monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

Well, how can you argue

Are you saying Iran does not want Israel destroyed and all Jews dead? If you are you are just wrong again. Nothing new. Your group think has very little to do with fact.

Corey Lewis was leaving a Subway sandwich shop in the US state of Georgia on Sunday with the two children he was babysitting, when a woman approached him in a Walmart car park.

The woman asked if the children were OK, and requested to speak to them. When Mr Lewis refused, the woman followed him home and called the police.

Mr Lewis is black. The children were white.

The incident in suburban Atlanta has recharged the debate about racial profiling in America.

Mr Lewis documented parts of the experience in a series of Facebook Live videos which have been viewed more than 600,000 times.


In the videos, Mr Lewis says: "It's 2018. I can't step out into the community without being profiled.

"I am being harassed and followed... because I have got two kids that don't look like me."

He also said that the children were "scared" by the woman following them.

In the final video, Mr Lewis is questioned by a police officer by the side of the road.

Mr Lewis described the incident as an example of "babysitting while black" and suggests that the only reason the woman contacted the police was because of his skin colour.

The videos were met with anger online, with many people commenting that it was "disgusting" and "terrible" that the police were called.

Many people used the hashtag #BabysittingWhileBlack to express their anger.

Mr Lewis' experience is the latest of a number of incidents of white people calling the police to report black people for undertaking seemingly normal daily activities.

This has given rise to the term "living while black" to describe the criminalisation of black people going about their everyday lawful business.

Black people napping, visiting a coffee shop or restaurant, canvassing and selling water have all resulted in the police being called.

Dana Mango, the children's mother, told Good Morning America, that she was "in a state of disbelief" when she received a phone call from a police officer asking her to confirm that she knew Mr Lewis.

"The officer was actually apologetic," Ms Mango said. "I think he was embarrassed. He saw what was happening pretty quickly."

Mr Lewis runs a youth mentoring organisation that teaches life skills to young people with emotional and behaviour issues.

Trump's America.

the Native American, lesbian, MMA fighter, and lawyer

Sure, scoff now....

US share markets have suffered their sharpest one-day falls in months, as fears about rising interest rates, inflation, trade tensions intensified.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq led the declines, sliding 4%, or 315.9 points, to 7,422.

The Dow Jones and S&P 500 also fell by more than 3%, with losses accelerating towards the end of the day. Netflix fell 8%, while Amazon slid 6%.

The slides extended declines in Europe, where exchanges in Germany and France ended the day down more than 2%.

The Dow fell 831.8 points, or 3.15% to 25,598.7. The S&P 500 dropped 94.6 or 3.29% to 2,785.6 - the biggest one-day fall since early February.

President Donald Trump has vowed to "get to the bottom" of the case of missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Mr Trump told reporters he had talked to the Saudi authorities "at the highest level" about Mr Khashoggi.

Mr Khashoggi, a US resident and critic of the Saudi monarchy, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October and has not been seen since.

Turkish authorities say Mr Khashoggi was killed. Saudi Arabia denies this.

"We cannot let this happen to reporters, to anybody," Mr Trump said on Wednesday.

"We're demanding everything. We want to see what's going on there."

The White House said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and senior officials had spoken to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman on Tuesday and asked for more details about the situation.

The US justice department has announced charges of economic espionage against a suspected Chinese intelligence officer.

Officials say Yanjun Xu tried to steal trade secrets from US aviation and aerospace companies on behalf of China.

He was arrested in Belgium earlier this year and on Tuesday extradited to the US.

A senior justice department official said the case was "part of an overall economic policy of developing China at American expense".

"We cannot tolerate a nation's stealing our firepower and the fruits of our brainpower," Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers added.

Prosecutors say Mr Xu is a senior officer with China's ministry of state security - which is responsible for counter-intelligence, foreign intelligence and political security.

He was detained in Belgium on 1 April at the request of the US. He was later indicted by an Ohio grand jury on four charges of conspiring to commit economic espionage and attempting to steal trade secrets.

The indictment was unsealed on Wednesday following the suspect's extradition.

The recent exposé in this newspaper about the Trump family finances shines a light on the ways in which the wealthiest Americans can avoid estate and gift taxes on the transfer of assets to their children. While many of the Trump family schemes described in the report were clearly outside of the law, a disturbing number exemplify commonly used techniques.

This would not be as troubling if the richest Americans paid more income taxes. But most of the wealth they acquire is not taxed as income. This situation — generous exclusions from income taxes combined with easy evasion of estate and gift taxes — has given the wealthiest a free pass on the costs of running the country.

To see how the ultrarich acquire their wealth, look at the Forbes 400, an annual listing of the wealthiest Americans. This year an individual needed to have more than $2 billion to be included, and together the Fortune 400 group controls over $3 trillion. This enormous wealth was generally acquired in one of two ways: through inheritance or by building or investing in a successful business.

(...)

In the early 1990s, 18 super-wealthy families (including the DeVos, Koch and Walton families) invested $500 million in lobbying efforts to undermine the estate tax. Their results have been impressive. In 1990 the estate tax applied to all estates in excess of $600,000 and the tax rates were as high as 55 percent. Today the tax applies only to individuals with assets greater than $11 million ($22 million for a couple) and the top tax rate has been reduced to 40 percent.