| Sanders retracts controversial endorsement less than 24 hours after making it Posted: 13 Dec 2019 02:03 PM PST  Sen. Bernie Sanders retracted his endorsement of congressional candidate Cenk Uygur on Friday, less than 24 hours after making it, as allegations of sexism hit the former online talk show host.
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| Ex-DOJ official: Trump was 'vulnerable' to foreign intelligence agencies Posted: 13 Dec 2019 12:44 PM PST  Mary McCord, the top Justice Department official who oversaw the FBI investigation into Donald Trump's ties to Russia in its early stages, talks to the Yahoo News "Skullduggery" podcast.
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| U.S. sanctions on Iran violate international law: Mahathir Posted: 13 Dec 2019 10:52 PM PST  The American sanctions imposed on Iran violate the United Nations charter and international law, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a conference in Qatar on Saturday. ''Malaysia does not support the reimposition of the unilateral sanctions by the US against Iran,'' he told the Doha Forum, also attended by Qatar Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani.
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| 2 children dead after being swept away in Arizona floodwaters Posted: 14 Dec 2019 12:34 AM PST  The bodies of two children were found about three miles from the crash scene.
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| Kamala Harris flames out: Black people didn't trust her, and they were wise not to Posted: 14 Dec 2019 02:00 AM PST  Younger blacks and black progressives took a deeper, dispassionate dive into Kamala Harris' real-world record. They didn't like what they found
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| Man gives DNA to find out if he's Detroit boy missing since 1994 Posted: 13 Dec 2019 11:30 AM PST  A Michigan man give a DNA sample to the Livonia Police Department to find out if he is D'Wan Sims, a boy who has been missing for 25 years.
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| Nazi Germany's 'Stealth Fighter' Could Not Stop Hitler From Losing World War II Posted: 12 Dec 2019 08:00 PM PST  A sign of things to come.
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| Brazilians arrive in waves at the US-Mexico border Posted: 13 Dec 2019 11:28 AM PST  Growing up along the U.S.-Mexico border, hotel clerk Joe Luis Rubio never thought he'd be trying to communicate in Portuguese on a daily basis. The quiet migration of around 17,000 Brazilians through a single U.S. city in the past year reveals a new frontier in the Trump administration's effort to shut down the legal immigration pathway for people claiming fear of persecution. Like hundreds of thousands of families from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, known collectively as the Northern Triangle, Brazilians have been crossing the border here and applying for asylum.
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| The CEO of a Silicon Valley startup was quietly fired after allegedly spending over $75,000 at strip clubs and charging it to a company credit card Posted: 14 Dec 2019 04:25 PM PST  Turvo named a new CEO in November named Scott Lang. The company was last valued at $435 million, according to Pitchbook.
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| Mike Huckabee says Trump has begun 2024 campaign Posted: 13 Dec 2019 03:50 AM PST  Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says he has been "named to head up a 2024 re-election" campaign for President Trump.
