Jack Hills`s Blog

This is some I, Tonya drama right here!

The International Skating Union has determined there was “no evidence” that American figure skater Mariah Bell had deliberately kicked South Korean competitor Lim Eun-Soo during warm-ups at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships.

On Wednesday, the 22-year-old allegedly cut the calf of the 16-year-old with the blade of her skate while the two were preparing for the women’s short program in Saitama, Japan — a move that some thought might have been intentional.

All That Sports, the company that reps the Korean skater, told press that it asked the Korean Skating Union to lodge a formal complaint on Lim’s behalf with the ISU, along with a request for an investigation.

After reviewing the incident, however, both the Korean Skating Union and the ISU concur that no foul play was detected… at least not from what they saw in the video footage. Noting that Lim’s parents also brought up the incident, the KSU said in a statement:

“At this stage, we can’t conclude Bell caused the injury on purpose. It is hard to tell just by watching the video footage of the incident.”

The ISU agreed, telling press:

“The incident was verbally reported to the ISU by the Korean Team Leader; however, no formal complaint has been received. Based on the evidence at hand at this point in time, which includes a video, there is no evidence that Ms. Bell intended any harm to Ms. Lim. The ISU met with delegates from both [the] USA and Korea and urged both parties to find an amicable solution. The ISU maintains this remains the appropriate approach… We believe this is not a minor situation that can happen in an official rehearsal.”

But All That Sports believes otherwise.

The agency said it believed the slash was intentional because Bell collided with Lim, who was competing in her first senior worlds, from behind when she was skating close to the wall of the rink, away from the rest of the skaters, claiming:

“Lim was slowly skating on the edge of the rink after completing her turn. Mariah Bell, who was scheduled to rehearse after Lim, suddenly kicked and stabbed Lim’s calf with her skate blades. Mariah Bell didn’t apologize to Lim Eun-Soo after the incident and instead continued to rehearse for her routine.”

It appears the two have somewhat of a competitive relationship with each other. Both women train under Rafael Arutuian in Los Angeles, and, the agency alleges, Bell had been “bullying Lim for months.”

Intentional or not, Lim didn’t let the injury affect her performance. She was treated and competed in the event, going on to score a personal best of 72.91 points and placing fifth. Bell, meanwhile, scored 71.26 points and placed sixth.

You can see the bandage on Lim’s lower left calf in the video of her near-flawless performance (below):

When they go low… show them the f**k up on the rink!

[Image via ISU/Instagram]

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

The polar vortex has kept Lake Michigan frozen for the most part of winter. For example, in Chicago, Illinois, temperatures reached -30C (-23F) during the peak of the cold, causing ice shelves to form on the lake – hills formed from waves crashing over existing ice piles. But everything eventually comes to an end. Spring is bringing warmer weather to the area, destroying the ice and transforming the region into a magical wonderland.

Moving water underneath the ice is pushing the sheets to the surface, shattering them into mesmerizing patterns, visible along South Haven’s pier. But as much as people want to capture this beautiful phenomenon in photos, the US Coast Guard has warned that the ice should only be viewed from afar, as it is dangerous to stand or walk on the unstable surface. “No ice is safe ice especially this time of year,” US Coast Guard BMC Grant Heffner told MLive. “The ice is certainly deteriorating and breaking up.”

This isn’t the first time when Mother Nature is toying with Lake Michigan. Photographers have been following the site for years.

Image credits: Gunner’s Pixs

Image credits: Greg VandeLeest

Image credits: Gunner’s Pixs

Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America and the only one located entirely within the United States. The other four Great Lakes are shared by the U.S. and Canada. It is the second-biggest of the Great Lakes by volume (1,180 cu mi or 4,900 km3) and the third-largest by surface area (22,404 sq mi or 58,030 km2), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron.

Image credits: Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar

Image credits: Konstantin Papushin

Some of the earliest people that lived in the region were the Hopewell Indians. Their culture declined after 800 AD, and for the next few hundred years, the area was the home of peoples known as the Late Woodland Indians. Now, about twelve million people live along Lake Michigan’s shores, mainly in the Chicago and Milwaukee metropolitan areas.

Image credits: Gunner’s Pixs

Image credits: Kate Ter Haar

People were mesmerized by the beautiful sight

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Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

We already know that crossing America from one coast to another is not an expensive prospect, especially if you snatch a deal like this traveler who showed how you can do it for less than $200. However, while you could see quite a lot of scenic routes while on a train, the suggested path doesn’t exactly show off everything that the USA has to offer. And there are plenty of things each of the 50 states has to offer. From stunning valleys to canyons to lakes, there are plenty of places worth visiting in each state, and here are 50 most scenic locations for each of them. While not many could argue that the choices aren’t beautiful, the final judgement is, of course, subjective. So if you think that there are more stunning places a state could offer, suggest your pic in the comments! Oh, and don’t forget to vote for your favorites!

