It has grounded plans, closed roads and has even been compared to a nuclear winter, but one couple were not going to let the smog in Beijing ruin their big day.
The couple added gas masks to the more traditional wedding outfits before posing for a series of shorts around Guomao Bridge in the Chinese capital.
Severe pollution has hit much of northern China for the past week, with some readings well over 10 times the internationally accepted safety limit.
It is unknown whether the couple had in fact just been married or were taking part in a protest against the heavy pollution.
The smog in Beijing is now so thick that it is blocking sunlight despite recent announced closures or production cuts at 147 of the city’s industrial plants.
Michigan police officers won’t face federal charges in the fatal shooting of a homeless man during a confrontation over stolen coffee.
Federal authorities, including the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI, announced Tuesday that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the six Saginaw police officers.
“After a thorough investigation, federal authorities have determined that this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to lead to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved,” the agencies said in a joint statement.
Police were called on the afternoon of July 1, 2012, to investigate a report that a man had stolen a cup of coffee from a convenience store.
Officers found 49-year-old Milton Hall, a homeless Saginaw man who was armed with a pocket knife and a known history of mental illness.
During the confrontation in a parking lot, police fired their weapons 47 times at Hall, striking him 11 times and killing him.
Prosecutors also declined to charge the officers in the state’s investigation, saying Hall acted aggressively as he wielded the knife.
Considering her recent past, you’d think Paula Deen would be advised against using certain colors in her public statements when referring to other people. If she cannot remember Michael Sam’s name, you’d think she’ll use another descriptor instead of “black” when comparing herself to the man. But, no…
“I feel like ‘embattled’ or ‘disgraced’ will always follow my name,” Deen reportedly told People. “It’s like that black football player who recently came out. He said, ‘I just want to be known as a football player. I don’t want to be known as a gay football player.’ I know exactly what he’s saying.”
Unlike Sam, however, Deen wasn’t called “embattled” or “disgraced” until after she lost her show and several endorsements following the revelation that she regularly used a racist slur regarding Black people during the course of her work.
Though discrimination charges against her were later dismissed, Deen lost her show. Earlier this month, however, she secured an investment worth between $75 million and $100 million to be used for a new company fueling a comeback bid.
A new poll is showing stronger acceptance of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Fifty six percent of those polled accept or are in favor of the bill while thirty one percent want it reoealed.
The poll shows that 48 percent want to keep and improve the law, and another eight percent want to keep it as is — for a total of 56 percent who want to keep it. (50 percent of independents want to keep and fix.)
Meanwhile, 19 percent want to repeal the law and not replace it, while 12 percent want to repeal and replace with a GOP alternative — totaling 31 percent.
Back in October Kaiser found that 37 percent want repeal/replace or just repeal, versus 47 percent who want to keep/expand it. There was a temporary spike for repeal in December, at the height of the problems; now it appears to be back down to below where it was.
Two years ago today, on February 26th, Georgia Zimmerman murdered seventeen year old Trayvon Martin. Two years later, the loved ones of Trayvon are still feeling the pain of their loss.
Trayvon’s dad Tracy, marked the anniversary of his son’s death by making an appearance on Politics Nation with Al Sharpton and dropped a sad truth – that America shows more love to guns, than they do to the life of our kids.
So you want to donate money to someone to get rid of the president? Worry no more. There’s an app for that. A Facebook app that is.
The owner of the page created it with the specific goal of collecting donations from the blindly faithful. Those who think that giving their hard earned money to losers would somehow result in the caputer and elimination of our Democratically elected president.
You may remember Everest Wilhelmsen from last November’s call to arms, where he claimed “authority to shoot [Obama].”
Emboldened by Facebook’s decision to let him continue splattering his seditious speech all over Facebook and WordPress.com, Wilhelmsen has hatched his newest campaign, a fundraiser to accumulate reward money for the capture of the president.
If his Facebook post is to be believed, he has raised nearly $30,000 toward this goal. In his call for donations, he writes:
This group is for American patriots and others who have the mettle to pledge a REWARD FOR THE CAPTURE OF OBAMA.
NOTE: This is NOT a political issue, but A MATTER OF SELF-DEFENSE and a time that TRUE PATRIOTS MUST STAND !!! Most of us are not able to get close enough to Obama to capture and remove him, but some are. This REWARD is to encourage all who have the ability and opportunity to CAPTURE and permanently REMOVE Obama from the White House and Washington — to do so.
Obama MUST BE REMOVED BEFORE THE ELECTIONS, otherwise he will use them again for wrongful (fraudulent) advantage: Elections are how Obama convinces voters that they have “representatives” (that is why he is always campaigning) when in fact he and his co-conspirators are violating and alienating our Constitution—supplanting our Constitution with their usurpation of our Sovereignty.
The closer we get to the November elections the stronger and more arrogant (more dangerous) Obama will become.
Rocco’s Little Chicago Pizzeria in Tucson had a message for the politicians who supported a bill that allows business owners to refuse to serve gays and lesbians.
“We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators,” the sign read.
“Funny how just being decent is starting to seem radical these days,” the restaurant commented on Facebook.
On the Fox News’ Hannity program last night, a panel was assembled to talk about food stamps. Using a story about a 29-year-old California surfer who is abusing the food stamp program while dining of lobsters, Sean Hannity asked his panel to respond to the lifestyle of the surfer.
‘Vice’ co-founder Gavin McInnes took issue with the premise of Hannity’s question and immediately suggested that white people are not the ones abusing the food stamp program. His conclusion? The abuse is happening because of “black Dominicans” in New York who are using food stamps as a “fat pill.”
