>Senate Probing if Burisma Leveraged Hunter Biden Ties for Access to State Department
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2019-11-06%20RHJ%20CEG%20to%20State%20-%20Burisma%20Inquiry.pdf

The United States Senate is probing whether a lobbying firm working on the behalf of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian oil and gas conglomerate, leveraged the company’s ties to Hunter Biden for access to the State Department.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday asking his department to provide all records pertaining to Hunter Biden, Burisma, and any intermediaries. In particular, Grassley requested the State Dept. provide further information about meetings Blue Star Strategies, a Washington, D.C. based lobbying and public relations firm, sought with U.S. officials in 2016 to discuss public corruption allegations against Burisma.

The letter comes after a Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) lawsuit revealed representatives of Blue Star Strategies specifically invoked Hunter Biden, who at the time sat on Burisma’s board of directors, when trying to secure the meeting. At the time, Burisma and its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, were under suspicion for money laundering and public corruption. The allegations stem from Zlochevsky’s tenure as Ukraine’s minister of ecology and natural resources in the early 2010s, where it is purported he used his position to approve oil and gas licenses for Burisma.

>'Despite 40 years of major global negotiations, we conduct business as usual and have failed to address this crisis,' group says

Eleven thousand scientists in 153 countries have declared a climate emergency and warned that "untold human suffering" is unavoidable without huge shifts in the way we live.

The letter is based on climate science that was first established in 1979 at the first World Climate Conference held in Geneva. For decades multiple global bodies have agreed urgent action is needed but greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

"Despite 40 years of major global negotiations, we have continued to conduct business as usual and have failed to address this crisis," said William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University, who spearheaded the letter.

"Climate change has arrived and is accelerating faster than many scientists expected," according to the letter published in BioScience.

Researchers say they have a moral obligation to "clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat" and "tell it like it is". "Clearly and unequivocally planet Earth is facing a climate emergency," they state.

Although there are some positive indicators -- such as declining birth rates and a rise in renewable energy use -- most indicators suggest humans are rapidly heading in the wrong direction, they say.

- https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-emergency-scientists-emissions-letter-climate-change-a9185786.html

Personally, I think these scientist fellows are just being pessimistic crybabies.

>NY Times : Tidal wave of immigration has “tilted the field toward the Democrats” in the state of Virginia
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/us/politics/virginia-elections-democrats-republicans.html

Last week, Democrats took control of Virginia’s House of Delegates and the State Senate. Now, the Democrats hold power over the state’s legislature, the governor’s seat and the lieutenant governor’s seat — the first time since 1993 that this has occurred.

The New York Times reports that four to five decades of immigration - where about 1.2 million legal immigrants are admitted to the United States every year - has shifted Virginia into a blue state:

>Not long ago, this rolling green stretch of Northern Virginia was farmland. Most people who could vote had grown up here. And when they did, they usually chose Republicans.

>The fields of Loudoun County are disappearing. In their place is row upon row of cookie-cutter townhouses, clipped lawns and cul-de-sacs - a suburban landscape for as far as the eye can see. Unlike three decades ago, the residents are often from other places, like India and Korea. And when they vote, it is often for Democrats.
>“It’s a totally different world,” said Charles Poland, 85, a retired history professor whose family has lived in Loudoun County for four generations. His family farm is now dotted with subdivisions filled with four and five-bedroom homes that sell for $750,000. The family legacy is a road named Poland. “If my parents came back today, they wouldn’t recognize the place. The changes came like a tidal wave.”

As Breitbart News analyzed, Virginia’s foreign-born population has boomed over the last few decades. In 1990, Virginia was home to less than 312,000 foreign-born residents. Today, there are close to 1.1 million, almost four times what the population was three decades before.

In 2019, 1-in-10 Virginia residents are foreign-born. In 1990, only about 1-in-28 residents were born outside the U.S.

https://www.westernjournal.com/google-reportedly-collected-personal-health-information-millions-americans-secret-project-nightingale/?ff_source=Email&ff_medium=CTBreaking&ff_campaign=breaking&ff_content=conservative-tribune

A 24-year-old Chinese man who visited a hospital to complain about sharp pain in his right ear was shocked to learn that he had an entire family of cockroaches living in his ear canal.