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| Judge's decision may shine light on secret Trump-Putin meeting notes Posted: 13 Dec 2019 10:49 AM PST  A district court judge in Washington, D.C. has ordered administration lawyers to explain why, for more than two years, the White House has refused to turn over to the State Department an interpreter's notes from a meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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| Iran Demands $6 Billion Oil Payment From South Korea: Chosun Posted: 14 Dec 2019 12:47 AM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Iran's Foreign Ministry called in the South Korean ambassador last month to demand payment of 7 trillion won ($6 billion) for oil it sold to the Asian country, Chosun Ilbo reported, citing officials it didn't identify.Iran expressed "strong regret" over Seoul's failure to complete the payment, which has been deposited at two South Korean banks without being transferred to Iran's central bank for years due to U.S. sanctions against the Middle Eastern country, the newspaper said. It added that other Iranian authorities including the central bank also complained.South Korea sent a delegation to the Middle East late last month and explained that the country will cooperate with the U.S. to successfully complete transfer of the payment, it added.To contact the reporter on this story: Kanga Kong in Seoul at kkong50@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Sara Marley, Siraj DatooFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Body of 21-year-old vet recovered from volcano island as family fight for survival in hospital Posted: 14 Dec 2019 09:02 AM PST  Krystal Browitt, an Australian veterinary student from Melbourne who had just turned 21, was sightseeing with her sister and father on the island of Whakaari when toxic ash clouds spewed rocks and dust high into the air. Her mother stayed on the cruise ship, safe from the hot blanket of fumes and stones that rained down on the group of tourists hoping to see inside the crater of one of the country's most active volcanoes. The body of Ms Browitt was finally recovered from the island in a daring mission by elite military bomb squads on Friday. She was formally identified as among the 15 to have died so far on Saturday morning. The closure is likely to be little comfort for her mother Marie who was on Saturday keeping a bedside vigil for her surviving daughter, Stephanie, 23, and husband Paul fighting for their lives among the critically injured in hospital. Fourteen people remain hospitalised in New Zealand, 10 of whom are in critical condition with horrific burns. Thirteen others have been transported to Australia for treatment. One person succumbed to their injuries on Saturday morning, officials said. Police divers prepare to search the waters near White Island off the coast of Whakatane Credit: NZ Police Some patients have burns to up to 95 per cent of their bodies. Surgeons ordered 1.2 million sq cm of donor skin from the US earlier in the week in a desperate attempt to keep victims alive. It is understood that two British women are among the injured in hospital. The nature of the gas meant that survivors were found with third-degree burns to their skin but their clothing largely intact, and many suffered burnt lungs from inhaling the superheated gas, made up of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride. Dr Watson said the gases would have reacted with the eyes, skin and mucous membranes, causing agony to the victims. Two people are missing, assumed dead, on the island itself. A team of nine from the Police National Dive Squad resumed their search at 7am on Saturday for a body seen in the water. Deputy Commissioner Tims said the water around the island is contaminated, requiring the divers to take extra precautions to ensure their safety, including using specialist protective equipment. "Divers have reported seeing a number of dead fish and eels washed ashore and floating in the water," he said. "Each time they surface, the divers are decontaminated using fresh water."
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| Turns out I'm Jewish after all Posted: 13 Dec 2019 02:45 AM PST ![Turns out I'm Jewish after all]( "Turns out I'm Jewish after all") Being Jewish has become hard again.After decades when Jews in America permitted themselves to believe they had finally found a welcoming home in a majority Christian, creedally universalist country, things have begun to shift in familiar and terrifying ways. Jews have been murdered in synagogues and kosher delis in the United States. They are regularly harassed and beaten on the streets of American cities. Swastikas scrawled on walls, acts of attempted arson and vandalism at synagogues, shouted slurs — the stories add up, amplifying one another and mixing with similar and worse stories from abroad.Over a hundred gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in France were spray-painted with swastikas earlier this month. It was the latest in a seemingly endless series of incidents across the continent. And of course leaders (and would-be leaders) of nations, along with prime-time TV pundits, now actively encourage such demonization, turning Jewish philanthropists into scapegoats, blaming them for a wide range of injustices. As enemies of the Jewish people have always done.It's a painful spectacle for anyone committed to liberal ideals of pluralism and tolerance. But it's especially, existentially, agonizing for Jews themselves — even for bad, part-time Jews like me.I was born Jewish — my father is the son of orthodox Jewish immigrants from Central Europe (Poland and Austria), and my mother a convert — but for much of the past two decades, that hasn't