During a panel discussion, Hannity asked his guests to respond to a 29-year-old California surfer who had allegedly been using the food stamp program instead of getting a job.
“This guy doesn’t personify the problem,” McInnes opined. “You see a middle-class white surfer kid. Here in New York, Dominicans go to the grocery store with their food stamps and the barrels that they ship back to the Dominican Republic are available at the grocery store.”
“But it’s more palatable to use this surfer than it is to use people who represent the problem here,” he said.
After another guest stated that “obesity is a big problem” when it comes to the food stamps, and the ease of “access to in these stores that accept food stamps,” McInnes shot back, “yeah, the sheer volume of it. It’s just a fat pill.”
Fox News Megyn Kelly summed it up well when talking to Brit Hume about the Arizona Discrimination Bill.
“I look at this bill and I wonder whether this is … an overreaction [by religious] people who feel under attack on this score, and in the end, they may have struck back in a way that’s deeply offensive to many and potentially dangerous to folks who are gay and lesbians and need medical services and other services being denied potentially.”
Four years ago, he pulled his gun and shot his cousin. Then in March 2012, legally blind John Rogers pulled his gun again and killed his 34-year-old friend, James DeWitt. He stayed a short while in jail while the court went through the motions, but after it was all said and done, Stand Your Ground allowed John to walk free.
Last week, Stand Your Ground required a Seminole County Judge, John Galluzzo to return the murder weapon along with all his other guns to Mr. Rogers. This, according to WESH.
Even though the he said he didn’t want to do it, a judge in Seminole County, Florida, was forced to return a Glock pistol and a rifle to a blind man who won immunity for killing another man under the state’s “stand your ground” law. The surreal hearing took place in the Seminole County Courthouse in Sanford—the city where Trayvon Martin was killed and his shooter set free under the same self-defense statute.
John Wayne Rogers had stood accused of premeditated first degree murder for shooting a “drinking buddy” in March 2012 “after a long drinking session,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. The killing was done “once in the chest with a .308 Remington assault rifle from a distance of 18 inches or less.”
But amid differing eyewitness accounts at his trial last month, a judge dismissed the jury and awarded Rogers immunity under Florida’s “stand your ground” law.
That led to Thursday’s hearing, in which Judge John Galluzo reluctantly admitted he’d have to give Rogers his rifle and a Glock 10 mm handgun. “I have to return property that was taken under the circumstance,” the judge said. “I have researched and haven’t found case law to say otherwise.”
Rogers—who has done probation for firing 15 rounds at a cousin and was jailed for pushing and punching a woman in a domestic disturbance three years ago—will have to buy new ammunition, however, since the state considered his cache “too old and dangerous.”
I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics. But I am a Republican no longer.
There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this: “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.” These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. But I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently. After all, my real education only began when I was 30 years old.
This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.
I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I was oblivious. Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s “losers” had somehow earned their deserts. As I came to recognize that poverty is not earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people.
No longer oblivious, I couldn’t remain in today’s Republican Party, not unless I embraced an individualism that was even more heartless than the one I had previously accepted. The more I learned about reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my values shifted. Had I always known what I know today, it would have been clear that there hasn’t been a place for me in the Republican Party since the Free Soil days of Abe Lincoln.
Quickly now – There’s a discrimination bill in Arizona that would allow businesses to deny service to anyone on the ground of Religion. If a business feels that their religious beliefs is not being upheld by a potential customer or if the employee of that business feels that the customer’s lifestyle differs from theirs, the business will be able to legally kick that person off their premises. The governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, cannot decide if she should make this bill law. She’s actually trying to decide if discrimination in her state, should be legal.
Now to the letter.
Dear Arizona,
Congratulations. You are now the first state actually to pass a bill permitting businesses–even those open to the public–to refuse to provide service to LGBT people based on an individual’s “sincerely held religious belief.” This “turn away the gay” bill enshrines discrimination into the law. Your taxi drivers can refuse to carry us. Your hotels can refuse to house us. And your restaurants can refuse to serve us.
Kansas tried to pass a similar law, but had the good sense to not let it come up for a vote. The quashing came only after the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and other traditional conservative groups came out strongly against the bill.
But not you, Arizona. You’re willing to ostracize and marginalize LGBT people to score political points with the extreme right of the Republican Party. You say this bill protects “religious freedom,” but no one is fooled. When I was younger, people used “God’s Will” as a reason to keep the races separate, too. Make no mistake, this is the new segregation, yours is a Jim Crow law, and you are about to make yourself ground zero.
This bill also saddens me deeply. Brad and I have strong ties to Arizona. Brad was born in Phoenix, and we vacation in Show Low. We have close friends and relatives in the state and spend weeks there annually. We even attended the Fourth of July Parade in Show Low in 2012, looking like a pair of Arizona ranchers.
The law is breathtaking in its scope. It gives bigotry against us gays and lesbians a powerful and unprecedented weapon. But your mean-spirited representatives and senators know this. They also know that it is going to be struck down eventually by the courts. But they passed it anyway, just to make their hateful opinion of us crystal clear.
So let me make mine just as clear. If your Governor Jan Brewer signs this repugnant bill into law, make no mistake. We will not come. We will not spend. And we will urge everyone we know–from large corporations to small families on vacation–to boycott. Because you don’t deserve our dollars. Not one red cent.
And maybe you just never learn. In 1989, you voted down recognition of the Martin Luther King holiday, and as a result, conventions and tourists boycotted the state, and the NFL moved the Superbowl to Pasadena. That was a $500 million mistake.
So if our appeals to equality, fairness, and our basic right to live in a civil society without doors being slammed in our face for being who we are don’t move you, I’ll bet a big hit to your pocketbook and state coffers will.
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