The plane went missing almost a year ago on March 8th 2014, but after months of searching and coming up with nothing, the Malaysia government issued a formal declaration stating that the passengers on MH370 is presumed dead.
The formal declaration, read Thursday by civil aviation director Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, will allow the families of those presumed dead to continue the compensation process with the airline or with insurers.
“It is therefore, with the heaviest heart and deepest sorrow that, on behalf of the Government of Malaysia, we officially declare Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 an accident in accordance with the Standards of Annexes 12 and 13 to the Chicago Convention and that all 239 of the passengers and crew on board MH370 are presumed to have lost their lives,” Azharuddin said.
A co-worker asked if I had watched the “speech” Sarah Palin delivered in Iowa last week. Of course I didn’t. I try to be as productive as possible and sitting down to watch Sarah Palin ramble on about nothing is counterproductive and a total waste of time!
But he insisted. “I dare you,” he said. “Try to figure out what the mama grizzly was saying and if you can, lunch is on me. Go ahead,” he insisted, “give it a shot.”
I looked at my watch and realized it was almost lunchtime. A free lunch? Just for watching and summarizing a speech by Sarah Palin? I can do this, I thought and I took him up on his challenge.
I couldn’t get past the first 5 minutes of the speech. Needless to say, I ended up buying lunch today.
As reported by Rachel Maddow, Bryan Fischer, the man who was the face and voice of the Conservative organization, The American Family Association, and the man who is well known as a Republican/Christian-Conservative hate-monger, has lost his job with the group because of statements he recently made against Jews and gays.
According to Maddow’s reporting, Bryan Fischer and his group paid for a trip to Israel for the Republican National Committee after Fischer made some disparaging remarks about the Jewish people and gays. Speaking about Jews, Fischer referred to their religion as a “counterfeit religion” and said that Christianity is the only religion in the United States covered under the First Amendment.
“Counterfeit religion, alternative religions to Christianity have no First Amendment right to the free expression of Religion,” Fischer said. He also went on talking about the Holocaust being done by Hitler and gay people.
According to Tim Wildmon, the President of the American Family Accociation, “Bryan Fischer is just a talk show host,” and is no longer associated with the American Family Association. Mr. Wildmon told the Maddow show that “the soundbite quotes, you know, the Hitler and homosexuality one” were the quotes that broke the camel’s back.
Police said she entered the police station “brandishing a weapon,” so that apparently meant the three grown men with guns felt threatened enough to gun down the 17 year old mentally challenged girl in the lobby of the police station.
Police said that Kristiana Coignard entered Longview’s police station at 6.30pm on Thursday and asked to speak with an officer through the lobby courtesy phone. The teenager was still in the lobby of the police station when, according to police, she threatened the officers while wielding a weapon — reportedly a knife — and was shot “multiple times,” according to a local official.
Exactly what led three male officers to shoot Coignard dead is still unclear. The Longview police department has not released any further statements on the events.
Kristie Brian, spokeswoman for Longview Police, said that footage of the incident does exist, but is not available to the public, nor are records of the brief call Coignard made from the police department’s lobby. Brian did not confirm what type of weapon Coignard was allegedly threatening the officers with.
Heather Robertson, Coignard’s aunt, told ThinkProgress that her niece, who was living with her in Longview, had mental illness issues since her mother died when she was four. Robertson added that Coignard attempted suicide various times, but was taking medications, and that she did not have a criminal record or a history of violent behavior toward others.
“I think it was a cry for help,” Robertson said. “I think they could have done something. They are grown men. I think there is something they are not telling us.”
Stewart took on just about everyone who hyped the recent blizzard out of proportion, but he had a special word or two or three for CNN’ and Don Lemon, as Lemon climbed into a vehicle he called “the blizzardmobile” and ventured out on the streets of New York after authorities made clear that “non-essential” and “non emergency” vehicles must stay off the roads.
In a country where women are sometimes treated worse than second class citizens, The First Lady of the United States sent a powerful message when she visited Saudi Arabia with her husband on Tuesday. The pictures say it all!
There she was, standing side-by-side with her husband as he stepped off Air Force One in Riyadh today, where, during a brief visit, the president offered condolences for the recent death of King Abdullah and met with his successor, King Salman.
