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CEO of Podesta Group is leaving the firm to start her own lobbying shop

Theodoric Meyer
Politico
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 17:43 UTC
Tony Podesta
Kimberley Fritts, the longtime chief executive of the Podesta Group, is leaving the firm to start her own lobbying shop, according to three Podesta Group staffers.

Tony Podesta, the firm's founder, tapped Fritts as his successor when he announced he'd step down as chairman last week, hours after an indictment was unsealed, charging Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, with violating foreign lobbying law. The indictment accused Manafort of hiring the Podesta Group to lobby for an ostensibly independent nonprofit that "was under the ultimate direction" of the Ukrainian president, his party and the Ukrainian government.

Comment: Breaking: Tony Podesta quits Podesta Group amid Mueller inquiry

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TV

MSM loathes alternative media like 'the builder of a house of cards fears the wind'

Adam Garrie
The Duran
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 17:12 UTC
It is clear that the MSM pundits slamming alt-media don't know anything about it. If they did they'd have a much better story than they do, albeit a less sinister one.

Obama
When it comes to the daily slandering of so-called alt-media personalities and outlets from broadcasters like RT to independently owned and operated private enterprise websites such as the one you are reading now, one would hope that the so-called journalists of the MSM would actually do some investigating into their own hypotheses.

To listen to MSM, one would think that half of the people in alt-media are paid handsome salaries by a foreign government (usually Russia, sometimes Iran and on fewer occasions Venezuela and North Korea) in order to use the right to peaceful free speech to report on facts and express opinions. According to this same narrative, those who aren't receiving money from the "Kremlin", are "useful idiots" who are expressing their opinions in the purely private sector that neo-liberals lionise, except when it comes to starting a business that involves opinions that contradict their worldview.
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Ambulance

Paramedic overdoses while driving overdose patient to hospital

Will Garbe
Dayton Daily News
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 16:42 UTC
fairborn paramedics
© WKEF/WRGT
A Fairborn firefighter-paramedic driving a suspected overdose patient to the hospital Thursday night began showing symptoms of an overdose himself, prompting his partner to jump into action and stop the ambulance in the middle of the road.

This is the latest - and perhaps most dramatic - case of a public safety employee exposed to an opioid.

"He was not feeling right. He was having issues seeing the speedometer controls," said David Reichert, division chief for Fairborn fire. "His partner in the back was immediately able to stop the medic in the middle of an intersection."

The partner administered Narcan to the firefighter-paramedic. He and the 49-year-old woman patient were taken to Soin Medical Center in Beavercreek, Reichert said. The woman and firefighter, whose names have not been released, have recovered.

"There's nothing like going to the hospital and seeing one of our guys in the hospital bed who has just been given Narcan to pull him away from dying," Reichert said.

Comment: U.S. police warn of opioid drug so potent it can be fatal 'just by touching'

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Target

Star Trek's George Takei accused of sexual assault by former male model


Fox News
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 16:34 UTC
George Takei
© AP
Actor George Takei was accused Friday of sexual assault by a former actor and model in Hollywood.
George Takei, best known for his role in "Star Trek," was accused Friday of sexual assault by a former actor and model, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Scott R. Brunton said the incident occurred in 1981 when he was beginning his career in Hollywood. He said he met Takei, who was 43 or 44 years old then, at a bar and the pair reportedly exchanged numbers and talked on occasion.

When Brunton, then 23 years old, broke up with his boyfriend at the time, he said Takei "was a great ear."

"He was very good at consoling me and understanding that I was upset and still in love with my boyfriend," Brunton recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. "He was very good about me spilling my heart on my sleeve."

Following a night out, the duo reportedly went back to Takei's apartment for drinks. During the second round, Brunton said he began "feeling very disoriented and dizzy" and thought he "was going to pass out," he told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Biohazard

'Hazardous' smoke in Brussels, residents told to keep doors & windows shut


RT
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 13:43 UTC
Power plant
© Emmanuel Dunand / AFP
Smoke is pictured billowing from the Drogenbos gas-fired power plant, the country's largest, in Brussels.
A fire at a plant in the Drogenbos municipality to the south-west of the Belgian capital prompted authorities to release a statement warning that the smoke might be hazardous.

Police in Brussels asked residents in the southern and western parts of the city "to close windows and doors" on Saturday afternoon, local media report. Drivers in the area have also been strongly advised to shut off their ventilation, while roads in the affected area have been partially closed off.