#1 Ladew Topiary Gardens, Maryland

Located in Monkton, Maryland, Ladew Topiary Gardens are a 22 acre (8.9 ha) nonprofit gardens that feature many creative topiary. The gardens were established in the 30s by Harvey S. Ladew, who enjoyed fox hunting. Thus, many topiaries depict a fox hunt with horses, riders, dogs, as well as a selection of other animals. The gardens are open from April to October.

#2 Old Man’s Cave, Ohio

Old Man’s Cave is located in Hocking Hills State Park, in the Hocking Hills region of Hocking County, Ohio. It’s one of the most scenic hiking trails in the park and features 5 main areas: Upper Falls, Upper Gorge, Middle Falls, Lower Falls and Lower Gorge. Scattered across the trail are gorge and waterfalls that offer a unique look at the earth’s subsurface.

#3 Sand Harbor Island, Lake Tahoe, Nevada

Sand Harbor Island in Lake Tahoe–Nevada State Park shows some of the key elements of Lake Tahoe’s scenery. The different hues of lake water, the rocks scattered throughout the shore and the greenery that frames everything into one breathtaking picture.

#4 Angel Oak, South Carolina

This spectacular tree is located on Johns Island near Charleston, South Carolina. Angel Oak is around  66.5 ft (20 m) tall, measures 28 ft (8.5 m) in circumference and produces shade that is about 17,200 square feet (1,600 m2) wide. The Southern live oak  is estimated to be 400-500 years old. Don’t forget to grab a picnic basket or a book and enjoy a peaceful afternoon by the tree!

#5 Glacier National Park, Montana

Located on the Canada–United States border, Glacier National Park covers a stunning area of 1,013,322 acres (4,100.77 km2). The park includes parts of two mountain ranges, over 130 named lakes, more than 1,000 different species of plants, and hundreds of species of animals. It’s no wonder that about 3 million people visit the site annually.

#6 Grand Prismatic Spring, Wyoming

Located in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, Grand Prismatic Spring is a 160 feet (50 m) deep hot spring, the largest in the United States (as well as 3rd largest in the world!). Its name is the perfect description for the spring, since its coloring of red, orange, yellow, green, and blue look just like the rainbow dispersion of white light by an optical prism. With a stunning blue water in the center, the edges shift colors from red to green thanks to microbial mats around the edges. The spring is around 160 °F (70 °C) hot.

#7 Horseshoe Bend, Arizona

As its name suggests, this incised meander in Arizona is shaped like a horseshoe and is located 5 miles (8.0 km) downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. The glimmering waters of the Colorado River make for a stunning landmark from the overlook 1,000-foot (300 m) above.The Horseshoe Bend is part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area that includes Rainbow Bridge National Monument, Reflection Canyon and more, which make it a perfect destination to see in Arizona.

#8 Lake Mohonk, New York

Even if New York has such landmarks like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building to offer, there are some hidden gems hidden away from the Big Apple. Lake Mohonk is one of them. While it’s relatively small (one-half mile (800 m) long and 60 feet (18 m) deep), the lake is framed by an endless sea of greenery, making its shoreline an Instagram user’s dream.

#9 Glacier Bay National Park And Preserve, Alaska

Located in in Southeast Alaska west of Juneau, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is a 3,223,384 acres (13,044.57 km2) land with 1,045 tidewater and terrestrial glaciers that makes for one sublime view. The stunning white glaciers contrast with the blue waters of Glacier Bay and the Pacific ocean and the sky, creating a natural “crack” in between that is perfect for holiday pictures.

#10 Yosemite Valley, California

Californians’ favorite hiking spot, Yosemite National Park covers 748,436 acres (3,028.81 km2) and features breathtaking granite cliffs, waterfalls, clear streams, giant sequoia groves, lakes and mountains that all add up to form one unforgettable sight. Yosemite Valley is a a glacial valley that is around 7.5 miles (12 km) long and approximately 3000–3500 feet deep. It is surrounded by high granite summits like Half Dome and framed by a dense blanket of pines. Another feature of an already beautiful picture is the amount of waterfalls in the valley, like Yosemite Falls that are 2,425 feet (739 m) high.

#11 Monument Rocks, Kansas

The first landmark chosen by the US Department of the Interior as a National Natural Landmark, Monument Rocks are also known as Chalk Pyramids and reach up to 70 ft (21 m). Experts estimate that the chalk formations have been formed 80 million years ago. They were also named as one of 8 Wonders of Kansas in 2008.

#12 New River Gorge Bridge, West Virginia

This stunning 3,030 ft (924 m) long and 69.3 ft (21.1 m) wide structure that stands 876 feet (267 m) above the New River is the New River Gorge Bridge. Located in Fayette County, West Virginia, this bridge was built in the 70s and cost $37 million to construct. The bridge is not only a picturesque sight itself, but it also allows to take in the sublime panorama of the New River Gorge.

