This Country is on a Verge of a Recession

/0 Comments/in , /by

Statistics Canada revealed on July 31 that the Canadian economy shrank by 0.2% on an annualized basis in May, perhaps pushing the country over the edge into recessionary territory for the first half of 2015 . . .

The poor showing surprised economists, who predicted GDP to remain flat, but [instead it contracted] in the first quarter at an annual rate of 0.6%. Canada’s economy may or may not have technically dipped into recession this year — defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth — but it is surely facing some serious headwinds.

Attempts to rebound: Canada’s central bank slashed interest rates in July to 0.50%, the second cut this year, but that may not be enough to goose the economy. With rates already so low, there comes a point when interest rate cuts have diminishing returns. Consumer confidence in Canada is at a two-year low.

There are other fault lines in the Canadian economy. Fears over a housing bubble in key metro areas such as Toronto and Vancouver are rising.

“In light of its hotter price performance over the past three to five years and greater supply risk, this vulnerability appears to be comparatively high in the Toronto market,” the deputy chief economist of TD Bank wrote in a new report. (Read more from “This Country Is on a Verge of a Recession” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Fifth Undercover Planned Parenthood Video Released: ‘This Patient Was Like 18 Weeks’

/2 Comments/in , /by

A pro-life, medical ethics group has released the fifth video in its ongoing undercover series that allegedly shows Planned Parenthood doctors and staffers discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts.

The latest footage, which was captured on April 9, 2015, features Melissa Farrell, director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Houston, Texas, who proclaims that her organization has been “doing research for many, many years.”

Farrell also allegedly tells two actors posing as tissue buyers that Planned Parenthood can “get creative about when and where, and under what conditions can we interject something that is specific to the tissue procurement needs.”

At one point, the buyers speak with her about “financial gain” over a meal, and at another point they are seen with medical staff observing fetal remains in a pathology lab — an incredibly graphic scene that is reminiscent of what unfolded at a different clinic in the fourth video.

“This patient was at, like, 18 weeks, I think,” one medical staffer says, while sifting through fetal remains. (Read more from “Fifth Undercover Planned Parenthood Video Released: ‘This Patient Was Like 18 Weeks'” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Two Illegal Aliens Appointed to California City Commission

/2 Comments/in , /by

By CBS Los Angeles. Huntington Park is making history and not everyone is happy about it.

Councilman Jhonny Pineda announced at Monday night’s city council meeting the appointment of two undocumented immigrants as commissioners, CBS2/KCAL9’s Kara Finnstrom reports.

“You are out of order!” one woman in the crowd yelled at the councilmembers during the meeting.

Some critics say Pineda, who joined the council in March, specifically picked Medina and Zatarain because they worked on his campaign. Others say they don’t believe undocumented immigrants should serve the government this way.

“We’re sending the wrong message: you can be illegal and you can come and work for the city,” a woman told Finnstrom. (Read more from “Two Illegal Aliens Appointed to California City Commission” HERE)


____________________________________________________

Illegal Aliens Named to Huntington Park Commissions

By Tracy Bloom and Eric Spillman. Julian Zatarain, 21, won an appointment to the parks and recreation commission, while Francisco Medina, 29, was appointed to the health and education commission by Huntington Park Councilman Jhonny Pineda.

“I am proud to appoint both Julian and Francisco to the Parks and Recreation Commission and Health and Education Commission, respectively,“ Pineda said in a news release announcing the appointments. “Huntington Park is a city of opportunity and a city of hope for all individuals regardless of socioeconomic status, race, creed, or in this case, citizenship. Both these gentlemen have accomplished a great deal for the city.”

The two Huntington Park residents did not meet the requirements set forth in President Barack Obama’s Executive Order of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, according to Pineda. . .

Zatarain arrived in the U.S. in September of 2007, and initially lived in South Los Angeles before his family moved to Huntington Park. He . . . graduated from California State University at Dominguez Hill, has worked in the public sector and dedicated himself to improving lives of those who have been the “most marginalized,” the release stated. He interned in the office of then-Assemblyman Gil Cedillo and has also organized free immigration forums to help working class communities. . .