much mattered. I grew up identifying as a Jew, but we never worshipped at a synagogue (even on high holy days). I received no Jewish education. There was no Hebrew school. No bar mitzvah.By the time I started to sense religious stirrings in my late 20s, I knew far more about Christian, and especially Catholic, theology and moral teaching than I did about Judaism. Plus, by then I'd gone and done what American Jews are often warned against doing (and yet increasingly do anyway): I married a non-Jew. That my wife's family hoped and expected our children to be raised Catholic made the path forward obvious. I would repudiate my upbringing by converting to Catholicism.As regular readers know, the conversion didn't take. After 17 years, in August 2018, I publicly renounced Catholicism. The decision was mainly motivated by disgust at the church's systematic sexual perversion and corruption. But there was also something else going on.Exploration of existential possibilities is relatively easy in good times. When I turned away from my birthright, I knew it was a rejection — a turning of my back on my family, an act of disregard for the demographic fate of the Jewish community, which would lose me and my progeny forevermore. But I would still express love for my family in other ways, and my rejection of Judaism seemed like the infliction of a very small harm. True, there aren't that many Jews in the world. But really, how important was little old me, my kids, and those who would follow us? And anyway, the Jews were doing just fine — in the U.S., in other liberal democracies around the world, in Israel. My contribution seemed pretty close to infinitesimal, utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of Jewish history.But things look and feel very different in dark times. Not that I'm now deluded enough to think the fate of Judaism in the world depends in any measurable way on whether or not I call myself a Jew or rise in defense of Jews when they face threat or come under outright attack. Of course it doesn't. I'm as infinitesimal and irrelevant as ever. Yet the fact remains that my youthful shirking of my inheritance no longer feels like a liberation. It feels more like an act of cowardice, perhaps even an expression of decadence, a sign that I took certain things for granted that no Jew should ever treat as a given.I also fear that at some level I was trying to hide, conceal, or camouflage myself by seeking to blend in so thoroughly and completely to the default Christianity of the surrounding culture. At the time of my conversion, in the center-right circles where I then worked, that culture was maximally welcoming of my spiritual decision while also treating the Judaism I left behind with a great deal of sincere respect. The borderline between traditions and faiths felt porous. Permeable.But not anymore. Walls are going up. Hard edges and irreconcilable differences are returning all over the liberal democratic world, raising a serious question about whether and to what extent that world will remain liberal and democratic. It would be nice if the cosmopolitan universalism that prevailed in the decade or so following the conclusion of the Cold War — during the era when so many of us permitted ourselves to believe that history had come to a peaceful end — could continue to feel compelling in the face of this threat. But it doesn't. It feels like foolishness. The world has changed, and we are changing with it. And we don't know how far the change is going to go.Turns out I'm Jewish after all. However malformed and badly enacted that Jewishness is and has been. The times are no longer compatible with, they no longer afford me the luxury of, denying it. Anything else would be irresponsible.That certainly doesn't mean I'll stop being infuriatingly, unreliably contrarian in my judgment of political issues and disputes. I'll continue to judge Israel's settlement policies and some of its punitive actions against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to be acts of moral and strategic idiocy. But I'll also continue to defend Israel's unconditional right to exist and defend itself against military threat. I'll continue to view President Trump's gestures of support for Jews with considerable skepticism — as incompatible with free speech and as doing little to compensate for the much greater harm precipitated by his intolerant and inflammatory rhetoric, which has done so much to activate previously dormant racism and anti-Semitism in the country. But I'll also continue to think of Judaism as a nationality or ethnicity as well as a religion. (Otherwise I could never have been considered a Jew in the first place.)But then what does my reaffirmation of my own Judaism amount to?All it means is that if things get worse — and who would dare try to reassure a Jew that it won't? — I will know exactly how and where I'll be taking my stand: in proud, defiant self-defense with my fellow Jews.More stories from theweek.com Trump's pathological obsession with being laughed at The most important day of the impeachment inquiry Jerry Falwell Jr.'s false gospel of memes
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| Johnson's win may deliver Brexit but could risk UK's breakup Posted: 14 Dec 2019 06:30 AM PST  Leaving the European Union is not the only split British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has to worry about. Johnson's commanding election victory this week may let him fulfill his campaign promise to "get Brexit done," but it could also imperil the future of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland and Northern Ireland didn't vote for Brexit, didn't embrace this week's Conservative electoral landslide -- and now may be drifting permanently away from London.