#13 Skagit Valley, Washington

Probably the best time to visit this valley is in April, as the annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is hosted during that time. Red, orange, yellow, pink, red and many more flowers paint the valley in most vibrant shades, creating the perfect opportunity not only to enjoy the smell and sight of this beauty, but to snap a memorable picture as well. The festival claims that beautiful tulips draw over a million visitors every year and we’re not surprised as the visual is simply stunning!

#14 Thor’s Well At Cape Perpetua, Oregon

Best seen approximately an hour before high tide to an hour after high tide, Thor’s Well is a sinkhole in a rock located in Cape Perpetua, Oregon. The coastal area of Cape Perpetua is pretty breathtaking on its own, however, Thor’s Well is a sight everyone should consider when visiting this state. As spectacular as it is a high tide, the hole is actually pretty dangerous considering the merciless waters around, despite being only about 20 feet (6 m) deep.

#15 Nā Pali Coast State Park, Hawaii

Covering 6,175 acres (2,499 ha), the Nā Pali Coast State Park is located on the northwest side of Kauaʻi, the oldest inhabited Hawaiian island. Although it’s not possible to reach it by car, one can experience the beauty of this state park by following hiking trails, taking a helicopter ride or simply kayaking to it from the ocean side. And while it seems like a lot of effort, it’s definitely worth the trouble as the view from The na pali cliffs that reach as far as 4,000 feet (1,200 m) offer a sublime view of the coastline and the Pacific ocean.

#16 White Sands National Monument, New Mexico

Perhaps one of the most unique places on this list, White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, showcases the vast white dunes that look extraordinary when vaulted by a blue sky. The sand dunes are composed of of gypsum crystals, giving it a unique pale color. It’s small wonder that many films like Transformers (2007) were filmed on this site.

#17 Apostle Islands Caves, Wisconsin

Although not always open, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore has plenty of excellent sights to offer. Located in Lake Superior, off the Bayfield Peninsula in northern Wisconsin, 22 Apostle Islands are quite stunning on their own with many caves etched in stone. However, if temperatures in winter fall low enough, the many holes and caverns turn into breathtaking ice caves that look like they’re straight out of a fairy tale.

#18 Pikes Peak State Park, Iowa

The 960 acre (390 ha) state park in Iowa, Pikes Peak State Park features impressive sights overlooking the Upper Mississippi River. The park gets its name from Pikes Peak which is a particularly high point overlooking the gorge of the Upper Mississippi, and like Pikes Peak in Colorado, is named for explorer Zebulon Pike.

#19 Acadia National Park, Maine

Located southwest of Bar Harbor, Maine, Acadia National Park is 49,075 acres (198.60 km2) large and features Mount Desert Island and many smaller islands. The land is not only impressive to look at, it is also rich in history as Native Americans have inhabited the area called Acadia for at least 12,000 years. Bass Harbor Head Light is one of the attractions in the park, framed by the sea, forest and rock.

#20 Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Michigan

On the shore of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan lies Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, covering 73,236 acres (296.38 km2) and attracting about half a million visitors annually. This National Lakeshore is one of the many places perfect for photos, as the region features stunning rock formations, waterfalls, and sand dunes.

#21 Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania

The water gap called Delaware Water Gap is situated on the state border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the Delaware River cuts through a large ridge of the Appalachian Mountains. With the contrasting heights of the mountains, the gap makes for a scenic view as well as offers many activities like canoeing, swimming, fishing, hiking, and rock climbing.

#22 Tallulah Gorge State Park, Georgia

A 2,689-acre (1,088 ha) Georgia state park adjacent to Tallulah Falls, this State Park surrounds Tallulah Gorge, a 1,000-foot (300 m) deep gorge formed by the action of the river. The greatest attractions in the park are the six waterfalls known as the Tallulah Falls, which cause the river to drop 500 feet over one mile (150 m over 1.6 km).

#23 Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Idaho

At the heart of Idaho lies the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, a 730,864 acre (295,770 ha) National Recreation Area featuring such stunning sights like Stanley Lake and McGown Peak. The peak is 9,860 feet (3,010 m) above sea level and creates a memorable view when paired with the clear waters of the lake, a perfect place to take in just how sublime nature is.

#24 Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky

Mammoth Cave National Park covers an area of 52,830 acres (213.8 km2) and features portions of Mammoth Cave which is the longest cave system known in the world. The cave was discovered in 1791 and is 651.8 km (405.0 mi) long. Besides the impressive cave, the park has some other lovely sights to offer, like the Green River.

#25 Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia

Spanning across  29 Virginia and North Carolina counties, Blue Ridge Parkway is 469 miles (755 km) long and offers some truly spectacular views. With valleys and mountains scattered across the parkway, some of the highlights include Roanoke Mountain and the Peaks of Otter.

