all, Alzheimer’s disease before it starts. That part of the story, when we come back.

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s right now, and given the aging baby boomer population, that number is projected to nearly triple by mid-century. Yet unlike many other leading killers, there is no effective treatment. An Alzheimer’s diagnosis is essentially a prescription for a slow descent into oblivion -- an inexorable loss of the memories, spatial skills, and ability to think that make us who we are.

Early-onset Alzheimer’s patients like the hundreds of family members in Colombia are a tiny fraction of the whole, but to scientists, they could be everything. Because they are offering researchers something they have never had before -- a way to test whether intervening years before people start having symptoms, might halt the disease in its tracks. Answers are still years away, but with more than a thousand Americans developing Alzheimer’s every day, a way to prevent it can not come soon enough.

The scene we witnessed in Dr. Pierre Tariot’s exam room at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix is one that plays out in neurologist’s offices every day.

Dr. Tariot: So if I asked you what city we’re in right now, what would you say?

Norm: Uh, you know, right, I don’t know at this moment.

Norm, age 72, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s -- the typical, late-in-life form so many of us fear. It begins with mild memory and thinking problems and spirals into full-on dementia.

Dr. Tariot: Who is that young lady over there?

Norm: Betsy.

Dr. Tariot: Betsy. And is she a friend?

Norm: Yes.

Dr. Tariot: How do you know Betsy?

Norm: Because I’ve been loving her for a long time.

Dr. Tariot: OK. Is she your sister?

Norm: A little bit of both.

Dr. Tariot: Uh-huh. Is she your wife?

Norm: I don’t think so. I think you’re-- somebody. I wish I was, but…

They’ve been married 51 years. Unlike early-onset Alzheimer’s, there’s been no single gene identified that causes this. No way to know who among us is destined to get it.

Lesley Stahl: What percentage of all people are going to be get Alzheimer’s?

Pierre Tariot: One percent of us 60 or older will have a dementia like Alzheimer’s disease. But by the time you hit 85—

Lesley Stahl: What percent?

Pierre Tariot: --that-- that percentage is approaching 40ish percent.

Norm: That’s a Dogan and these are Gogans.

Pierre Tariot: Alzheimer’s disease has been called out by the World Health Organization as the coming pandemic of the West. We have to do something to put it behind us.

Claudia to female patient: Can you draw the numbers for a clock?

But Dr. Claudia Kawas, a leading Alzheimer’s researcher and clinician at the University of California Irvine, says she’s frustrated that she can’t offer her patients any hope.

Claudia Kawas: I have to say I’ve been doing this now for a third of a century. And when I started, I just never would have believed we would still not be closer than we are now to making a real difference. It has been a little disappointing.

It hasn’t been for lack of trying. Kawas gave us a quick primer on the tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain after autopsy.

Claudia Kawas: Every place you see a brown spot, that is a senile amyloid plaque. In contrast, you see these black things that tend to be triangular shape. Those are what we call neurofibrillary tangles.

The relationship between plaques and tangles isn’t completely understood, but because it’s been shown that amyloid plaques build up in the brain before tangles -- and years before patients develop symptoms -- pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s developing drugs to remove amyloid from the brain, and hundreds of millions more to test those drugs in patients like Norm.

Lesley Stahl: Of all the trials that have been done, what percent have succeeded?

Pierre Tariot: About one percent.

In other words, a resounding failure.

Lesley Stahl: So what does that say, do you think?

Claudia Kawas: Well, it says either amyloid is not the right thing to go after. Or it says we need to remove it earlier on in the process before it’s made all the other things cascade after it. You know, if you give a polio vaccine once somebody has polio, you can understand why it doesn’t work.

Lesley Stahl: You’re saying that maybe those drugs haven’t worked because the person already had Alzheimer’s?

Claudia Kawas: Exactly. And maybe if we give ‘em early enough, it might work.

But how can you test drugs on people before they develop the disease, when you don’t know who among us is going to get it? Dr. Tariot and the executive director at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, Dr. Eric Reiman, realized there was a place where you could know who was going to get Alzheimer’s --- Antioquia.