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| Trump on Senate impeachment trial: 'I'll do whatever I want' Posted: 13 Dec 2019 09:59 AM PST  While speaking to press, President Trump said he'll do "whatever I want" when it comes to the Senate impeachment trial.
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| The New York Times editorial board calls for Trump's impeachment Posted: 14 Dec 2019 02:59 PM PST  The New York Times editorial board is the latest to join a growing list of major papers openly calling for the impeachment of President Trump.
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| The 25 Best Survival Games Posted: 14 Dec 2019 06:00 AM PST |
| Democrats Threaten to Skip Next Week’s Debate Over Union Dispute Posted: 13 Dec 2019 02:45 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- All of the Democratic presidential candidates who have qualified for next week's debate say they will skip the event rather than cross a planned picket line at the venue.The seven candidates -- Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang -- all said Friday that they would not show up for the debate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles next Thursday if the Unite Here Local 11 goes forward with its protest of food service contractor Sodexo SA.The union, which represents about 150 Sodexo employees at the LMU campus, reached out to the campaigns on Friday to inform them they planned to demonstrate. The union and the food-services company have been negotiating for months but their talks stalled this week.This is the second labor issue to complicate plans for the December debate. It had been set to be held at the University of California at Los Angeles's Luskin School of Public Affairs. But the Democratic National Committee asked the debate's media sponsors to find a new location because the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees demanded that the candidates to boycott it over a contract dispute involving patient care workers at the university's hospital system."The DNC should find a solution that lives up to our party's commitment to fight for working people," Warren wrote on Twitter. "I will not cross the union's picket line even if it means missing the debate."Biden said he would not cross a picket line and had to stand with the union's members "for affordable health care and fair wages."Xochitl Hinjosa, the DNC's communications director, said late Friday that the group's chairman, Tom Perez, "would absolutely not cross a picket line and would never expect our candidates to either." She added that the DNC was trying to find a solution that "will enable us to proceed as scheduled with next week's debate."(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)(Adds DNC comment in last paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Ryan Teague Beckwith in New York at rbeckwith3@bloomberg.net;Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Max BerleyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Death toll from New Zealand eruption rises to 14 after authorities conduct harrowing mission to retrieve bodies from the island Posted: 12 Dec 2019 08:14 PM PST  New Zealand police said that two people remain missing and are presumed dead after one of New Zealand's most active volcanoes erupted on Monday.
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| Satellite evades ‘day of reckoning' to discover puzzling weather phenomenon on Jupiter Posted: 13 Dec 2019 04:51 PM PST  At first glance, these newly released images by NASA may look like lava churning in the heart of a volcano, but they reveal otherworldly storm systems whirling in a way that surprised scientists.The swirls in the photos are cyclones around Jupiter's south pole, captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft on Nov. 3, 2019. Juno has been orbiting the solar system's largest planet since 2016 and has seen these polar cyclones before, but its latest flight over this region of the planet revealed a startling discovery - a new cyclone had formed unexpectedly. Six cyclones can be seen at Jupiter's south pole in this infrared image taken on Feb. 2, 2017, during the 3rd science pass of NASA's Juno spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM) Prior to its early November pass, Juno had photographed five windstorms arranged in a uniform, pentagonal pattern around one storm sitting stationary over the south pole."It almost appeared like the polar cyclones were part of a private club that seemed to resist new members," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.It is unclear when exactly the new cyclone formed, but it changed the arrangement of the storms from a pentagon to a hexagon.Winds in these cyclones average around 225 mph, according to NASA, wind speeds higher than any tropical cyclone ever recorded on Earth. An outline of the continental United States superimposed over the central cyclone and an outline of Texas is superimposed over the newest cyclone at Jupiter's south pole give a sense of their immense scale. The hexagonal arrangement of the cyclones is large enough to dwarf the Earth. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM) The discovery of this evolving meteorological phenomenon almost didn't happen as Jupiter itself almost caused the mission to end abruptly.Juno is a solar-powered spacecraft that relies on constant light from the sun to keep the craft alive. Flying through Jupiter's enormous shadow would take about 12 hours to complete, which would cut off the power source, drain the spacecraft's battery and potentially spell the end of the mission."Our navigators and engineers told us a day of reckoning was coming, when we would go into Jupiter's shadow for about 12 hours," said Steve Levin, Juno project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.To avoid the potential mission-ending eclipse, Juno fired up its engine (which was not initially designed for such a maneuver) and adjusted its trajectory just enough to avoid the icy grip of Jupiter's shadow. Jupiter's moon Io casts its shadow on Jupiter whenever it passes in front of the Sun as seen from Jupiter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Tanya Oleksuik, (C) CC BY) "Thanks to our navigators and engineers, we still have a mission," said Bolton. "What they did is more than just make our cyclone discovery possible; they made possible the new insights and revelations about Jupiter that lie ahead of us."NASA scientists will continue to study these polar vortices in future flights over Jupiter's south pole to better understand the atmosphere over this part of the planet."These cyclones are new weather phenomena that have not been seen or predicted before," said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist from the University of California, Berkeley. "Nature is revealing new physics regarding fluid motions and how giant planet atmospheres work. Future Juno flybys will help us further refine our understanding by revealing how the cyclones evolve over time."
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| Man gets life for killing 2 engaged doctors in their condo Posted: 13 Dec 2019 07:52 AM PST ![Man gets life for killing 2 engaged doctors in their condo]( "Man gets life for killing 2 engaged doctors in their condo") Bampumim Teixeira, 33, requested not to be in the courtroom when the sentence was handed down because he said he wouldn't control himself. Teixeira declined to address the court, but the victims' families gave impact statements. Field's brother, Jason Field, delivered a tearful speech in which he described his brother as his "life adviser and best friend," the best man at his wedding and his roommate in college.
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| Will the Navy's New LRASM Missile Change the Balance of Power? Posted: 13 Dec 2019 08:00 PM PST  Or will it keep the status quo?
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| Russia raises concerns over new U.S. ballistic missile test: RIA Posted: 13 Dec 2019 12:21 AM PST ![Russia raises concerns over new U.S. ballistic missile test: RIA]( "Russia raises concerns over new U.S. ballistic missile test: RIA") Russia said on Friday it was alarmed after the United States tested a ground-launched ballistic missile that would have been banned under the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the RIA news agency reported. The United States carried out the test on Thursday. Washington formally withdrew from the 1987 INF pact with Russia in August after determining that Moscow was violating the treaty, an accusation the Kremlin has denied.
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| Warren, slumping in the polls, attacks Biden and Buttigieg Posted: 13 Dec 2019 12:39 PM PST  With polls showing her once steady rise to the top tier of the Democratic race stalling, Elizabeth Warren went on the attack in New Hampshire.
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| Crashed Chile plane had emergency in 2016: Air Force Posted: 14 Dec 2019 05:31 PM PST  The Chilean Hercules C-130 plane that crashed on its way to Antarctica, killing all 38 people on board, suffered an emergency three years ago on the same route, the Air Force said Saturday. In a statement, the Chilean Air Force said the plane shown in the footage is the same one that crashed during a crossing of the Drake Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, en route to a Chilean airbase. As it approached the Antarctica base in 2016 "the crew realized that the left main gear of the aircraft did not travel to the down position and secure when activating the landing gear," the statement said.
