Appeals court questions whether Boston Marathon bombing jury was biased
Jake Kennedy has ALS. He will fight it with all his might
Every year he writes a column about Christmas in the City, and one can only hope it isn't made up.
"In N.H., Warren gives her most forceful attack yet on rivals as her poll numbers stall" by James Pindell and Victoria McGrane Globe Staff, December 12, 2019
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MANCHESTER, N.H. — With polls showing her momentum waning, Senator Elizabeth Warren traveled to the must-win state of New Hampshire on Thursday and launched an amped-up offensive against her chief rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination in an hourlong speech at Saint Anselm College.
The speech amounted to her most forceful attack yet, and it came as her once-hot momentum has cooled. Just a month ago, Warren led polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, and nationwide. On Thursday, just 53 days before the first votes in Iowa, she is in fourth in the Real Clear Politics average of polls, behind a trio of men. A month ago, she was leading at 21 percent in the same average.
She started dropping right after she noted Palestinian deaths during Israel's latest war criminal assault on Gaza.
New Hampshire is often viewed as a “must-win” for Warren, given that politicians from neighboring states historically win in the Granite State, which shares a media market with Boston. But a WBUR/MassInc poll of likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters released on Wednesday placed Warren fourth, with 12 percent, behind South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (18 percent), former vice president Joe Biden (17 percent), and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont (15 percent.)
They are the best bet to beat Trump.
Warren’s support nationwide among likely Democratic primary voters has been cut in half in just six weeks, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, which found she had slipped from 28 percent support to 15 percent.....
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The expanded stump speech is a strategic reversal.
Related: Warren’s tax estimate misses mark
So says Bloomberg News (and here I thought they weren't investigating Democrats).
Also see: A court ruling boosts au pairs’ pay, but it puts families in a bind
Liz has a plan for that.
The story behind Back Bay’s Santa Speedo Run
It began as a boozy lark born in a Beacon Hill bar at the start of the millennium.
The Nation
"House panel grinds through GOP objections to impeachment articles" by Nicholas Fandos New York Times, December 12, 2019
WASHINGTON — Amid Republicans’ cries of outrage, Democrats were poised to approve along party lines a charge that President Trump abused the powers of his office. They were also on track to adopt a second charge against Trump for obstructing Congress, based on an across-the-board defiance of their subpoenas. The only question was when the president’s defenders would sheath their swords for the day to allow the final roll-call vote to recommend the articles to the full House to go forward.
The The House Judiciary Committee vote would make Trump, whose unorthodox and polarizing presidency has preoccupied the nation like few of his modern predecessors, only the fourth president in American history to face impeachment by the House for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Though the charges allude to a pattern of past conduct, they do not explicitly mention his embrace of Russian election interference in 2016 or efforts to thwart a special counsel investigation of it.
The full House is expected to debate and vote on the articles next week, just days before Congress is scheduled to leave town for Christmas. Democratic leaders anticipate that a handful of their members — particularly more moderate lawmakers from districts Trump won in 2016 — may join Republicans in opposing one or both of the articles, but they expect the defections to be narrow.
Far from expressing remorse for the charges against him, the president once again declared his total innocence and raged against the Democrats leading the charge to impeach him. He turned to Twitter, his favored platform, to retweet dozens of allies who were defending his conduct and slamming the Democrats.
Thursday’s proceeding aired out all the pent-up bitterness of years of near existential political warfare. Democrats accused Republicans of turning a blind eye to misconduct by Trump out of reflexive loyalty to their party.....
You know, the same thing Democrats did 20 years ago when it was Clinton being impeached.
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Related: Pentagon investigator to examine border wall contract awarded to GOP donor
Also see:
"House backs giving government more power to negotiate lower drug prices" by Sheryl Gay Stolberg New York Times, December 12, 2019
WASHINGTON — The House, delivering on one of the Democrats’ central campaign promises, on Thursday passed ambitious legislation to lower the rising cost of prescription drugs by empowering the US government to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Just before they leave town, huh?
The bill, known as HR 3 — a numerical designation that reflects its position on Democrats’ priority list — would make significant changes to the federal Medicare program, which provides health coverage to older Americans. It passed largely on party lines, 230 to 192, and includes provisions to create new vision, dental, and hearing benefits and caps out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries at $2,000.
It may be third on the list, but it is far down after impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, and now the New York Times is crowing about this turd they shined up just before the Democrats skip town.
Lowering the cost of prescription drugs is a huge priority for voters and politicians of both parties — including President Trump, who has made curbing their costs a central theme of his 2020 reelection campaign.
Trump has vowed to veto the Democratic bill, but its passage could put pressure on Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, to take up a bipartisan drug-price measure pending there or press senators to act on other bills.
See: Senate recognizes Armenian Genocide
Drug makers strongly oppose both the House bill and a Senate bill drafted in the Finance Committee.
The central and most contentious provision of the measure that passed Thursday is its language enabling the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers Medicare, to negotiate the price of up to 250 commonly used drugs. It would also require the manufacturers to offer the agreed-on prices to private insurers, and it would require pharmaceutical manufacturers to pay rebates to Medicare if the price of their drugs increased faster than inflation.