#26 Pikes Peak, Colorado

The highest summit of the southern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Pikes Peak is 14,115 feet (4,302 m) high, higher than any point in the United States east of its longitude. The peak is named after Zebulon Pike, an American brigadier general and explorer, who tried to reach the summit on 2 expeditions, but was ultimately unable to do so.

#27 Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois

While Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is now a historic park, years ago it was a large pre-Columbian Native American city (circa 1050–1350 CE). The site covers 2,200 acres (8.9 km2) and includes around 120 manmade earthen mounds in a wide range of sizes. At some point in history it was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture. In 1982 it was named as one of only 23 UNESCO World Heritage Sites within the United States.

#28 Brown County State Park, Indiana

A perfect location to take a hike, Brown County State Park covers 15,776 acres (63.84 km2) making it the largest of 24 state parks in Indiana. The wide variety of of trees on the scenic hills of southern Indiana make an excellent photo opportunity for those seeking mosaic shots, as the area is colored in patches of green, yellow and red in autumn. Of course, if you don’t like the fall chill and have no allergies to worry about, the park is also beautiful in spring, when many blossoms appear on trees in springtime.

#29 Everglades National Park, Florida

The largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, Everglades covers a vast area of 1,508,976 acres (6,106.61 km2). It’s an important natural habitat to some unique species like the manatee, American crocodile, and Florida panther. The Everglades & Dry Tortugas Biosphere Reserve was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1979 by UNESCO.

#30 Franconia Notch State Park, New Hampshire

Although the park’s ‘star’ Old Man of the Mountain (a series of five granite cliff ledges that appeared to be the jagged profile of a face) collapsed in 2003, Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire still has a lot to offer. From mesmerizing Flume Gorge to striking Cannon Mountain, the park is an excellent place for hikes and, of course, snapping gorgeous pictures for your album!

#31 Outer Banks, North Carolina

A string of barrier islands and spits off the coast of North Carolina and southeastern Virginia that stretches for 200-mile-long (320 km) known as Outer Banks is one of the best travel destinations for those who love seaside and want to see something unique. As the area is vast, there are plenty of things to see and activities to choose from. From watching a one-of-a-kind sunset at Jockey’s Ridge to climbing the tallest brick lighthouse in America at Cape Hatteras, Outer Banks will have a perfect answer to any wish.

#32 Turner Falls, Oklahoma

Considered to be Oklahoma’s tallest waterfall, Turner Falls is 77 feet (23 m) tall. A perfect tourist destination during summer, Turner Falls cascade into a natural swimming pool where people visiting the site can swim and relax.

#33 Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee

#34 Zion National Park, Utah

146,597 acres (593.26 km2) of Zion National Park has a lot to offer to any visitor. Like 15 miles (24 km) long and up to 2,640 ft (800 m) deep Zion Canyon that you could observe from Angels Landing. Or the Virgin River, that offers a beautiful path for hikes. It seems like you could find almost everything in this park, starting with mountains, canyons, buttes, mesas, monoliths, and ending with rivers, slot canyons, and natural arches. It is small wonder that this site attracted over 4 million visitors in 2018 alone.

#35 Cape May, New Jersey

#36 Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota

#37 Badlands National Park, South Dakota

#38 Big Bend National Park, Texas

#39 Lake Willoughby, Vermont

#40 Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware

Cape Henlopen State Park in Delaware covers 5,193 acres (2,102 ha) and faces Delaware Bay, forming an impressive sight for everyone fond of the seaside. It’s a great spot for camping, although not areas are always open. Areas that are open during the day offer plenty activities for the visitors, including an area for surf-fishing, bicycle lanes, and a World War II-era watchtower.

#41 The Berkshires, Massachusetts

The Berkshires have many names, including Berkshire Hills, Berkshire Mountains, and Berkshire Plateau, with the highest point reaching 2,841 ft (866 m) at Crum Hill. The region was named among the 200 Last Great Places by The Nature Conservancy. There are plenty of trails for those fond of hiking, as well as the Berkshire Botanical Garden if you enjoy less natural formations. It’s also a perfect spot for those with a cultural taste as there are plenty museums, performing-arts institutions and festivals taking place in the Berkshires.

#42 Tettegouche State Park, Minnesota

#43 Beavertail Lighthouse, Rhode Island

Built in 1856, Beavertail Lighthouse is the premier lighthouse in Rhode Island. It marks the entrance to Narragansett Bay and is 64-foot (20 m) tall, offering a spectacular look to the ocean, as well as the shoreline.

#44 Scotts Bluff National Monument, Nebraska

Scotts Bluff National Monument in Nebraska covers 3,005 acres (12.16 km2) that are rich not only in scenic views, but in history as well. The National Monument features historic overland trail remnants, mixed-grass prairie, rugged badlands, towering bluffs and riparian area along the North Platte River, making it the perfect place to step into our ancestor’s shoes. Scotts Bluff was an important landmark for pioneers the Oregon Trail and many more. It was named after Hiram Scott, a clerk who died near the bluff in 1828.