"A fire at Engie [facility] in Drogenbos - toxic smells: close doors and windows, shut down ventilation with air coming from outside, remain indoors," a text warning sent by local authorities said.
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Network

Teenager tells how the internet & popular culture influenced her gender confusion

Rod Dreher
American Conservative
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:46 UTC
intersectionality sign
© nito/Shutterstock
Here's the stunning story of Noor Jontry, 14, who had begun to change her gender, but ceased and desisted. She talks about how she got into it, and how she escaped it. It's a long story, and I'm only going to quote parts of it that talk about the role the Internet and popular culture played in exploiting ordinary stresses and cracks within a pubescent teenager's psyche. Excerpts:

Comment:

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Newspaper

Actress Ellen Page accuses Brett Ratner of 'outing her as gay' on movie by urging a female crew member to have sex with her


Sputnik
Sat, 11 Nov 2017 15:35 UTC
Ellen Page
© AP Photo/ Arthur Mola/Invision
Ellen Page
Actress Ellen Page, a star of Inception science fiction movie, has added her name to those who accuse Hollywood producer and director Brett Ratner of sexual misconduct, claiming that he "outed her as gay" when she was as young as 18.

In a lengthy post on her Facebook page, Ellen Page has accused Ratner of stripping her of her privacy to come to grips with her sexual orientation by herself.

The Canadian actress, who publicly came out as gay in 2014, at the age of 27, has revealed that when she was 18, the influential Hollywood producer encouraged a woman ten years her senior to have sex with her "to make her realize that she was gay."

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Bullseye

Thought police crackdown: University teaching assistant labeled as 'transphobic' for showing a Jordan Peterson video in class

Christie Blatchford
National Post
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 15:47 UTC
Jordan Peterson
© Darren Brown / Ottawa Citizen/Ottawa Sun
Jordan Peterson speaks to a group at the Carleton Place Arena on Thursday, June 15, 2017.
A Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant has been identified as "transphobic" and sanctioned last week for showing her class an excerpt of a video debate involving the controversial University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson.

In fact, her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, told her that by showing the video to her "Canadian Communication in Context" class, "it basically was like ... neutrally playing a speech by Hitler ..."

Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old graduate student at the school in Waterloo, Ont., was informed that merely by showing the clip, taken from a televised debate between Peterson and Nicholas Matte, a lecturer at the U of T's Sexual Diversity Studies program, she was "legitimizing" Peterson's views about genderless pronouns.

She has been told that she must now submit her lesson plans to her supervisor in advance, that he may sit in on her next few classes and she must "not show any more controversial videos of this kind."
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Bizarro Earth

Not satire: Philosopher at U of W thinks we should stop 'labeling' people who commit crimes 'criminals'

Daniel J. Flynn
Breitbart
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 15:25 UTC
Add "criminal" to the growing list of words banished from the English language.

prison bars
© SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP/Getty Images
In an article titled, "Stop labeling people who commit crimes 'criminals,'" Kimberley Brownlee, a philosopher at the University of Warwick, calls the word an "epithet"-more commonly used to describe a term conveying something disparaging rather than its alternative definition as merely a neutral tag-and compares it to politically-incorrect terms and phrases for people with disabilities.

"By reducing people to their crimes, we see them as offenders and nothing else, and we force them to see themselves that way," she writes. "Consequently, we might set up the exact conditions for them to become the kind of person who offends."
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People

Pepe Escobar's letter from Iraq: Grief, forgiveness, and 20 million pilgrims

Pepe Escobar
Russia Insider
Fri, 10 Nov 2017 14:16 UTC
The largest pilgrimage in the world, 15 times bigger than Mecca

The largest pilgrimage in the world, 15 times bigger than Mecca.
TIKRIT and NAJAF, Iraq - Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares you to revive, on the spot, the memory of what will go down in history as ISIS / Daesh's most horrid killing field in Iraq or Syria since the death cult stormed across the border in the summer of 2014; the Speicher massacre of June 12, 2014 - when almost 2,000 Iraqi army recruits were assassinated in and nearby a former Saddam Hussein palace on the banks of the Tigris near Tikrit.

As Dylan would sing it, "ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet". In 2003, a few days after Shock and Awe and the fall of Baghdad, I took the road to Tikrit for Asia Times to survey Uday Hussein's bombed palace as well as his father's birthplace, only to return 14 years later to one of those palaces turned into a house of horror.

The Speicher killing field was gruesomely staged - and filmed - by Daesh only a few days after the fall of Mosul. Daesh's Salafi-jihadi goons were feted as "liberators" by many a Sunni tribe around Trikrit just as 10,000 Iraqi Army recruits from different provinces, mostly Shi'ites, were being trained at an Air Force academy nearby.
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