Big Time News Blog: 11/28/19

Thursday, November 28, 2019

Rudy Giuliani was angling for a 6-figure business deal with a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor while pushing him to get political dirt on the Bidens

Rudy Giuliani said he had been approached by the Ukrainians with multiple business offers, but dismissed all of them and never accepted any money.

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North Korea test fires two missiles month before deadline for US to respond on talks

North Korea fired two "unidentified projectiles" on Thursday, Seoul said, as nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington remain deadlocked. The projectiles were fired eastwards from South Hamgyong province and came down in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. They added that the launch, the latest in a series by Pyongyang, was carried out at 16:59 pm local time - or the early hours on the east coast of the United States, during Thanksgiving, one of the country's biggest annual holidays. It was also one day short of the two-year anniversary of the North's first test of its Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, which analysts say is capable of reaching the entire US mainland. Pyongyang is banned from firing ballistic missiles under UN Security Council resolutions, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Thursday's launch was the latest in a series of violations. "North Korea's repeated launches of ballistic missiles are a serious defiance to not only our country but also the international community," he told reporters in Tokyo. Thursday's launch came after Pyongyang fired what it called a "super-large multiple rocket launcher" system last month, and the JCS said the latest devices were presumed to be of a similar type. They flew 380 kilometres (236 miles) and reached a maximum altitude of 97 kilometres, the JCS added. Nuclear negotiations between the US and the North have been at a standstill since the Hanoi summit between Donald Trump, the US president, and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, broke up in February. Pyongyang has since demanded Washington change its approach by the end of the year. "North Korea is growing anxious as its deadline approaches," said Shin Beom-chul of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. "That's why it's carrying out these provocations, which is the typical North Korean playbook to get more concessions from the US."

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Port Neches explosion: 60,000 evacuated from homes after Texas chemical plant blast

A series of explosions at a chemical plant forced some 60,000 people to be evacuated from the area surrounding Port Neches in Texas.The first blast occurred at 1am on Wednesday, injuring three workers who are now in hospital. TPC Group, which operates the plant, confirmed all other employees have been accounted for.

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Judge upholds charges that could put Weinstein away for life

A New York judge has rejected Harvey Weinstein’s bid to throw out the most serious charges in his sexual assault case, dealing a big blow to the disgraced movie mogul as he sought to limit the scope of his looming trial and any potential punishment. The ruling made public Wednesday clears the way for prosecutors to bolster their case with testimony from actress Anabella Sciorra who says Weinstein raped her in 1993 or 1994. In recent court filings, Weinstein’s lawyers objected to two of the five counts against him — both stemming from a charge called predatory sexual assault, which carries a maximum life sentence and requires prosecutors to show a pattern of misconduct.

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Iran supreme leader says 'very dangerous' plot foiled

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said his sanctions-hit country had foiled a "very dangerous" plot after violent demonstrations triggered by a fuel price hike. New York-based Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, accused Tehran of "deliberately covering up" more than 100 deaths and thousands of arrests during the crackdown.

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'Sleepwalking toward climate catastrophe:' World must slash emissions immediately, UN report says

The world's nations must make steep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions immediately or risk missing the targets they’ve agreed on, a U.N. report says.

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Texas chemical fire rages for second day, thousands evacuated

The fiery blast inside a distillation column at the Port Neches, Texas, TPC Group facility on Wednesday injured three workers, blew locked doors off their hinges and spewed a plume of toxic chemicals for miles (kilometers). The plant manufactures petrochemicals used to make rubber and resins, and the volatile organic compounds in the explosion's smoke can lead to eye, nose and throat irritation, shortness of breath, headaches and nausea, the pollution regulator Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) said. The plant, 90 miles (145 km) east of Houston, has a long history of environmental violations and has been out of compliance with federal clean air laws for years, according to the Texas Tribune and state records; it was also declared a high priority violator by the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Native Americans Have Little to Celebrate on Thanksgiving