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| A Mobster's Murder, and the Jockeying to Move Up the Hierarchy Posted: 14 Dec 2019 07:20 AM PST  NEW YORK -- On a quiet night in March, a mob leader was executed in New York City for the first time since 1985. The body of Francesco Cali, a reputed boss of the Gambino crime family, lay crumpled outside his Staten Island home, pierced by at least six bullets.Hours later, two soldiers in the Gambino family talked on the phone. One of them, Vincent Fiore, said he had just read a "short article" about the "news," according to prosecutors.No tears were shed for their fallen leader. The murder was "a good thing," Fiore, 57, said on the call. The vacuum at the top meant that Andrew Campos, described by authorities as the Gambino captain who ran Fiore's crew, was poised to gain more power.Cali's death was just the beginning of surprises to come for the Gambino family.Last week, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Fiore and 11 others in a sprawling racketeering scheme linked to the Gambinos, once the country's preeminent organized crime dynasty. The charges stemmed from a yearslong investigation involving wiretapped calls, physical surveillance and even listening devices installed inside an office where mob associates worked.As part of the case, the government released a court filing that offered an extremely rare glimpse at the reactions inside a Mafia family to the murder of their boss -- a curious mix of mourning and jockeying for power. The case showed that life in the mob can be just as petty as life in a corporate cubicle."Mob guys are the biggest gossips in the world," said James J. Hunt, the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's office in New York. "You think they're tough guys, but they're all looking out for themselves. The only way they get promoted is by a guy dying or going to jail."While Fiore initially plotted how Cali's death would help him and his faction, he adopted a different tone when calling his own ex-wife a few days later, prosecutors said. He warmly referred to Cali as "Frankie" and seemed to mourn the boss as a man who "was loved." He speculated about the killer's motive, saying he had watched the surveillance tape from Cali's home that captured the murder.Vincent Fiore appeared ambitious, court documents showed, eager to reveal his connections to other gangs and organized crime families. About two weeks after Cali's death, Fiore bragged in another wiretapped conversation about how he could take revenge on students who had hit his son at school, a government filing said.Fiore talked first about sending his daughter to beat the students up.But he also had other options, he said on the call. His ex-wife's father was a Latin King, her nephews were Bloods, and her cousin was a member of the Ching-a-Lings, the South Bronx motorcycle gang.Vincent Fiore and the other defendants have each pleaded not guilty to the charges. A lawyer for Fiore did not respond to a request for comment.Despite decades of declining influence in New York City, the Gambino family, led by the notoriously flashy John J. Gotti in the 1980s, is still raking in millions of dollars, according to the government. Prosecutors said they had evidence that the family had maintained its long-standing coziness with the construction industry, infiltrating high-end Manhattan properties.The indictments accused Gambino associates of bribing a real estate executive to skim hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York City construction projects, including the XI, a luxury building with two twisting towers being built along the High Line park in West Chelsea.At the height of their power in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Gambinos and other organized crime families had a stranglehold on New York City construction, through their control of construction unions and the concrete business.Some of the defendants charged last week operated a carpentry company called CWC Contracting Corp., which prosecutors said paid kickbacks to real estate developers in exchange for contracts.Despite the scramble after Cali's death in March, the Gambino crime family continued to thrive through fraud, bribery and extortion, investigators said.The wiretaps quoted in court papers hinted at the crime family's capacity for violence. One of the defendants was recorded in April claiming that he had a fight in a diner and "stabbed the kid, I don't know, 1,000 times with a fork." Inside another defendant's home and vehicle, agents found brass knuckles and a large knife that appeared to have blood on it.Among the notable names in last week's takedown were two longtime Gambino members, Andrew Campos and Richard Martino, who were once considered by Gotti to be rising stars in the Mafia, according to