#45 Gillette Castle State Park, Connecticut

#46 W

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

(CNN)May the luck o’ the Irish be with you on this St. Patrick’s Day! Hope you picked out some green — so the leprechauns haven’t been able to land a pinch. Here’s what else you need to know toStart Your Week Smart.

(You can also get “5 Things You Need to Know Today” delivered to your inbox daily. You give us five minutes, and we give you five things you must know for your weekday, plus a Sunday edition to get your week started smart. Sign up here.)

ALL WEEK

• The top US diplomat heads back to the Mideast. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo travels to Israel, Kuwait and Lebanon. The trip comes just weeks ahead of the Israeli elections that will determine the political fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Pompeo visited the region in January, with a focus on ISIS and Iran.  

On ‘GPS’: Pompeo’s message to Arab allies

SUNDAY

• It’s Selection Sunday! The top 68 teams in college basketball are revealed at 6 p.m. ET on CBS. NCAA tournament play begins Tuesday.

March Madness: The business behind the bracket

• Richard Nixon’s life and times. The CNN Original Series “Tricky Dick” features never-before-seen footage as it tracks the rise, fall, comeback and political destruction of the 37th President. It premieres at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Preview of ‘Tricky Dick’ series: Nixon and Trump had mutual admiration

MONDAY

• An ex-President welcomes new US citizens. George W. Bush and Laura Bush will be on hand when new Americans are sworn in in Dallas. Both will speak about “significant contributions of immigrants to our society and economy and the importance of border security” — hot-button subjects in Washington.

George W. Bush disturbed by immigration debate

TUESDAY

• The ex-cop accused of killing Antwon Rose II goes on trial. Authorities in Pittsburgh are on high alert as the trial is set to begin for Michael Rosfeld, who’s charged with homicide in last year’s fatal shooting of the 17-year-old. Rose was black and unarmed; Rosfeld is white. The killing sparked big protests at the time.

Trial set to begin for ex-officer who shot teen

• Brazil’s President visits the White House. Jair Bolsonaro, known for making racist, sexist and homophobic remarks, is President Donald Trump’s guest. The leaders both have taken hard lines on immigration and moved to reverse their nations’ climate change policies.

A look at Brazil’s President

WEDNESDAY

• Another week of Brexit woes. The deadline arrives for the UK Parliament to vote for a third time on Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for her nation to exit the European Union. If it passes, she’ll ask EU leaders on Thursday to delay the departure until June 30. If either request fails, Brexit will happen March 29, with or without a deal.

Here’s what you need to know about Brexit

• Welcome, spring! The vernal equinox begins when the sun is directly above the Earth’s equator and the length of day and night are equal. A supermoon also shines on that night.

Why we have daylight saving time

THURSDAY

• The Special Olympics World Games comes to an end. From badminton to volleyball, top athletes with intellectual disabilities have been going for gold in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It also happens to be World Down Syndrome Day.

Swimmer with Down syndrome defies the odds

FRIDAY

• R. Kelly legal drama continues in court. The singer, who’s accused of sexually abusing teens, is due back in court in Chicago. He also faces a legal battle over child support. Kelly has long denied allegations of abusing women and being sexually involved with underage girls. A recent docuseries put a fresh spotlight on the accusations.

R. Kelly’s publicist: The Gayle King interview helped

• Latin American leaders meet amid Venezuela crisis. Venezuela’s self-declared president, opposition leader Juan Guaido, is expected at the first summit of a group of Latin American leaders known as Prosur.

Guaido: Venezuela has collapsed after major blackouts

The South American county is in chaos as Guaido wrestles for control with President Nicolas Maduro, who’s overseen a period of hyperinflation and poverty.

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

Policy shifts such as more in-person interviews, stricter guidance on denying student visas, travel bans and lower refugee caps have reduced immigration

When Moshe Schulmans then fiancee visited the United States consulate in Casablanca, he believed that she would leave her interview for a K-1 visa with permission to return to New York and they could finally stop conducting their relationship long-distance.

Instead, she walked out with even more paperwork.

The supplementary form she was assigned DS-5535 is a brainchild of Donald Trumps administration. After an executive order and memorandum from the White House calling for enhanced vetting of foreign nationals, the state department also announced a three-page document for visa applicants whom consular officers believe could pose terrorist or national security threats.

That experience in finding sudden new barriers to legal immigration to the US is hardly unique. From more in-person interviews, to stricter guidance on denying student visas, to travel bans, to lower refugee caps, experts say recent policy shifts have impacted the number of foreign nationals who are coming to America. On top of that is recent news that the Trump administration wants to close all international offices of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, shifting the paperwork back to the US but almost certainly adding to delays for those seeking to come to America from abroad.