[Huntington Park Mayor Karina Macias said,] “Our population includes documented and undocumented immigrants, and I wanted to make sure everyone could participate,” Macias told the Times. “If we’re going to talk about transparency, being open and having a community that’s involved, then the conversation also has to include undocumented immigrants. I’m hoping other cities are looking at what we’re doing here.” (Read more from this story HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

More Than Two-Thirds of Obamacare Enrollees Unsatisfied With Coverage

/10 Comments/in , /by

Obamacare has offered insurance to millions of people, but they’re unhappy with the coverage they’re getting and are particularly upset about the costs, according to a survey released Monday that suggests the health care law continues to struggle to win over Americans.

Just 30 percent of customers on Obamacare’s exchanges were satisfied with their coverage, the health care research arm of the Deloitte consulting firm said.

Only a quarter of Obamacare customers in the survey were confident that they could get care when they needed it, and just 16 percent felt “financially prepared” to handle future health care costs, Deloitte said.

“Those are not high numbers,” said Paul Lambdin, a director for Deloitte’s work on insurance exchanges and retail practices.

Analysts said it is hard to tell at this point whether dissatisfaction is the inevitable byproduct of a new customer base or whether the law itself has structural problems. (Read more from “More Than Two-Thirds of Obamacare Enrollees Unsatisfied With Coverage” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

“SHAMEFUL”: Obama Administration Deliberately Covered-Up Human Trafficking in Muslim, Communist Countries

/3 Comments/in , /by

Several U.S. politicians sharply criticized the Obama administration on Monday over an annual global report on human trafficking in response to a Reuters article chronicling how senior U.S. diplomats had watered down rankings of more than a dozen strategically important countries.

Democratic Senator Bob Menendez called the account “alarming & unacceptable if true”, tweeting that “we must get to the bottom of this” at a Senate hearing set for Thursday to review the 2015 Trafficking in Persons report.

A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen people in Washington and foreign capitals, showed that the State Department office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 countries in this year’s report.

Among the countries that received higher rankings than recommended by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons were Malaysia, Cuba, China, India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, the sources said.

“It’s shameful that President Obama allowed a bunch of political hacks to alter the administration’s human trafficking report to the benefit of perennial violators like Cuba and Malaysia,” said U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, who is also a Republican presidential candidate. (Read more from “Obama Administration Faces Criticism Over Human Trafficking Report” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

HuffPost Arabic’s Muslim Brotherhood Connections

/1 Comment/in , /by

“Don’t be shocked if you expect one thing and find something entirely different,” writes Anas Fouda, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post’s brand new Arabic-language edition, HuffPost Arabi, in his inaugural editorial.

The warning is apt, for presumably few readers indeed will have expected the liberal American media juggernaut to launch a venture headed by two prominent figures of the Middle East’s religious right.

Fouda, previously an executive producer at Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA), is managing the website in partnership with his old boss, former AJA director general Wadah Khanfar. Their profiles may make for interesting perusal for existing Huffington Post readers unfamiliar with the Arabic-language media landscape.

An Egyptian national now living in Turkey, Fouda was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in 2013 on suspicion of affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) – an affiliation which he freely admitted had existed since 1988, though he claimed to have held no formal party role since 1995. A browse of his Twitter timeline shows his politics to be fairly bread-and-butter MB; recommending, for instance, articles praising “His Eminence” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Holocaust-revisionist cleric who routinely denounces Shiite and Alawite Muslims, to say nothing of Jews. Indeed, Fouda has himself on occasion found less-than-obliging things to say about his Semitic cousins, e.g., tweeting last July that, “Only after the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza did I realize the number of Egyptian Jews has increased greatly since the coup.”

Khanfar, however, is the heavyweight of the pair; the man who made Al Jazeera the titan of Arabic media that it is today. He’s also, according to ex-colleagues, the man who made Al Jazeera the Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece that it is today. A former Baghdad correspondent complained that once Khanfar took over the reins, “the liberals, the secular types, the Arab nationalists [were] getting downsized, and the Islamic position [was] dominating the newsroom.” Former AJA Washington bureau chief Hafez al-Mirazi similarly said that “From the first day of the Wadah Khanfar era, there was a dramatic change, especially because of him selecting assistants who are hard-line Islamists.” Khanfar has defended his Brotherhoodisation of the editorial line as simply a reflection of a new “political reality” in the Arab world – never mind any Arabs who may seek to challenge that reality. (Read more from “HuffPost Arabic’s Muslim Brotherhood Connections” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Donald Trump: I Pay as Little as Possible Because I Hate the Way Our Government Spends Our Taxes

/5 Comments/in , /by

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he tries to pay as little taxes as possible, not just because he’s a businessman, but because he doesn’t like what the U.S. does with the taxpayers’ money.