Identified only as “Mr. Lv”, the young man arrived at Sanhe Hospital, in Guangdong Province, southeast China, last month, complaining of sharp pain in his right ear, and a sensation like something was crawling and scratching in his ear. Dr. Zhong Yijin, an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist at the hospital examined the man’s ear canal and was shocked to see a full-grown German cockroach and over 10 of its offspring running around.

Upon hearing about the creepy squatters that had taken over his ear, Mr. Lv told doctors that one of his family members had shone some light in his ear and had spotted a big bug inside. He added that he had the habit of leaving food by his bed at night, which doctors suspect is what attracted the bugs. One of them must have viewed the man’s ear as an incubation chamber, and crawled inside to lay eggs.

Upon discovering the cause of the man’s ear pain, hospital staff proceeded to extract the cockroach and its small babies with tweezers. Mr Lv was left with minor injuries to his ear, and was discharged with a course of antibiotics.

Although doctors recommend good hygiene and nets to keep critters from crawling into your ears, we’ve seen a bunch of weird cases of people discovering all sorts of creepy crawlers living inside their ear canals, from web spinning spiders to Gecko lizards.

https://www.odditycentral.com/news/man-complaining-of-earache-had-whole-family-of-cockroaches-living-in-ear-canal.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/british-founder-syria-white-helmets-dead-turkey-191111133910573.html

>A former British army officer who helped found the White Helmets volunteer search-and-rescue organisation in Syria was found dead in Turkey on Monday.

>The body of James Le Mesurier, founder and CEO of Mayday Rescue group, was discovered near his home in central Istanbul's Beyoglu district by worshippers on their way to a mosque, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

>The Istanbul governor's office said that "comprehensive administrative and judicial investigations into Le Mesurier's death have been initiated".

...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-taxes/trumps-accounting-firm-must-hand-over-8-years-of-tax-returns-court-rules-idUSKBN1XE1O8?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FPoliticsNews+%28Reuters+Politics+News%29

NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm must hand over eight years of his tax returns to New York prosecutors, a U.S. appeals court ruled Monday, the latest setback for Trump in his tenacious efforts to keep his finances secret.

The ruling by a unanimous three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed the ability of prosecutors to enforce a subpoena for the returns against accounting firm Mazars LLP. Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said the Republican president will appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 5-4 conservative majority includes two justices appointed by Trump.

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, is seeking the returns as part of a criminal investigation into Trump and his family real estate business. The scope of that probe is not publicly known.

The 2nd Circuit did not decide whether Trump is immune from being charged with a state crime while in office, as the president has argued. However, it found that even if he is, the immunity could not stop Vance from getting the returns from a third party, or from prosecuting him once he leaves office.

It would “exact a heavy toll on our criminal justice system to prohibit a state from even investigating potential crimes committed by him for potential later prosecution,” 2nd Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann wrote in the ruling.

Vance’s office has agreed not to enforce the subpoena while Trump petitions the Supreme Court. Under the agreement, Trump has 10 calendar days to file the petition.

https://www.city-journal.org/angela-ditchfield-aquitted-climate-change
A woman named Angela Ditchfield, who had been a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party, was arrested for having defaced the offices of the county council by spray-painting them with symbols of “Extinction Rebellion,” the radical ecological movement whose demonstrations have brought chaos to London and elsewhere.

She was charged with criminal damage. Her defense was that, by so doing, she was defending her property (her house) from imminent damage caused by climate change. Astonishingly—and alarmingly—the magistrates accepted her defense and acquitted her
Obviously, the magistrates, as weak of mind as of character, were acting in a politically biased manner. If a person with “a very strong and honestly held belief” that Britain was being Islamized had daubed the council offices with a slogan to that effect, he would (quite rightly) not have been acquitted. If the accused had been an unemployed young male lout dressed in international slum-ghetto costume, he would not have been acquitted, either. Thus, there is one law for the bien pensant and another for the rest of us