Ken Kosik: And that’s when my phone began to ring.

By then, Ken Kosik had been studying the Colombian extended family for 15 years.

Ken Kosik: Received a call from the people at Banner. And they said, you know, “You have this family. We know when they’re gonna get it. We know who’s gonna get it. Can we start treating before the disease strikes?”

Kosik connected Tariot and Teiman with Dr. Lopera, who by that time had identified hundreds of people who carried the gene mutation, guaranteeing they would be struck with Alzheimer’s in the prime of their lives. Reiman and Tariot traveled to Medellin and met with both healthy and sick members of the extended family.

Lesley Stahl: Is this particular family, in the world-- extraordinary?

Pierre Tariot: There’s nothing else like it. The idea that there’s this concentration within roughly 100 miles of each other is-- just an extraordinary phenomenon.

And a perfect scientific laboratory. To lay the groundwork for a large clinical trial, Banner flew a group of extended family members from Medellin to Phoenix for PET scans. One goal: to compare the brains of those with and without the mutation years before any memory loss began, when they were in their 30s. Dr. Reiman showed us the results.

Eric Reiman: This is somebody who doesn’t have the gene. They have no plaques in the brain.

But in members of the family with the mutation, it was a different story.

Eric Reiman: Extensive amyloid deposition in the brain.

Lesley Stahl: That’s the red.

Eric Reiman: Red is more amyloid. But yellow is also amyloid.

This brain had even more. The images showed that amyloid plaques build up in the brain more than a decade before memory loss begins.

So if a drug could remove that red and yellow, maybe the disease could be prevented. Banner developed a plan for a multimillion dollar drug trial and convened a meeting with leading scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and representatives of the NIH.

Pierre Tariot: The end of the meeting, each scientist was allowed to say one closing thought. And Francisco had the last word.

Lesley Stahl: Lopera?

Pierre Tariot: And he paused a long time. And you could hear a pin drop in the room.

Francisco Lopera: I said to them-- “We w-- the families are waiting for you.”

Lesley Stahl: They’re waiting for you.

Pierre Tariot: That’s the point when, you know, the goose bumps came, and we said, “We really have to make this work. We really do.”

And they did. With a commitment of $15 million from NIH, another $15 million from philanthropists, and the rest from drug company Genentech, the trial -- on an immunotherapy drug to remove amyloid plaque -- enrolled its first patient three years ago, and they’ve been enrolling more people ever since.

Freddie: They told me about the study and I said yes. I’ll go right away, and anything that you need it, I am here.

Freddie and all his siblings signed up. The plan is to enroll a total of 300 members of the extended family who are healthy and have no memory loss yet -- 200 who have the mutation and another 100 who don’t. That way, no one will learn their genetic status just by being accepted into the study. Of the 200 with the mutation, half will get injections of the drug; the other half will be injected with a harmless placebo.

The study is double-blind: neither patients nor investigators will know who’s getting what. They have to come in every two weeks, for at least five years -- long enough to see whether the group taking the drug does better than the group taking placebo. Final results aren’t expected until 2021.

Lesley Stahl: Is this the first time in all these years of seeing these patients that you can actually offer them hope?

Dr. Lopera: Yes, this is the first time. Because in the past we only offer them education-- better quality of life but no hope to have a solution. And now they have hope, a big hope.

Lesley Stahl: What would be the best outcome?

Pierre Tariot: Nobody who receives the immunotherapy experiences any worsening of their thinking or memory ability. Doesn’t change at all. Doesn’t decline. That would be fabulous. That’s a stretch goal.

And that would be just the beginning.

Claudia Kawas: If it makes a difference for them, I think there’s a reasonable chance it could make a difference for all the rest of the people who get Alzheimer’s disease.

And that of course is the ultimate goal: to help prevent the late in life form of Alzheimer’s that we’re all susceptible to. The hope is that one day every one of us could be screened and when necessary, treated before problems begin.