Bettmann/GettyWhile I have been researching and writing a Wampanoag-centered history of Plymouth Colony and the Thanksgiving holiday, my conversations with Native people have opened my eyes to some profound lessons about their past and present. These teachings have particular resonance this Thanksgiving season as the United States continues to struggle with white nationalism, the importance of distinguishing between truth and lies in democratic debate, and the place of indigenous people in a pluralistic country with a colonial foundation.Native people widely agree that the U.S. has yet to reckon with its history of white violence against their people. Instead, the country uses the myth of the First Thanksgiving to make it appear that Indians consented bloodlessly to colonialism.That myth, reinforced over and over again through grade school Thanksgiving pageants, holiday decorations, and television specials, is the only cameo Indians make in the colonial history curriculum in many American schools. Unfortunately, it is terrible history and even worse civics.The myth tells that supposedly friendly Indians (rarely identified by tribe) voluntarily gifted their country to the Pilgrims in order to lay the foundations for a white, Christian, democratic United States. As for why these Indians were so welcoming in the first place, this myth has nothing to say. It does not address the fact that the Wampanoags had already experienced years of slave raiding by European sailors before the appearance of the Mayflower, and that those contacts had introduced them to a devastating plague that more than halved their population and left them vulnerable to their inter-tribal enemies. Thus, when the Pilgrims arrived, the Wampanoags looked to them for a military alliance despite their wariness of English treachery.Why Thanksgiving Is Better Than ChristmasThe Thanksgiving Myth also evades the fact that the celebrated peace between the Wampanoags and Plymouth was rife with tensions from the start and ultimately degenerated into a bloody war. During the celebrated 50 years of peace following the First Thanksgiving, the Wampanoags complained endlessly about the English encroaching on their land, undermining their political systems, and asserting their jurisdiction over purely Indian affairs.Not coincidentally, there were recurrent war scares during these years as Native leaders reached across tribal lines to make common cause against their common colonial threat. The tension finally broke in King Philip’s War of 1675-76, which led to the deaths of thousands of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, and other indigenous people, and the enslavement of thousands more. The Thanksgiving Myth ignores this consequence of the Pilgrim-Wampanoag alliance, though clashes of this sort were a basic feature of American colonial history.Some American history courses might teach about King Philip’s War, but few have anything to say about how many Wampanoags and other Native New Englanders survived after their military subjugation. Over the following centuries, they endured white society’s reduction of them and their children to indentured servitude and the ongoing occupation of their lands. They also suffered white people denying they were Indians at all based on the intermarriages and cultural adjustments they had made to survive under white domination. In other words, Americans are rarely taught the incredible achievement that American Indians are still here, every bit as much a part of the modern world as everyone else.Indigenous people also widely bemoan that Americans’ lack of historical understanding about the Native American contributes to a marked lack of recognition of their place in the country, a general lack of compassion for their historic struggles, and widespread unawareness about their ongoing fights for sovereignty and cultural self-determination. Indeed, many of them feel invisible to the general public.Worse still, every Thanksgiving season the country reduces historic Indians and their traumas to caricature, as if to say that Native Americans’ only role in the national culture is to concede to colonialism and then go away.Lest we diminish the impact of these messages, consider the experience of a young Wampanoag woman who told me that when she was in kindergarten, the lone Indian in her class, her teacher cast her as Chief Massasoit in a Thanksgiving pageant and had her sing with her classmates “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.” Reflecting on the moment as an adult, the cruel irony was not lost on her. As a child, she only knew enough to be embarrassed about it.The Trump era has cast into relief some of the dark consequences of this amnesia and ignorance. It includes the government’s environmental racism and disregard of Native sovereignty evident in the battle over the Keystone Pipeline. It includes the ongoing use of racist stereotypes of indigenous people in sports mascots. It includes President Donald Trump’s derision of Sen. Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas, which feeds on the widespread assumption that it is ludicrous for someone with a light (or dark) complexion leading a modern life to have Native heritage and want to claim it.Trump’s juvenile trolling of Warren also plays on the widespread ignorance of the American public about the difference between being an enrolled member of an Indian tribe (which Warren is not) and being a descendant of Native people (which Warren is). Such thinking is part of a long American tradition of white people insisting that Indians should disappear, the better to reduce the numbers of them laying claim to the land.The belief that Indians do not matter also contributed to Trump posing a delegation of Navajo leaders visiting the White House in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the proponent of Indian Removal, and then making light on Twitter about the historic massacre of Wounded Knee.Not least of all, the widespread belief that modern Indians cannot be authentic and have no legitimate historic rights has contributed to a recent decision by Trump’s Department of the Interior to revoke a 2007 federal ruling that restored reservation lands to the Mashpee Wampanoags of Cape Cod, descendants of the very people who welcomed the Pilgrims.No wonder, then, that many Native people, including the Wampanoags, charge that their fellow Americans lack sufficient gratitude for what they’ve sacrificed for the country. This feeling of victimhood is especially poignant given that many Native communities still suffer extraordinarily high levels of poverty, with all of its associated ills, while living in the shadow of sometimes garish wealth. Wampanoag people in southeastern New England, for instance, are confronted daily with the sight of outsiders’ extravagant coastal estates, occupied for only six or eight weeks in summer, built atop places where the ancestors are buried and where some of them fished, hunted, and gathered within memory. The image sickens and depresses. And yet there is no escaping it or the sense that other Americans revel in it.In Thanksgiving season, one cannot drive past neighbors’ lawns or go to the store without confronting happy Pilgrim and Indian decorations, or turn on the television, radio, or computer without being bombarded with Pilgrim and Indian themes. Some schools continue to have children, including Native children, perform Thanksgiving pageants. For these reasons and more, the United New England Indians have held a National Day of Mourning in Plymouth every Thanksgiving Day since 1970, which is attended by indigenous people from throughout the hemisphere. They do not see American colonialism as something to celebrate.Part of what I’ve learned through my conversations with Wampanoag people is that achieving some measure of repair and signaling that Americans value their Native countrymen and women requires compassion, gratitude, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable history. Taking these steps might also help us, collectively, to restore basic dignity, intelligence, and humanity to our civic culture. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Lawsuit: Alabama Sheriff 'Big John' Williams shot in parking lot 'without provocation'