The Senate bill, sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, does not contain those provisions, but like the House bill, it would cap out-of-pocket expenses and require drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they raised prices faster than inflation.
(Blog editor just shakes head at this filler crap)
Democrats say their bill addresses research and development concerns by allocating more than $10 billion to the National Institutes of Health for biomedical research, with the goal of advancing breakthrough cures.
Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices has been a long-sought goal of Democrats; because the program buys drugs in bulk, it can effectively set the prices for all insurers. It was a matter of intense debate in 2003, when the Republican-led Congress passed the bill creating Medicare Part D, which allows Medicare to pay for the cost of prescription drugs.
The debate is just like the wealth inequality issue. It's raised every four years, and after the election it is back to business as usual.
Although the bill passed Thursday is unlikely to become law in anything close to its current form, it will serve as a campaign document for the Democrats, to show voters what their vision is on prescription drugs and that they have the will to make a substantive change in the system, rather than tinker around the edges.
Are you tired of the political illusions yet, and if they want to make substantive change and not just tinker on the edges, why are they all criticizing and opposing Medicare-For-All?
At another moment, House passage might have also jump-started negotiations with the White House, but that is unlikely, given that Democrats are about to impeach the president.....
Meaning the entire article is nothing but a political placebo.
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Maybe the government should start treating the pharmaceuticals as a cartel as more Americans are dying at home.
"Jersey City shooting was ‘domestic terrorism,’ officials say" by Michael Gold New York Times, December 12, 2019
The deadly rampage that ended with one police officer slain and three bystanders killed at a kosher market in New Jersey is now being treated as an act of domestic terrorism, authorities said Thursday.
The developments came as residents of Jersey City, located across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, were reeling from the chaos Tuesday, when a fierce firefight put parts of the city on lockdown.....
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Here is who is investigating the case:
New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal spoke during a news conference in Jersey City, N.J., Thursday. Grewal said authorities believe the shooting in Jersey City was "fueled both by anti-Semitism and anti-law enforcement beliefs." Seth Wenig/AP/Associated Press
Also see:
College freshman fatally stabbed near New York City campus
The Barnard College student’s parents live in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Three Alabama teachers suspended over text messages leaked online
They were sharing offensive text messages about students.
Mother wanted for crashing car into son’s barber turns self in
A San Francisco Bay Area mother was upset with her son’s haircut because it made the kid want to commit suicide.
Trump mocks Greta Thunberg, and she jabs back
WAAAA!
The World
"Exit polls show Johnson’s Conservative Party with a clear majority of parliamentary seats" by William Booth, Karla Adam and James McAuley The Washington Post, December 12, 2019
LONDON - Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to have won a large and powerful majority of parliamentary seats in Thursday’s election, according to an exit poll, as voters apparently delivered a decisive outcome that should allow Johnson to fulfill his plan to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union next month.
If the exit poll results hold when actual ballots are tallied overnight, Johnson and his Conservative Party will have achieved a smashing success — the largest win for the Tories since the days of Margaret Thatcher — while the opposition Labour Party and its hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn will have suffered their worst defeat in four decades.
This was Britain’s third general election in a little more than four years, and reactions from Corbyn’s party were gloomy. Labour lawmaker Barry Gardiner called exit polls ‘‘obviously a devastating result for us.’’ He told Sky News, ‘‘And as the night goes on, we’ll know whether it’s as bad as it says or not. It’s a deeply depressing prediction.’’
Corbyn is expected to come under pressure to step down.
Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said Labour has ‘‘a lot of very hard thinking to do, particularly with the leader it now chooses.’’
He said that if the party selected its next leader in Corbyn’s image, it would be in ‘‘trouble.’’
Under Corbyn, the party swung hard to the left, calling for the nationalization of rail, mail, water, and electricity, alongside a four-day work week and free university tuition, and heavy taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Looks like Trump is a shoo-in for 2020.
While Brexit was dominant in many voters’ minds on Thursday, it wasn’t the only issue.
Sarah Duncan, 71, a lifelong Conservative voter, was up first thing to her London polling station, not far from the River Thames. She said this election ‘‘was particularly important, because I’m very frightened of far-left-wing government and what Jeremy Corbyn could do for this country.’’
Duncan confessed in the June 2016 referendum, ‘‘I voted to stay, I didn’t vote for Brexit, but I do feel that because the country has voted for Brexit, it’s a democratic country, and we should do what the majority said and we should leave,’’ she said.
Nick Symes, 53, a yacht broker, standing in the rain, said he voted for the Labour Party because, ‘‘it’s socialist, it’s why I like it, it’s redistributive, and it’s not Boris Johnson.’’
In Brussels, EU leaders who had gathered for a planned summit were preparing for a late night of election results-watching. Several said they just wanted to get Brexit over with.....
That's the way I feel about blogging these days, and British voters ‘‘gift-wrapped an oven-ready’’ Brexit for Chri$tma$.