Claudia Kawas: It might be the case that just like when you go to your doctor to get your cholesterol checked in your blood to see if you need drugs to lower your cholesterol, you would go, and get an amyloid PET scan, and-- it would be part of—

Lesley Stahl: Routine.

Claudia Kawas: --routine prevention.

Lesley Stahl: What if the drug removes the amyloid, and they still get the disease?

Claudia Kawas: I think that’ll mean that there are other things we need to be targeting besides amyloid.

Lesley Stahl: But will you say that the drug test was successful?

Claudia Kawas: Hard as this is to say, yes. I think that we need to know the answer.

The answer to whether the field’s focus on amyloid plaque removal for the last 15 years has been a failure. If this test doesn’t work, they will at least know they need to go in a different direction.

Lesley Stahl: You know, Victor, all the other drug trials that have gone on for years have all failed.

Victor: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: You know that.

Victor: But this is going to be the exception. This is the exception.

Lesley Stahl: If it does work, this saves this community.

Ken Kosik: Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Lesley Stahl: That would be amazing.

Ken Kosik: To me, I am always impressed that these families that come from such a remote area of the world-- have the potential for informing all of us, globally, about a path forward for conquering Alzheimer’s.



This is a long and complex article, but it does give a good overview of Alzheimer’s as we know it today. I hope these family members will be able to see improvement in their own condition, and provide a window on one of the worst human conditions, in my opinion, known to man. Perhaps everybody with some memory problems could get the PET scan before their situation becomes severe. I think medical insurance companies should pay for that, as they do for mammograms in women over a certain age. Of course, if the plaques are found then treatment should begin immediately.

November 26 and 27, 2016


News and Views --
SEE ALSO “COUNTING THE VOTES” IN SEPARATE BLOG


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-millions-voted-illegally-for-hillary-clinton/

Donald Trump: "Millions" voted illegally for Hillary Clinton
By REENA FLORES CBS NEWS
November 27, 2016, 4:45 PM


President-elect Donald Trump is alleging that he would have won the nation’s popular vote if it weren’t for the “millions of people who voted illegally” for Hillary Clinton, during a series of tweets in which he panned the recount efforts that could take place soon in three states.

Mr. Trump expressed his feelings Sunday afternoon on the “so-called popular vote” on Twitter:

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
3:30 PM - 27 Nov 2016
17,012 17,012 Retweets 45,611 45,611 likes

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4--
3:34 PM - 27 Nov 2016
4,207 4,207 Retweets 15,555 15,555 likes

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!
3:41 PM - 27 Nov 2016
3,609 3,609 Retweets 14,462 14,462 likes

Mr. Trump won the electoral vote earlier this month by a wide margin, beating out Clinton with 290 votes compared to her 232. But according to the latest count by the Cook Political Report, which regularly updates its popular vote tally, Mr. Trump is currently losing that vote by over 2.2 million.

The president-elect’s tweetstorm comes as he continues to criticize the Green Party’s Jill Stein for her attempts to initiate vote audits in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Stein’s vote recount efforts are motivated, in part, because of fears that illegal votes were cast for Trump due to hacking or other fraudulent activity.

Earlier this weekend, the Clinton campaign announced it would participate in the recount effort in Wisconsin, where paperwork has already been filed, and would do the same in the other two states if they follow suit.

The president-elect’s latest claim seems to contradicts his previous assertions in the days immediately following the general election, when he called the contest “very open and successful.”

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!
9:19 PM - 10 Nov 2016
71,304 71,304 Retweets 235,327 235,327 likes



I wonder if there is any real basis for his claim of “millions of fraudulent votes.” Of course, he doesn’t need reasons for the claims he makes. He just says whatever occurs to him at the moment.



http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/politics/bernie-sanders-electoral-college/

Sanders calls for assessment of Electoral College
By Tom LoBianco, CNN
Updated 12:14 PM ET, Sun November 27, 2016


Washington (CNN)Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said Sunday it is time to re-examine the Electoral College, after Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to President-elect Donald Trump.