Suspect William Chase Johnson faces murder charges. He is the son of a Montgomery County Sheriff's Office deputy.

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Italy uncovers plot to create new Nazi party

Italian police said on Thursday they uncovered a plot to form a new Nazi party and seized a cache of weapons during searches across the country. Police in 16 towns and cities from the Mediterranean island of Sicily to the Alps in northern Italy took part in the investigation, which was launched two years. The probe revealed a "huge and varied array of subjects, residents in different places, united by the same ideological fanaticism and willing to create an openly pro-Nazi, xenophobic and anti-Semitic movement", a police statement said.

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Small plane crashes in Kingston, Ontario, killing seven: local police

A small plane crashed in a wooded area on the outskirts of Kingston, Ontario on Wednesday evening, killing seven people, local police said.

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Maltese Businessman Accuses Top Government Officials in Murder of Journalist

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Ice Sculpture Steals Show at U.K. Climate Debate That Boris Johnson Skips

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Hong Kong police enter ransacked campus after protest siege

Hong Kong police on Thursday entered a ransacked university campus where authorities faced off for days with barricaded pro-democracy protesters, gathering a huge haul of petrol bombs and other dangerous materials. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University became the epicentre of the territory's increasingly violent protest movement when clashes broke out on November 17 between police and protesters armed with bows and arrows as well as Molotov cocktails. The standoff settled into a tense stalemate during which hundreds fled the campus -- some making daring escapes, others caught and beaten by officers during failed breakouts -- leaving a dwindling core of holdouts surrounded by police cordons.

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ICE arrested an estimated 250 people who enrolled in a fake university set up by federal authorities as part of an immigration sting operation

A grand-jury indictment from January alleged that "the University was being used by foreign citizens as a 'pay to stay' scheme" to obtain visas.

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Trump peddles 'war on Thanksgiving' that he probably heard about on Fox News

Like the so-called war on Christmas, the rhetorical assault on Thanksgiving is being led by the president’s favorite cable news network.

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Israel demolishes homes of alleged Palestinian killers: army

Israel on Thursday demolished the West Bank homes of four Palestinians accused of a deadly attack, sparking clashes with stone-throwing protesters, the army and an AFP journalist said. The houses in the village of Beit Kahil near Hebron in the occupied West Bank were home to men who were "part of the squad that carried out the stabbing attack" which killed an off-duty soldier in August, the army said. Clashes broke out during the demolitions, the army said, with Palestinians hurling "rocks and burnt tyres at troops".

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Japan beer exports to S.Korea dry up amid hiccup in ties

Not a single drop of Japanese beer was exported to South Korea last month, according to official figures on Thursday, as a boycott campaign against Japan over a historical dispute dries up demand. Japanese beer shipments to South Korea stood at 7.9 billion yen ($72 million) last year, accounting for more than 60 percent of the country's global exports of the amber nectar. Exports of Japanese instant noodles and sake to South Korea have also plummeted.

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Israel says envoy's 'GOOD LUCK' to Myanmar for genocide case was a mistake

The Israeli ambassador was mistaken to have sent a "GOOD LUCK" message to Myanmar ahead of World Court hearings on accusations the state committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims, Israel's foreign ministry said on Thursday. Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported that the ambassador to Myanmar wished authorities good luck in tweets that have since been deleted ahead of the hearings next month at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

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German museum confirms 49-carat diamond among heist haul

Publishing a list of the pieces taken in Monday's brazen raid, the Green Vault museum at Dresden's royal palace said the items stolen included a sword whose hilt is encrusted with nine large and 770 smaller diamonds, and a shoulderpiece which contains the famous 49-carat Dresden white diamond. The Dresden white is one of the most precious jewels in the collection of former Saxon ruler August the Strong. "None of the diamonds would have been in themselves extra special except for the one large Dresden White," he said.