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Related: French president suggests he will change his pension overhaul plan
Also see:
Ex-Turkish prime minister forms party challenging Erdogan
The emergence of parties led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan allies-turned-rivals is a move that represents a challenge to Erdogan’s government as it grapples with an economic downturn and high unemployment.
"An angry mob killed a 16-year-old and strung up the corpse by its feet from a traffic pole after the teen shot and killed six people Thursday, including four anti-government protesters, Iraqi officials said. Dozens of people pointed their cellphones at the body dangling high above them in a central Baghdad square. Videos circulating on social media showed the young man being beaten and dragged across the street. The violence underscored the growing fears and suspicions swirling around the 8-week-old protest movement, which engulfed Iraq on Oct. 1, when thousands took to the streets to decry government corruption, poor services, and scarcity of jobs. A string of mysterious acts of bloodshed by unknown groups has put antigovernment protesters on edge and eroded their faith in the ability of state security forces to protect them. In recent days, abductions and assassinations of high-profile civil activists have stoked paranoia among demonstrators. Protesters largely blame Iran-backed militias for the attacks and see the violence as a campaign to instill fear and weaken their peaceful movement. The exact circumstances of Thursday’s bloodshed were not clear, with different versions circulated throughout the day......"
What you are looking at is something akin to Salvador Option or what happened on the Ukraine Maiden.
Pakistan charges 250 lawyers for treason in hospital assault
They were part of a mob that stormed a hospital.
New Zealand trying to recover bodies on volcanic island
Protests grow in India over religion-based citizenship bill
The protests quickly turned violent, but the government show of force only seemed to enrage protesters further.
"As Myanmar genocide hearing closes, focus is on trapped Rohingya" by Hannah Beech and Saw Nang New York Times, December 12, 2019
BANGKOK — Half a world away from the elegant confines of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Myanmar is being accused of genocide in a landmark case that opened this week, a Rohingya Muslim man was preparing to die.
It was, he said by phone Thursday, going to be a slow demise. His village in Rakhine state in far western Myanmar had been attacked in recent weeks. The rice had been ready to harvest, but Buddhists had stolen the crop. Aid from international groups had ceased. People were hungry, sick, and desperate.
This week’s dramatic opening in The Hague saw agonizing testimony about the mass slaughter and rape of Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar’s military and local mobs, followed by strenuous denials from Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader, that there had been any orchestrated persecution of the Muslim minority, but the three days of hearings this week have a narrower objective than deciding whether Myanmar’s treatment of the mostly stateless minority group constitutes the gravest of international crimes. A determination of whether Myanmar, a mostly Buddhist country, is guilty of acting with genocidal intent could take years to make.
The point of this week’s legal proceedings, instead, is to determine whether judges need to issue an emergency order to protect the Rohingya still in Myanmar from what United Nations investigators say is an ongoing genocidal campaign.
Over the years, about 1 million have fled to neighboring Bangladesh. Others survived perilous passages by boat to work as migrant workers elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Thousands more toil in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia.
In testimony presented to the court this week, lawyers for Gambia, the West African country that has brought the case against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice on behalf of other Muslim-majority nations, said that the Rohingya in Rakhine are facing mounting pressure, even the risk of starvation.....
How are they doing in Yemen and Gaza, btw?
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Related:
North Korea berates US for criticizing its missile tests
That was during a United Nations Security Council meeting, and speaking of North Korea.....
UN chief warns against ‘survival of the richest’ on climate
United Nations Secretary-General AntΓ³nio Guterres warned Thursday that failure to tackle climate change could result in economic disaster that would allow only the “survival of the richest.”
How is that different from now, and where is Liberty Mutual in the climate fight?
Trump’s US Space Command will bring Earth’s battlefields to the stars
Weaponizing space will benefit humanity.
If you believe that, then I have a vape cartridge to sell you:
Mass. marijuana stores given OK to resume sales of some vaping products
'Tis the $ea$on......
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Boston officials unveil safety recommendations for bars and patrons
It's about making the city’s night life safer (I didn't know there was a concern).
You will have to find your own way home:
Critics say the T needs more money. So why did lawmakers then give it less?
Trial begins for IRS agent accused of raping college intern
He literally did what they do to all of us.
Dartmouth College celebrates 250th anniversary
This 1835 Maine lighthouse lens is missing...have you seen it?
It's lost to history.
Baker, Walsh offer details on 2020 NAACP convention in Seaport
Chihuahua attacked by coyote in South Boston
Ala. inmate charged in rape, death of 19-year-old woman in Boston in 1980
Get ready for a new cellmate.
Maybe he can help you with your taxes.
Partners HealthCare is launching a $100 million digital health initiative
Why not lower drug prices instead?
Brookline women’s clothing shop closing after 40 years
They are going to leave you naked.
US, China settle on outline of elusive phase one trade deal
Stocks are now at record heights as hopes build for a trade deal, and the fact that unemployment is at a two-year high is not a talking point.
Colliers is picked to market the Hynes, but it could be a tricky assignment
Senate confirms Stephen Hahn, an oncologist, as FDA commissioner
His first hurdle will be clearing mushrooms as a treatment for depression.
Looks like the show is over, folks.