former officials."John was enamored by these guys," said Philip Scala, a retired FBI agent who supervised the squad investigating the Gambino family. "He couldn't believe what they were doing. These kids were making millions of dollars as entrepreneurs."In particular, Martino has long been viewed by mob investigators as somewhat of a white-collar crime genius, former officials said. Prosecutors have previously accused him of orchestrating the largest consumer fraud of the 1990s, which netted close to $1 billion. One part of that scheme involved a fake pornography website that lured users with the promise of a free tour and then charged their credit cards without their knowledge.Campos, 50, and Martino, 60, each pleaded guilty in 2005 to their role in the fraud and served time in federal prison.But as soon as they were released, the government said, they returned to the family business.Martino is now accused of hiding his wealth from the government to avoid paying the full $9.1 million forfeiture from his earlier case.After Martino's release from prison in 2014, he still controlled companies that conducted millions of dollars in transactions, using intermediaries to obscure his involvement, the government alleged. This included investments in pizzerias on Long Island and in Westchester County, according to a person familiar with the matter.Martino's lawyer, Maurice Sercarz, said his client fully paid the required forfeiture before reporting to prison. He added, "The suggestion that Mr. Martino concealed his ownership of businesses and bank accounts to avoid this obligation ignores or misrepresents his financial circumstances."Campos, meanwhile, climbed the ranks to become a captain inside the Gambino family, according to prosecutors.Henry E. Mazurek, a lawyer for Campos, said the government's photos and surveillance footage of his client were not evidence of a crime. "The government presents a trumped-up case that substitutes old lore for actual evidence," Mazurek said.After searching Campos' home in Scarsdale, New York, a wealthy suburb north of New York City, investigators found traces of a storied mob legacy. In his closet there were photos taken during his visits with Martino to see Frank Locascio, Gotti's former consigliere, or counselor, in prison.Locascio is serving a life sentence. He was convicted in 1992 alongside Gotti by the same U.S. attorney's office that brought last week's indictment. Gotti, who died in prison in 2002, was found guilty of, among other things, ordering the killing of Paul Castellano in 1985, the last time a Gambino boss was gunned down in the street.On March 14, the day after Cali's death, Campos drove into Manhattan around 5:50 p.m. to discuss the circumstances of the murder with Gambino family members, seemingly unaware that law enforcement was tracking his every move.He parked near a pizzeria on the Upper East Side, according to a person familiar with the matter. As the night progressed, he met with Gambino family captains on the Upper East Side and near a church in Brooklyn. They stood in the street, chatting openly, but law enforcement officials could not hear the conversations.Several days later, Campos and Fiore drove to Staten Island for a secret meeting. A group of about eight high-level Gambino lieutenants gathered to discuss Cali's murder, a court filing said. In a wiretapped call the next day, Fiore complained that he had stayed out past midnight.Fiore said on the call that a woman had been at Cali's home the night of his death, pointing to her as a possible connection. Court papers do not reveal the woman's identity.Nobody within the mob family seemed to suspect the person who was charged: a 25-year-old who appeared to have no clear motive.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
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| Challenge to immigration law is tossed on eve of enactment Posted: 13 Dec 2019 12:47 PM PST  A law that will allow New Yorkers to get driver's licenses without having to prove they are in the country legally weathered a second court challenge Friday, days before its enactment. A federal district judge ruled against Rensselaer County Clerk Frank Merola, saying he lacked the legal capacity to bring the lawsuit. Merola, a Republican, had argued that the state law conflicts with federal immigration law.
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| Would China Try to Claim Most of the Pacific Ocean? Posted: 13 Dec 2019 12:11 PM PST  Nine-dash line? How about two hundred and fifty? Some fake news freaked an academic conference out several years ago.
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| Blowback from U.K. election burns Warren, Sanders Posted: 13 Dec 2019 06:10 PM PST  Centrists warn Corbyn defeat highlights the dangers of a progressive nominee.
