monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Is that the lady to whom he allegedly said that"He knew what he was signing up for"???
Did he actully say that??

She was with her Congresswoman at the time, too. She had her phone on speaker phone so that they both could listen. She says that Plump made her cry. Now Plump is, effectively, calling them both liars.

Modern scientific sources report that the alleged phenomenon is not real. In 1995, Professor Douglas Melton, of the Harvard University Biology department, said, "If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don't sit still for you." Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, also rejected the suggestion, saying that "If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out."[3]

In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely incorrect!" He described how a critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.[4]

A Government Accountability Office report released Monday said the federal government has spent more than $350 billion over the last decade on disaster assistance programs and losses from flood and crop insurance. That tally does not include the massive toll from this year’s three major hurricanes and wildfires, expected to be among the most costly in the nation’s history.

The report predicts these costs will only grow in the future, potentially reaching a budget busting $35 billion a year by 2050. The report says the federal government doesn’t effectively plan for these recurring costs, classifying the financial exposure from climate-related costs as “high risk.”

“The federal government has not undertaken strategic government-wide planning to manage climate risks by using information on the potential economic effects of climate change to identify significant risks and craft appropriate federal responses,” the study said. “By using such information, the federal government could take the initial step in establishing government-wide priorities to manage such risks.”
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Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has hit back at presenter Megyn Kelly's "incomprehensible" comments involving reports of sexual harassment at the news channel, US media report.
Ms Kelly said Mr O'Reilly's suggestion that nobody had complained about his behaviour at Fox was "false". "I know because I complained," she said.
Mr O'Reilly retorted: "I don't know why [Kelly] is doing what she's doing. I've helped her dramatically in her career."
Mr O'Reilly has denied any wrongdoing.
In an interview with radio host Glenn Beck on Monday, Mr O'Reilly said he had "never had a problem" with Ms Kelly.
"When she was getting hammered earlier this year, I wrote a column sticking up for her," he said.
Mr O'Reilly said that he was not going to "run and hide" from allegations of sexual harassment at the company, but added that he wanted the story to "go away because it's brutalising my family."
On Monday, Ms Kelly used her NBC Today show to criticise Mr O'Reilly and Fox News over reports in the New York Times of a $32m (£24m) settlement paid to former Fox legal analyst Lis Wiehl to settle a sexual harassment case.
"That is not a nuisance value settlement, that is a jaw-dropping figure," Ms Kelly said.
"OJ Simpson was ordered to pay the Goldman and Brown families $33.5m for the murders of Ron and Nicole," she added, "what on Earth would justify that amount? What awfulness went on?"
Ms Kelly, who left Fox to join NBC earlier this year, said she had sent an email to several Fox News executives in November 2016 in relation to Mr O'Reilly's alleged behaviour.
Her email, she said, suggested that perhaps Mr O'Reilly "didn't realise the kind of message his criticism sent to young women" when he talked about the issue of speaking out about sexual harassment.
"Perhaps he didn't realise that his exact attitude of shaming women into shutting the hell up about harassment on grounds that it will disgrace the company is in part how Fox News got into the decade-long [Roger] Ailes mess to begin with," she said.
In an interview with CBS News, also in November 2016, Mr O'Reilly was asked about a chapter in Ms Kelly's memoir relating to the former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and alleged sexual harassment at Fox News.
"I'm not interested in basically litigating something that is finished that makes my network look bad," he said. "That doesn't interest me one bit."
Mr O'Reilly was forced to resign in April following a raft of sexual harassment allegations.
The settlement with Ms Wiehl - which was "extraordinarily large" for such cases, according to the Times - is one of six involving O'Reilly that are in the public domain, totalling $45m.
Several of those suits involved Mr Ailes, who stepped down in 2016 amid accusations of harassment which he denied. He died in May.

Why does the US have so many child brides?
Angel was 13 when her mother forced her to marry and start a family. "I felt like a slave," she says of her childhood.
While countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi and El Salvador have recently banned child marriage, it remains legal in the US - and half of states have no set minimum age below which you cannot get married.

I have always doubted that yarn, but never tested it on a frog.

KABUL, Afghanistan — It was Kabul and it wasn’t Kabul. There was a clock and there wasn’t a clock.

Soon after a two-hour secret visit to Afghanistan by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Monday was publicly disclosed, the American Embassy and the office of President Ashraf Ghani made statements about their productive meeting in Kabul.

The problem is that the meeting was not in Kabul, but in a windowless room in Bagram, the heavily fortified American military base a 90-minute drive away. The misinformation, apparently meant to obscure the true venue, was betrayed by discrepancies in similar photographs released by the Americans and the Afghans.

Both show Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Ghani sitting at the head of the room, two giant television screens behind them. On the coffee table between them is a thermos, two cups, and bottled water. Their delegations sit across from each other.

But the version released by Mr. Ghani’s office erased the large digital clock showing “Zulu time” — the military term for Coordinated Universal Time — and a red fire alarm behind Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Ghani, in what would be a giveaway that it was an American military facility.
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“True environmentalism, from my perspective, is using natural resources that God has blessed us with,” Pruitt told the Heritage Foundation last week.

The Dutch Reform Church was the most powerful religious institution in South Africa. Most of the country's Presidents and Prime Ministers during the apartheid years were members and it was only in 1992, two years after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, that the Church acknowledged aparthied as a sin.