As more data from the last two years become available, the long-term effects of such actions are finally coming into focus.

During the first nine months of fiscal year 2018, immigration application denials increased by 37% since fiscal year 2016, according to the Cato Institutes immigration policy analyst David Bier. Reuters reported that more than 37,000 visa applications were refused in 2018 as a direct result of the administrations travel ban on primarily Muslim-majority countries.

K-1 visas for fiances of US citizens dropped 35.7% in fiscal year 2018, compared to 2016, and student visas declined by 23%, according to state department data.

The key is that this is no longer speculation. Were now seeing the consequences of the rhetoric and the policy, said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

Schulmans partner who asked to remain anonymous spent a year in the US for an internship and completed her masters degree in France. But her history in the west didnt prevent her from being flagged for additional vetting.

Schulman suspects his partners obviously Arabic name had something to do with why she was targeted.

To me, its Islamophobia. Its racist, in my opinion, Schulman told the Guardian.

A myriad of changes under the Trump administration have made it more difficult for people to enter and stay in the country through lawful means. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

An estimated 65,000 visa applicants annually now have to fill out DS-5535, which requires a 15-year travel log, social media handles, a list of prior addresses and a 15-year employment history, among other information. The document is just one of myriad changes under the current administration that have made it more difficult for people to enter and stay in the country through lawful means even as Trump says publicly that he wants foreigners in the US, but they have to come in legally.

Some students are now opting to study elsewhere, avoiding an immigration climate that feels unwelcoming and hostile to foreigners. Among those who still want an American education, certain populations appear to be especially at risk of scrutiny.

Masume Assaf, the director of international student and scholar advising at Penn State University, has noticed Chinese nationals are suddenly being funneled into administrative processing for further review. She has watched as Iranian students have been unable to visit Iran; one of her PhD candidates who went home for a brothers wedding was barred from re-entering the US for months.

But perhaps the most dramatic testament to the administrations perceived aversion to foreigners is the major drop in refugee resettlement. In fiscal year 2016, the US admitted nearly 85,000 refugees. Two years later, that number plummeted to 22,491.

Is it deliberate? I would say that theres nothing being done to facilitate more efficient processing, said Denise Bell, the researcher for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.

On a research mission to Lebanon and Jordan in November, Bell met refugees who had been stranded because of Trump-era policies. Among them were Fawzi, his wife and two sons, who fled Iraq for Lebanon in 2013 because they feared retaliation for being Christian.

In August 2016, Fawzi and his family say they received a letter with conditional approval to resettle in the US. The letter warned it would be a minimum of four months before they could get on a plane.

Four months, Fawzis family told the Guardian, and we are now in two years and [a] half.

Every time they ask officials about why they are stuck in Lebanon, they get the same answer: security procedure. Its a similar rationale that justifies the administrations extreme vetting protocols for visa applicants.

However, experts in immigration policy say theres no evidence many of the new vetting policies affecting foreign nationals work. Bier said the requirements have been devised primarily to obstruct legal immigration.

The ultimate goal is making it more difficult to live in the United States legally, Bier said.

Im not sure any if these steps actually improve our security, added Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. These are political moves by the administration to reduce immigration.

Noorani and Schulman expressed frustration that people who are trying to follow the law must now jump through cumbersome hoops as the administration cracks down on legal as well as undocumented immigration. But at least his partners visa was eventually approved.

She traveled to the US on 29 December, and they married at a court in Brooklyn four days later. Then they spent the next two and a half weeks poring over forms to continue her legalization process.

I think the average American doesnt know the time, the money and the energy it takes to actually do legal immigration, Schulman said. I think people dont give enough credit to the folks who are doing that.

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

The Council on Islamic-American Relations called on advertisers Monday to boycott Fox News until the network axes host Jeanine Pirro.

The call comes just days after Pirro’s Saturday night program, “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” was yanked by Fox after she said in the previous episode that the hijab worn by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) may be “antithetical to the Constitution.” In fact, the Constitution guarantees the right of free expression of religion.

It’s not clear what Pirro’s future is on the network. Fox has refused to comment on “internal scheduling matters,” though it earlier issued a statement “strongly” condemning Pirro’s statement.

CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy and civil rights group in America, is also calling for advertisers to demand that Fox drop Tucker Carlson in the wake of unearthed audiotapes of the news host making racist and sexist comments on a radio program. Some advertisers have already abandoned the program.

“Fox News must clearly state that Jeanine Pirro will not be allowed back on the air after her long history of Islamophobic hate rhetoric, and the network must also take similar action against other Islamophobic hosts like Tucker Carlson,” Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director, said in a statement provided to HuffPost. “All existing advertisers should drop their ads on Fox News to ensure that they are not associated with the promotion of hate.” 