"We have one candidate who had two million more votes than the other candidate but she is not going to be sworn in as president, and I think on the surface that's a little bit weird," the Vermont senator told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union."

Other Democrats, including California Sen. Barbara Boxer, have flatly called for the Electoral College to be abolished and have presidents be elected by a simple popular vote. The effort gained some steam in Democratic-controlled statehouses in the years after Al Gore beat George W. Bush in the popular vote. But since any change would require a constitutional amendment, that appears highly unlikely to happen.

Sanders, meanwhile, hewed close to the line that Clinton's former campaign has walked on a recount effort being led by former Green Party candidate Jill Stein. The former Clinton campaign had been mum on calls for a recount, but said over the weekend that it would help the effort in Wisconsin.

Sanders said that even though Trump has called it a "scam" anyone has a right to a recount.

"The Green Party has the legal right," Sanders said. "Republicans have requested -- I think the governor of North Carolina right now is thinking about doing a recount. That's a legal right. They do it."

Sanders also weighed in on the future of the Democratic Party -- a battle that started almost immediately after Clinton conceded the election and features one of his former backers, US Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota.

The Obama White House is seeking a more moderate alternative to Ellison, but Ellison (the first Muslim elected to Congress) is the right person to rebuild the Democratic Party's "grassroots," Sanders said.

"In the last eight years, the Democrats have lost over 900 legislative seats around the country in state legislatures, I think it's time to take a reassessment of the purpose of where the Democratic Party is and where it wants to go," Sanders said on "State of the Union." "What we need to do right now is to become a grassroots party, which is what Keith Ellison believes, open the doors to working people, open the doors to young people, less emphasis on raising large sums of money, more emphasis on bringing new blood into the political party."



If the Dems don’t go back to being the working class’ party, they might as well call themselves GOP II. They also need to do their “Politickin’” all the time rather than popping up out of the woodwork every four years. I remember first time I tried to find Democratic Party headquarters some 15 years ago, there was only a TELEPHONE NUMBER RATHER THAN AN OPEN OFFICE, AND THAT WAS STAFFED BY AN ANSWERING MACHINE. It was three days before a lady called me back.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-military-kills-4-isis-militants-in-syria/

Israeli military kills 4 ISIS militants in Syria after ambush
AP November 27, 2016, 10:47 AM

Photograph -- Israeli soldiers on a tank monitor the area near the Israel-Syria border in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, on November 27, 2016, following an attack by gunmen linked to the Islamic State (IS) group. JALAA MAREY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Play VIDEO -- Civilian casualties growing in Syria



JERUSALEM -- Israeli aircraft struck a machine gun-mounted vehicle inside Syria Sunday, killing four militants affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) inside after they had opened fire on a military patrol on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights, the Israeli military said.

Israel has been largely unaffected by the Syrian civil war raging next door, suffering only sporadic incidents of spillover fire over the frontier that Israel has generally dismissed as tactical errors of the Assad regime. Israel has responded to these cases lightly, with limited reprisals on Syrian positions in response to the errant fire.

But Sunday’s event, in the southern part of the Golan Heights, appears to be a rare case of an intentional shooting ambush by Islamic militants targeting Israeli troops.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said the Israeli patrol came under machine gun and mortar fire early Sunday. They returned fire toward Syria before an Israeli aircraft engaged, striking the vehicle in question and killing its passengers. He said all were suspected militants from an IS offshoot that controls the area. No Israeli troops were harmed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commended the troops for thwarting the attack.

“We are well prepared on our northern border and will not allow Islamic State elements or any other hostile elements to use the war in Syria to establish themselves close to our borders,” he said at his weekly Cabinet meeting.

Though Israel has generally stayed on the sidelines of the fighting, fearing being sucked into a clash between forces that are all hostile to it, it is widely believed to have carried out airstrikes on arms shipments said to be destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a close ally of the Syrian government.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and the two countries remain enemies.

Amos Yadlin, a former military intelligence chief and current director of the Institute for National Security Studies, an independent think-tank, said it was too early to determine whether the attack marked a shift in ISIS policy or just a local initiative by some of its fighters.