The first lady accompanied the president throughout the stay, embodying some of the reforms that her husband is pushing the country to adopt.
Wearing pants and her head uncovered, Mrs. Obama stood dutifully beside her husband as he shook hands with the Saudi delegation on the airport tarmac this morning and again at Erga Palace on the outskirts of Riyadh.
At times she reached out to shake an occasional hand, but mostly she stood back and offered just a smile.
According to reporters traveling with the president, due to the cultural constraints, the first lady purposely stood slightly behind her husband and waited for a gesture to be made to her by the men in the receiving line. If one of the men initiated a handshake she returned, if not then she simply smiled or nodded politely.
Not only are they wasting the American people’s time with these pointless Obamacare repeal votes, these so-called “conservatives” are wasting our tax dollars as well. Millions of dollars down the drain on over 50 failed votes, and these “conservatives” see nothing wrong with wasting even more money on Obamacare repeal.
Is this why we pay these fools, or are we the fools for keeping them in office?
The Republican-led House is planning to vote next week to fully repeal Obamacare, a GOP leadership said on Wednesday.
It will be the fourth House vote to repeal the law in its entirety, and the latest in more than 50 votes aimed at dismantling President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
The House last voted to wipe out Obamacare in May 2013, after GOP freshmen complained that they had not had the chance to vote to repeal the law yet.
The upcoming vote is likely to succeed in the House and face a filibuster in the Senate and a veto threat from Obama. It appears to be an attempt to help more than three-dozen newly elected House Republicans win points with their base.
According to the Chinese government, Alibaba has a major credibility problem. The government issued a report station that the tech giant knowingly allows fake and counterfeit items to be sold on its platform.
The scathing report by the State Administration for Industry & Commerce accused Alibaba of allowing merchants to operate without required business licenses, to run unauthorized stores that co-opt famous brands and sell fake wine and handbags. Alibaba employees took bribes, and the e-commerce giant didn’t fix flaws in customer feedback or internal credit-scoring systems, the report said.
“For a long time, Alibaba hasn’t paid enough attention to the illegal operations on its platforms, and hasn’t effectively addressed the issues,” the report said. “Alibaba not only faces the biggest credibility crisis since its establishment, it also casts a bad influence for other Internet operators trying to operate legally.”
Bob Christie, a spokesman for Alibaba, said the Hangzhou-based company couldn’t immediately comment.
A statement posted on the official Weibo account of Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace Wednesday afternoon said the company was improving technology to fight against fakes and was willing to work with regulators on its procedures. The site also said it would file a complaint against the SAIC’s Internet regulation director, Liu Hongliang, who presided over a meeting with Alibaba representatives in July to discuss the claims.
The tweet from Dropkick Murphys was directed to Republican governor, Scott Walker – “Please stop using our music in any way…we literally hate you !!! Love, Dropkick Murphys.”
When the Celtic punk rock band tweeted those words at Wisconsin governor Scott Walker over the weekend, it wasn’t the first time they’d expressed their displeasure with the Republican governor’s policies. The band (whose left-leaning members have a tight relationship with workers’ rights activists) has previously slammed the governor as ”anti-union.”
This time, they were pissed that Walker had used their song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” as entrance music at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday.
“I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” which uses lyrics originally penned by Woody Guthrie, is Dropkick Murphys’ biggest hit, and was prominently featured in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning drama The Departed.
Dropkick Murphys’ tweet is one of many examples of liberal recording artists telling conservative politicians to quit using their music. John Mellencamp knocked Gov. Walker for playing his song “Small Town” out on the campaign trail. Tom Petty sent a cease-and-desist to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, asking the then-Texas governor to quit playing “I Won’t Back Down” at rallies. And Newt Gingrich was accused of violating copyright laws for blasting the Heavy’s “How Do You Like Me Now?” at an event in Tampa, Florida.
The people at Fox News are not fans of the president and have displayed their hate for the man from the time he announced his intentions to run for presidency. But there is an issue that’s causing a shockwave at Fox, and that issue is the disrespect John Boehner and the Republicans leveled against the president by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to a congressional speaking engagement without telling the president.