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| EF1 tornado flips over camper, leaves a path of damage, downed power lines Posted: 14 Dec 2019 11:12 AM PST  Thunderstorms erupted in parts of the southeastern United States, which spawned an EF-1 tornado Saturday morning in Flagler County, Florida.Numerous trees are down and several structures have been damaged, according to WOGX. There are also reports that a tree has gone through a home."A tornado touched down on the south side of Flagler Beach this morning at approximately 5:45 a.m. There have been no reported injuries and a camper was overturned in Gamble Rogers State Park. SRA1A is open and there was no damage to the Pier or any Dune Walkover," The Flagler Beach Police Department said in a Facebook post. The tornado overturned a camper in Flagler County, Florida. Image via The Flagler Beach Police Department Officials said in a press release that 'significant damage' was found from south of Bunnell to the Gamble Rogers area of Flagler Beach."A cold front pushing south and east across northern Florida early this morning helped initiate a squall line during the pre-dawn hours, and one of these thunderstorms was able to take advantage of strong winds in the upper atmosphere to produce a tornado," AccuWeather Meteorologist Randy Adkins said.> We found EF1 damage consistent with 110 mph winds from the tornado this morning in Flagler County. Read more in our Public Information Statement below. https://t.co/nXgmFSfJK2> > -- NWS Jacksonville (@NWSJacksonville) December 14, 2019The Flagler Beach Police Department posted photos of tornado damage on social media, including one that appeared to show a camper overturned. A camper was blown on its side during the tornado. Image via The Flagler Beach Police Department Tornado damage of a road sign that was knocked over in the tornado. Image via The Flagler Beach Police Department
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| Cholera kills over 27,000 pigs in Indonesia Posted: 14 Dec 2019 01:56 AM PST  More than 27,000 pigs have died in a hog-cholera epidemic that has struck Indonesia, with thousands more at risk, an animal welfare official said. Thousands of pigs have died in more than a dozen regencies across North Sumatra over the past three months, and the pace of deaths is increasing, authorities said.
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| An Oakland City Council member wants to use cruise ships to house homeless people — but her plan faces a big obstacle Posted: 13 Dec 2019 07:16 AM PST  Oakland's homeless population grew 47% between 2017 and 2019. The city's per-capita homelessness rate is now higher than San Francisco's.
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| Israel welcomes Belgian parade's removal from UNESCO list Posted: 14 Dec 2019 11:35 AM PST ![Israel welcomes Belgian parade's removal from UNESCO list]( "Israel welcomes Belgian parade's removal from UNESCO list") Israel on Saturday welcomed a decision by the U.N.'s educational, scientific and cultural agency to drop a famous Belgian carnival off its heritage list after protests over displays of anti-Semitism. Israel's rare appreciation of UNESCO came a day after the organization removed the Aalst carnival from its Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
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| Thousands join biggest protest for years in Thai capital Posted: 14 Dec 2019 12:07 AM PST  Several thousand people took part in Thailand's biggest protest since a 2014 coup on Saturday after authorities moved to ban a party that has rallied opposition to the government of former military ruler Prayuth Chan-ocha. The demonstration in Bangkok, called just a day earlier by Future Forward party leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, a 41-year-old billionaire, revived memories of the spasms of street protest that have roiled the Thai capital periodically during the past two decades of political turbulence. "This is just the beginning," Thanathorn told the cheering crowd that spilled across walkways and stairways close to the MBK Centre mall, in the heart of Bangkok's shopping and business district.
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| 'Disgusted.' Trump rails against Democrats after impeachment vote, backs short Senate trial Posted: 13 Dec 2019 09:23 AM PST  President Trump lashed out at Democrats less than an hour after the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve two articles of impeachment against him.
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| Justin Trudeau moves forward with ban on LGBT+ conversion therapy across Canada Posted: 14 Dec 2019 10:18 AM PST  LGBT+ conversion therapy could soon be banned across Canada after Justin Trudeau made this one of the priorities for his new government.In a letter to the country's justice secretary on Friday, the prime minister stated that banning the controversial practice of attempting to forcibly change people's gender or sexuality must be a "top priority".
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