He said ISIS has been very careful to avoid attacking Israel to this point since it has been engaged with so many other adversaries. But with its back against the wall in Syria and Iraq, he said they may be looking for a propaganda victory by targeting Israel. He said they were capable of far worse than a routine ambush.

“We will have to watch closely in the future to see if this is a change of policy,” Yadlin said. “I don’t think this is a planned strategy.”


I do hope ISIS isn’t going to try to broaden the war. From what I know of Israel, though, they would probably respond in a devastating manner. Maybe the ISIS group were testing the water?



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/veterans-protest-hampshire-college-stopped-flying-us-flag/

Veterans protest Hampshire College decision to stop flying U.S. flag
CBS/AP
November 27, 2016, 12:45 PM


AMHERST, Mass. - Veterans protested Sunday at a western Massachusetts college facing criticism from around the country for its decision to stop flying U.S. flags after students allegedly burned a flag in protest of Donald Trump’s presidential election.

Dozens of veterans and other demonstrators held American flags and chanted “U.S.A.” at Hampshire College in Amherst on Sunday, in what organizers called a “peaceful demonstration of freedom.”

Local veterans and others intended to place hundreds of U.S. flags on the streets around the college.

College officials decided to indefinitely stop flying flags earlier this month after the main flag in the center of campus was burned after students lowered the banner to half-staff. Officials replaced the flag, but it was lowered again.

School officials say they welcome peaceful discussions about the flag decision.

In a statement about their decision to remove the flag, college officials said: “This decision is not and was never a commentary on the presidential election.”

Clarifying the statement, Hampshire College President Jonathan Lash told CBS Boston he knows it’s a controversial decision to remove the flag, but he wanted to create a dialogue among those with differing opinions about the symbol.

“There were a range of views on campus, including people whose experience growing up have made the flag a symbol of fear, which was strengthened by the toxic language during the campaign, and people for whom the flag is the symbol of all that’s best throughout the country,” said Lash.

He said the trouble started with a gesture meant to help provoke “meaningful and respectful dialogue” on campus–a stance he outlined in a post on the college’s Facebook page. In that post, he said the Board of Trustees decided to fly the flag at half-staff due to the “environment of escalating hate-based violence” in the wake of the election.

Lash said the gesture was also meant to be an “expression of grief” over deaths around the world, including those of U.S. service members.

But, the move didn’t work as planned and many–especially veterans and families of veterans in the Hampshire College family–saw it as being disrespectful of the tradition of expressing mourning on a national level.

“Frankly, doing that, it didn’t help,” he said. “Flying the flag at half-mast just created more controversy.”

On Veterans Day, someone removed the flag and burned it.

“In the middle of the night, we have no idea who did it or even why,” said Lash.

So that’s why they decided to take down the U.S. flag–and all flags–on campus.

“The flag had become a heated symbol that was making that more difficult,” Lash said. “We really feel our community needs a conversation in which both sides listen to each other, and we wish the nation would have that kind of dialogue. We felt that if we could stop arguing about the symbol, we could get to the underlying issues.”

Of course, that decision has created even more backlash, and Lash said there “certainly is” a lot of anger about the decision.


IS THERE A LAW REQUIRING CORPORATE BODIES LIKE A COLLEGE TO FLY A FLAG AT ALL? THIS ARTICLE FROM CNN BELOW DOESN’T SAY SO. ODDLY, IT DOESN’T MENTION THE ISSUE AT ALL. THE ONLY RULE I KNOW FROM MY GIRL SCOUT DAYS IS THAT THE AMERICAN FLAG SHOULD ALWAYS BE FLOWN (WHEN IT IS THERE) ABOVE A STATE OR ORGANIZATIONAL BANNER. SO, THE VETERANS CAN COMPLAIN IF THEY WANT TO, BUT THEY HAVE NO GROUNDS FOR SUING THE COLLEGE OR ANY SUCH THING. I THINK THE COLLEGE HAS MADE A WISE DECISION.



http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/05/30/fly.american.flag.mf/

Rules on flying the American flag
Mental Floss
By Ethan Trex, MentalFloss.com
May 30, 2011 9:26 a.m. EDT

Photograph -- Show your national pride on Memorial Day by displaying the flag -- but be sure to consult the flag code before you do.