At least four advertisers — Botox-maker Allergan, online marketplace Letgo, personal finance company NerdWallet and pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk — have all indicated they’re pulling their ads from Pirro’s program, according to The Hollywood Reporter. 

President Donald Trump on Sunday called on Fox to bring Pirro back on the air. 

Also Monday, the cable news network announced it had hired former Democrat National Committee chair and CNN contributor Donna Brazile as a Fox political commentator.

In an appearance on Dana Perino’s Fox News show Monday, Brazile said that she was joining the network as an opportunity to listen and reach out to the “Fox family” adding: “This is a critical period in our country. It’s a time for dialogue, it’s a time for civility. We’re not going to get ahead by yelling at each other and sending nasty tweets.”

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The worlds best gymnast on disgraced US team doctor Larry Nassar, her year out and Tokyo 2020

Simone Biles, four-times world champion, winner of three individual Olympic gold medals and arguably one of the greatest gymnasts of all time, is 4ft 8in, but this is not how she appears when in flight. In the hangar-like space of the World Champions Center, a gym complex in a suburb of Houston, Texas, she stands at the end of a padded runway. All morning, Biles has been hanging out with squad gymnasts, some as young as six, who are already training full-time at the facility and are so accustomed to seeing Biles, says her mother, they barely look twice. (Occasionally, says Biles, Well have a new kid come in and just stare. Other than that, its normal.) For her part, Biles trains with the offhand style of the preternaturally talented, that almost louche kind of grace you see in top tennis players knocking up or sprinters stretching before a race, and behind which lies extraordinary powers. And then she starts running.

Last year, Biles returned to gymnastics after 12 months off and she is still adjusting to the demands of her schedule. After the training session, we sit in the office that overlooks the vast floor of the gym, Biles with a tracksuit thrown over her leotard, and talk about what it is like to be 21 and at the top of her game, the pressures of being the best in the world and just how Biles knows where she is when shes airborne.

At times, she seems younger than her years, a product of the almost religiously sheltered upbringing of the professional child athlete. At others, she sounds like a 45-year-old woman who should be running for political office. Biles swept the board at the World Gymnastics Championships in Doha last October and has had two moves named after her (The Biles) one of which, on the vault, is described by the International Gymnastics Federation as a round off flic-flac with turn (180) on stretched salto fwd with 2/1 turn (720) off.

Yet her appeal beyond the world of gymnastics the reason I have heard so many women say, when her name comes up, Oh my God, shes amazing, is not just the physical and psychological courage necessary to excel at such a hard sport. What has become apparent, in the last year, is Biles moral courage. As an athlete, she is talked of in the same breath as Serena Williams, but the echo I find in her is of Muhammad Ali. In a sport whose governing body, USA Gymnastics, has been thoroughly disgraced by the conduct of its team doctor, Larry Nassar currently serving a life sentence for sexually abusing young gymnasts in his care, including Biles she will not bite her tongue. It really has to be something that sets me off, she says sheepishly, some way into our conversation. But once Im sure of something, Ill go ahead and say it.

Once you get to a high level, there are still 100 other elite athletes. Photograph: Dylan Coulter/The Guardian. Hair and makeup: @Gemini Tresses. Leotards by GK.

It is a reminder, watching the morning training session, that competitive gymnastics is a strange world in which to immerse young children. Female gymnasts are said to peak in performance at 16, the minimum age at which they can compete at senior level events, including the Olympics. Whereas male gymnasts bulk up with puberty and become stronger competitors, their female peers are generally considered more effective as children. You want to be light in the gym, you want to be petite, says Biles, who started relatively late, at the age of six. For females, once you go through puberty, you get a butt, you get boobs, and that makes it harder to do gymnastics because everything is going in different directions. She laughs. The sobering thing is that, while 16 is the official peak age, in reality many female gymnasts are considered to peak at 12.

This is borne out by the scene at the World Champions Center, which is owned by Biles parents, Nellie and Ron. At one end, toddlers play with their parents in a baby gym area, while at the other, a coach drills tiny girls, many of them already ranked nationally, at work on the asymmetric bars. The air smells like every gymnastics centre in the world of chalk dust and feet and there are huge photos of Biles on the walls. Good jig, but keep your head down, sweetie, yells the coach at a tiny under-10. Dont pull the head! Elbows! Curve up through the butt! What are you doing with your legs? Work the curve! Curve! More! More! More! The child dismounts, landing cleanly on her feet like a cat. Thats so bad, Sophie. Its not good at all. Your chest is like this the whole time.