“I have said this many times, so it is not exactly breaking news. I pay as little as possible. I fight like hell to pay as little as possible, for two reasons. Number one, I am a businessman, and that’s the way you are supposed to do it, and you put the money back in your company and employees and all of that, but the other reason is that I hate the way our government spends our taxes,” said Trump when asked what percentage of income he pays in taxes.

“I hate the way they waste our money, trillions and trillions of dollars of waste and abuse, and I hate it,” said Trump.

According to Trump’s campaign, his personal fortune is set at $10 billion, and his annual income is estimated to be $362 million.

“I will be probably the first candidate in the history of politics within this country to say, I try and — like every — by the way, like every single taxpayer out there, I try to pay as little tax as possible, and, again, one of the big reasons is, I hate what our country does with the money that we pay,” he added. (Read more from “Donald Trump: I Pay as Little as Possible Because ‘I Hate the Way Our Government Spends Our Taxes” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Transgender Teen, 18, Undergoes Rare Surgery so She Can Be a ‘Dad’ One Day

/4 Comments/in , /by

[Editor’s note: the below excerpt from Yahoo.com is provided to inform. As with other stories regarding the “transgendered,” the pronouns used below are the author’s choice, not ours] When 18-year-old Cole Carman made the decision to transition from female to male late last year, the San Francisco-area teen knew that she would be in for major surgery and hormone therapy.

That didn’t stop Carman, a recent high school grad set to start college in the fall, from signing on for another potentially risky medical procedure: egg retrieval. It’s a fairly routine (yet still major) surgery, typically undertaken by egg donors and some women undergoing in-vitro fertilization.

But Carman may be the first transgender teen to have her eggs successfully harvested before transitioning — preserving his ability to have children that he’ll be biologically related to, whether he chooses to carry a child himself or turn to a surrogate. “I’ve always known I wanted to have kids of my own, so when my endocrinologist talked to me about it, it was a no-brainer,” Carman told Yahoo Parenting.

The surgery, which was done at the end of May, wasn’t so simple. It required 10 days of hormone shots, and it left her dealing with side effects like bloating and cramping. During the procedure, a doctor used a needle to harvest as many egg follicles as possible, freezing them so they can be thawed and fertilized at some point in the future.

What makes Carman’s situation so groundbreaking is that up until recently, doctors didn’t routinely talk about fertility preservation to transgender teens or adults who were planning to transition. (Read more from “Transgender Teen, 18, Undergoes Rare Surgery so She Can Be a ‘Dad’ One Day” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

‘Gene Drive’: Scientists Sound Alarm Over Supercharged GM Organisms Which Could Spread in the Wild and Cause Environmental Disasters

/3 Comments/in , /by

A powerful new technique for generating “supercharged” genetically modified organisms that can spread rapidly in the wild has caused alarm among scientists who fear that it may be misused, accidentally or deliberately, and cause a health emergency or environmental disaster.

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.

However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.

“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

A group of senior geneticists have called for international safeguards to apply to researchers who want to develop gene drives, with strict security measures placed on laboratories to prevent the accidental escape of “supercharged” GM organisms that are able to spread rapidly in the wild. (Read more from “‘Gene Drive’: Scientists Sound Alarm Over Supercharged GM Organisms Which Could Spread in the Wild and Cause Environmental Disasters” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Directive Urges English Teachers to Push Students to Question Their Gender

/7 Comments/in , /by

The National Council of Teachers of English believes teachers should work to promote “gender nonconforming” people and their issues in public school lesson plans.

A NCTE resolution passed in 2007 urges more teachers and teacher training programs to focus on LGBT issues, and to “publish guidelines and instructional materials and offer professional development opportunities designed to assist teachers in their teaching of LGBT issues,” according to the NCTE site.

To that end, NCTE recently posted a new “Diverse Gender Expression and Gender Non-Conforming Curriculum in English Grades 7-12” to promote an “equitable focus on issues honoring a range of diverse expressions related to gender and gender non-conformity.”

The goal of the guide is apparently to convince students to view the world through the eyes of someone who’s not sexually normal. Reading literature to students with gay or gender nonconforming characters isn’t enough, according to a NCTE blog.

The blog cited an English Journal article that alleges “heterosexism and homophobia are already part of the classroom, so we’ll need to use a variety of strategies to counter these beliefs as we introduce LGBTQ texts.” (Read more from “Directive Urges English Teachers to Push Students to Question Their Gender” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.