(MentalFloss.com) -- On Memorial Day, we thought it might be a good time to take a look at some of the rules for respectfully displaying the American flag, as dictated by the United States Flag Code.

When did these flag rules fall into place?


Surprisingly late in American history. On Flag Day in 1923, a group of organizations headed by the American Legion outlined the National Flag Code as a set of advisory rules for displaying the flag. These rules became law during World War II and form the bulk of what's now the United States Flag Code.

These rules cover all manner of extremely specific situations, but they're all governed by the same basic principle: the flag is one of the most visible and important symbols of our country, so we should treat it with respect.

Are you really supposed to lower the flag at sunset?

You don't have to. While the flag code notes that displaying the flag only from sunrise to sunset is "universal custom," it makes an exception. "However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed 24 hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness."

When should the flag be displayed?

Section 6 of the flag code states, "The flag should be displayed on all days." However, the code goes on to say that the flag should especially (emphasis added) be displayed on the following days: New Year's Day, Inauguration Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Lincoln's birthday, Washington's birthday, Easter, Mother's Day, Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day, Labor Day, Constitution Day, Columbus Day, Navy Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, state holidays, states' dates of admission, and "such other days as may be proclaimed by the President of the United States."

Where should the flag be displayed?

Section 6 of the flag code covers this question, too. The flag should be displayed in or near every schoolhouse on school days, on or near the main administration building of every public institution each day, and in or near every polling place on election days.

Why doesn't, say, the Dream Team take the courts in American-flag jerseys at the Olympics?


The flag code thought of that one, too. Section 8 of the code covers "Respect for the Flag," and it explicitly states, "No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations."

Mental Floss: Why do we sing the National Anthem at sporting events?
Any other restrictions on wearing the flag?

Section 8 also states, "The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery."

What about those American flag lapel pins that so many folks wear?

The flag code thought of that one, too. Section 8 rather elegantly states, "The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart."

Is it true you have to retire and burn a flag that touches the ground?

No, that's a myth. The flag code is quite a bit more realistic about this situation. While the code states, "The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise," there's no rule saying that a flag that slips has to immediately be burned.

Instead, the code stipulates, "The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning." Unless hitting the ground once renders the flag unfit for display, there's no need to burn it.

When is it acceptable to fly the flag upside down?

The flag code allows for flying the flag with the union (the blue field of stars) down only "as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."

We know that the American flag is supposed to be displayed in a position of prominence over other flags on American soil. Are there any exceptions to this rule?

Section 7 of the flag code provides one major exception: the flag of the United Nations can be flown in the position of honor or prominence at the U.N. headquarters in New York.

The only other exception involves church services performed by naval chaplains while at sea. In these instances, the church's flag may fly above the American flag during the service.

Mental Floss: Videos: Dogs welcoming home soldiers

What's the penalty for breaking the flag code?

There isn't one. The flag code is an odd duck in this regard. As part of the United States Code, the flag code is technically federal law. However, the code doesn't outline any measures for enforcement or punishment. Basically, the flag code is a set of advisory rules for Americans who want to know the proper and respectful way to display their flag.

Even if the flag code did provide measures for its enforcement, it's not clear that the measures would be constitutional. Individual states used to have their own prohibitions on and penalties for desecrating the flag, but the 1989 Supreme Court decision Texas v. Johnson invalidated these laws as infringements on free speech. Congress responded by passing the Flag Protection Act, which made flag desecration a federal crime. The Supreme Court struck down this law in the 1990 case United States v. Eichman.

Can anyone stop me from displaying the flag?

In 2006 the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 officially became law. This law basically says that no condo board, housing co-op, or residential real estate management group can restrict a person's right to display the American flag on their own residential property as long as the display jibes with federal law and is reasonable.