The White House has already said that with this proposed speech, Netanyahu and the Republicans have “spat” in the president’s face and apparently, Fox News agrees.
“And to make you get a sense of really how, forgive me, wicked, this whole thing is, the Secretary of State John Kerry met with the Israeli Ambassador to the United States for two hours on Tuesday, Ron Dermer. The ambassador, never mentioned the fact that Netanyahu was in negotiations and finally agreed to come to Washington, not to see the president, but to go to Capitol Hill, speak to a joint session of congress and criticize the president’s policy. I have to say I’m shocked.”
Educators, are you getting excited? No, not about the next snowstorm, which looks like a whopper, but about the PARCC tests? You’d better be, because they are on the way and the impact will be measurable and unpredictable.
For those non-educators, the PARCC tests are the standardized tests that students in grades 3-11 will take in two administrations; March and April/May. They are tied to the Common Core Curriculum Standards and claim to be the newest, latest, greatest, most bestest tests to evaluate teacher performance and to prepare our students for further leaning, college, and the working world. Parents, teachers, administrators and politicians have debated whether these new tests, and the Common Core, are appropriate or will even measure what they purport to measure. Some states adopted the Common Core and the tests, then un-adopted them.
The bottom line, though, is that they are almost here.
I’ve taken some sample tests, and so can you. Go ahead and give it a try. Notice what students are being asked to do and how they are being asked to do it. My assumption is that it’s different from what you were asked to do in school. This is the point: The standards and tests are asking educators and students to approach education from a different perspective. In some ways, it’s a more productive, intuitive approach, and in others, it’s downright confounding.
One of the main issues in New Jersey and, I suspect, in most other states, is the availability and reliability of the school’s technology. All of the tests are taken on computers and all of the students will probably log on to their school’s systems at the same time. This will probably cause some networks to slow down and/or crash. Also, many schools do not have enough computers for all of their students, which will result in significant disruptions to the school schedule as students will need to test in shifts.
And as much as adults like to fool themselves into thinking that children are all adept at using computers, the facts are that many students can’t keyboard quickly, do not understand how technology works, or how to manipulate the screens as these tests require. There is a section of the high school language arts test where students will need to read and manage three sources on three different windows with three different scroll bars and write an essay using all of the readings. That can be a challenge. For younger students, actual keyboarding will be a problem. There are no computer bubble sheets or booklets on these tests. A slow typist will have trouble.
The actual testing, though, is still only part of the issue. These tests will be used to evaluate teachers, which is, and always has been, a terrible idea. Using any high-stakes test, especially one given for the first time on unpredictable technology by students who haven’t had a full school year of Common Core instruction, is folly.
Besides, the tests really are only high-stakes for the teachers, not the students. How’s that for sound policy? If a student decides the test is too difficult or they can’t type or didn’t eat a good breakfast that morning, then a teacher could get fired. This is what you get when know-nothing politicians decide, without significant teacher input, what’s best for education.
And in most cases, the former First Lady and Secretary of State is leading Republicans by double digits.
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that Hillary Clinton continues to maintain strong leads over any of her potential Republican challengers:
Hillary Rodham Clinton holds double-digit leads over potential Republican challengers Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney as the likely Democratic presidential candidate moves closer to entering the 2016 race, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
Although Clinton, Bush and Romney are all longtime politicians and members of political dynasties, registered voters are less likely to count that familiarity against Clinton. That is a good sign for Clinton, a failed 2008 presidential candidate and the focus of Republican criticism that her time has come and gone.
Clinton’s potential to make history as the first female U.S. president makes little difference to most voters and is a net positive for others.
The former first lady, U.S. senator from New York and secretary of state has said she is considering a second run for the White House. She joked about the anticipation surrounding her decision during remarks in Canada on Wednesday but did not offer hints about her thinking or the timing of a possible announcement. Democratic strategists say she is likely to enter the race in late March or April – some 10 months before the Iowa caucuses open the 2016 primary contests.
Clinton approaches the nominating season in a dominant position, leading Bush by 54 percent to 41 percent among registered voters and Romney by 55 percent to 40 percent.
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