What days is the flag always flown at half-staff?

The flag always flies on half-staff on Patriot Day (September 11 of each year), Peace Officers Memorial Day (May 15), and Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (December 7). On Memorial Day, the flag flies at half-staff until noon, at which point it is raised to the top of the staff.

What if I can't fly my flag at half-staff?

Some flags, like the ones commonly seen in school classrooms or on houses, are fixed in a certain position on their poles. How does one handle the sticky situation of a flag that physically can't be flown at half-staff? The United States Code doesn't cover this conundrum, but the American Legion advocates adding a black ribbon to the top of the flag's pole to indicate mourning.

Mental Floss: Why is the flag flown at half-staff in times of mourning?

What about adding new stars for new states?

Should we ever pick up a 51st state, Section 2 of the flag code stipulates that the state will get a new star on the flag. It won't be an overnight process, though. The new star will make its debut on the first Fourth of July following the state's formal admission into the union.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/genocide-threatening-letters-sent-to-three-california-mosques/

Genocide-threatening letters sent to three California mosques
CBS/AP
November 27, 2016, 8:16 AM

Photograph -- A hate letter delivered to the Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose, Calif., threatened that President Donald Trump will “do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.” CAIR
Play VIDEO -- Trump addresses reports of violence: "Stop it"
18 Photos -- CBS Los Angeles reports local Muslims have been rattled by the incident.


LOS ANGELES - A civil rights group has called for more police protection of mosques after several in California received letters that praised President-elect Donald Trump and threatened Muslim genocide.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, said the same handwritten, photocopied letter was sent last week to the Islamic Center of Long Beach, the Islamic Center of Claremont and the Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

The L.A. area mosques received it Wednesday and the San Jose mosque on Thursday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Bay Area chapter released a copy of the letter, which read:

To the children of Satan, You Muslims are a vile and filthy people. Your mothers are whores and your fathers are dogs. You are evil. You worship the devil. But your day of reckoning has arrived.

There’s a new sheriff in town -- President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And he’s going to start with you Muslims. He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews. You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.

This is a great time for patriotic Americans. Love live President Trump and God bless the USA.

“There’s a new sheriff in town - President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And, he’s going to start with you Muslims,” the letter states, according to CAIR. “And, he’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the jews (sic).”

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR-LA, said people at the L.A. County mosques were disheartened by the hateful letters and added that the “irresponsible, hateful rhetoric” of the Trump campaign has fueled “a level of vulgarity, vile hatred and anger among many self-proclaimed Trump supporters.”

“I’m not saying (Trump) created racist people,” he said. “He normalized it. While he might say he’s not responsible, and I respect that, I remind President-elect Trump that he has a responsibility to act as a president for all Americans.”

San Jose Police Department spokesman Sgt. Enrique Garcia said police have opened an investigation and are treating it as a “hate-motivated incident.”

“It’s kind of sad to see this kind of thing still exists,” said Nadya Aweinat.

She said it was hard to accept this letter in this day and age.

“That ignorance is shocked to me,” she said, “That there’s still that level of ignorance in our society.”

People in the mosque who have read the letter, postmarked from Santa Clarita with a fake name and phony address, said in addition to hate-filled it was rather juvenile.

“The handwriting is somewhat, no much of what they wrote, it’s someone that doesn’t have much intelligence. It’s written on a childish level,” said Regina Smadi.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that since Election Day, there have been more than 700 reports of hate crimes across the country -- vandalism, physical and verbal assaults, harassment and destruction of property -- directed against Muslims, African-Americans, Asians, immigrants, women and gays. In many cases the perpetrators allude to Mr. Trump, whose campaign was often criticized as playing to white nationalist prejudices. Critics charge that Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and subsequent election victory, has emboldened racists to speak up or act out, leading to nationwide demonstrations against racism and misogyny.

In an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in the days following the election, Mr. Trump denounced the acts of violence and told people involved in such incidents to “stop it.”


IT’S A GREAT SHAME THAT ANY FLAG TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER PEOPLE. OUR SOCIETY IS SICK.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-sorry-for-not-kicking-pro-trump-passenger-off-plane/

Delta says it's "sorry" for vulgar pro-Trump passenger
CBS/AP
November 27, 2016, 4:17 PM

ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- Delta Air Lines is apologizing for not removing a passenger from a flight to Pennsylvania who rudely professed his support for President-elect Donald Trump and insulted those who didn’t.

The (Allentown) Morning Call first reported on a video posted on Facebook by a fellow passenger on Flight 248, traveling from Atlanta to Allentown on Tuesday. The video shows the man standing in the aisle, yelling and insulting Hillary Clinton supporters.

In the video, the man asks loudly: “We got some Hillary b*****s on here?”

Referring to Trump’s victory, he says: “If you don’t like it, too bad.”

(Below is video purporting to show more of the encounter. WARNING: Some may find the language in the video offensive.)

Delta said on its website Saturday that it is “sorry to our customers who experienced this disruption.”

“We have followed up with the teams involved and all agree that this customer should not have been allowed to continue on the flight,” the statement said. “Our responsibility for ensuring all customers feel safe and comfortable with Delta includes requiring civil behavior from everyone. The behavior we see in this video does not square with our training or culture and follow up will continue so we can better ensure our employees will know they will be fully supported to make the right decisions when these issues arise.”

Follow
Delta ✔ @Delta
Statement regarding disruptive passenger on Flight 248 here: http://news.delta.com/statement-regarding-disruptive-passenger-flight-248 …
5:47 PM - 26 Nov 2016
151 151 Retweets 242 242 likes


ANTI-LIBERAL, ANTI-ISLAMIC EPISODES ON DELTA

Muslim couple says they were kicked off Delta flight for using phone ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../muslim-couple-says-they-were-kicked-...
Aug 7, 2016 - Faisal and Nazia Ali claim they were taken off an international Delta flight ... It is another symptom of the anti-Muslim behavior we see during the ...

Anti-Muslim Profiling At Airports Goes Beyond The TSA - ThinkProgress
https://thinkprogress.org/anti-muslim-profiling-at-airports-goes-beyond-t...
Jan 20, 2016 - Anti-Muslim Profiling At Airports Goes Beyond The TSA. Travelers on Delta Airlines waits for flights in 2012. ... The group's lawyer noted that the airline didn't accuse any of the men of inappropriate behavior or of being a ...

Black Female Doctor: Delta Discriminated, Barred Me ... - NBC News
www.nbcnews.com/news/...news/black-female-doctor-delta-discriminate...
Oct 14, 2016 - A black doctor has accused Delta Air Lines of discrimination after a flight attendant allegedly shooed her away from a passenger in need of ...

Soda-can dispute joins list of 'flying while Muslim' cases - LA Times
www.latimes.com/.../la-trb-united-flight-muslim-discrimination-claim-20...
Jun 1, 2015 - ... recognizable pattern: A claim of anti-Muslim mistreatment is lodged, Twitter hashtags are ... “if they witnessed this discriminatory and disgusting behavior. ... flight tomorrow and purchasing a new flight from @Delta right now.

Four Arab Muslims taken off Delta Flight for suspicious behavior ...
www.barenakedislam.com/.../four-arab-muslims-taken-off-delta-flight-fo...
Jun 10, 2012 - Four Arab Muslims taken off Delta Flight for suspicious behavior ... convert to islam as muslim is now Jihadi anti national anti Hindu a perfect ...

Muslim woman detained for 'suspicious behaviour' while reading book ...
globalnews.ca/.../muslim-woman-detained-for-suspicious-behaviour-whil...
Aug 5, 2016 - Faizah Shaheen, a British Muslim woman, was detained by airport ... her for “suspicious behaviour” while reading a book about Syria. ... READ MORE: Spree of anti-Muslim attacks across U.S. during Ramadan: Islamic group ... a Muslim couple in Ohio who were allegedly removed from a Delta Airline flight.