I guess, I say to Biles later, the philosophy of prizes-for-all hasnt reached competitive gymnastics yet? No, she says, smiling. Biles was introduced to gymnastics by chance, as a rainy day activity for a hyperactive six-year-old. She had recently moved to a suburb of Houston from her native Ohio and been adopted by Nellie and Ron, whom she calls mom and dad though they are technically her maternal grandparents. (Biles birth mother, Shanon, with whom she has minimal contact, struggled with addiction and was unable to care for her or her siblings. Her biological father, Kelvin, has never been a part of her life.) In the first instance, it was just somewhere for her to climb safely, says Nellie, a nurse who ran a consortium of nursing homes and knew nothing, at that point, about gymnastics. (She and Ron went into the gymnastics business after Biles won her first World Championship title in 2013.)

I was just another little kid on the block who used to run and jump around, says Biles. Soon after joining the gym, a coach observed Biles do a seat drop a bounce from a sitting position back on to her feet, as if the floor were a trampoline, which six-year-olds shouldnt be able to do. Biles upper body strength was so unusual, meanwhile, that while other kids flailed a few feet off the floor, she shot up a rope to the ceiling until everyone yelled at her to come down.

I was just another little kid on the block who used to run and jump around. Photograph: Dylan Coulter/The Guardian

In spite of all this, there was no thunderclap moment. I was pretty young and I just knew that it was a lot of fun and I wanted to do it, says Biles. But it wasnt that feeling of oh-she-belongs-here. In fact it didnt occur to her that she might have talent until she was 16, by which time she had risen up through regional competitions to the US Junior National Team and finally to the senior competition. Almost immediately, she won the womens individual all-around event at the 2013 World Championships in Antwerp. But, I say with some incredulity, at 16 you were already operating at such a high level. Surely the realisation that you were good came earlier? But once you get to a high level, there are still 100 other elite athletes. I wouldnt say that Im lucky but, if you look at it, there are hundreds of thousands of gymnasts in the US, and only four will make a team. So its almost like playing the lottery. You just never know.

Like most professional athletes, she is incredibly hard on herself and competes less with others than with her own internal set of ideals. In the past, Biles mother has tried gently to persuade her that she is almost always the best gymnast in the room, but this is not how Biles sees it. (This is, of course, the inverse of what one tells less-sporty kids, that its about doing their best in relation to their own goals. Apparently this doesnt work with world champions.)

During those early years of competition, Biles, along with the rest of the womens national squad, trained with Mrta Krolyi, the then team coach and co-ordinator who ran training programmes at the Krolyi Ranch, a centre 50 miles north of Houston. At home, Biles coach, Aimee Boorman, had always emphasised the importance of having fun while competing; but this was not the approach of Krolyi, a Romanian-American known for her unforgiving attitude and the inculcation of what one Olympic gymnast, Madison Kocian, described in the wake of the Nassar revelations as a culture of fear, a culture of silence. In Courage to Soar, the memoir Biles published in 2016, she recalls Krolyi telling her not to cheer for her peers at competitions and frowning on anything during training laughter, for example that might imply she was enjoying herself. She also urged Biles to attempt an excruciatingly difficult move on the vault, the Amanar, which involves two-and-a-half twists off the table, for the first time during a competition. In both cases the demand not to laugh or cheer, and the request that Biles perform a move she felt was dangerous without adequate preparation she pushed back against Krolyi.

Simone Biles at the 2018 World Championships.

I started to realise that whenever I was having fun, I was performing better so why stand there with a blank face? says Biles. Some people prefer not to talk during a competition, but were old enough to know what each of us needs. After some resistance, Krolyi permitted Biles to emote as she wished.

As for the vault, I knew that I wasnt ready for it. You have to trust your body, your instincts. And you also have to protect yourself. If I could have done it and just fallen, then yes. But I would have done it and actually got hurt. So I was like, no, theres no way.

This was no small act of defiance for a teenage girl whose entire life was taken up by gymnastics. Biles attended an ordinary school until her early teens, when her training schedule became such that only homeschooling, on site at the gym, made sense. (Her short experience of high school was unhappy. Youre at that age where there are boys in the class and you go to dances and I was obviously like, her voice drops to a gutsy Mae West, the strongest kid in my entire school. So I hid my muscles because the guys would stare and be like, Oh my gosh, look at her muscles!)

Yet standing up to Krolyi wasnt purely a question of confidence, says Biles. It was more like protecting my body. This is about to end my career: why would I do this? Just go out there and kill yourself?

What are the potential injuries if that particular move goes wrong? ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] injury, MCL [medial collateral ligament or knee tissue] injury, basically anything. Who knows what I would have landed on? She giggles. I wasnt ready for it.

Im curious about what this did to her trust in Krolyi. She shrugs. Its just because it was in a competition. If it was somewhere else I would have done it. Didnt she resent being asked in the first place? There is a long pause. No, says Biles, and there it is the flash of what it takes to be the best in the world. I already knew the answer. I wasnt doing it.

In January 2018, shortly before Larry Nassar was sentenced, Biles tweeted a statement in which she reported that, along with more than 160 other women, she had been sexually assaulted by the former national team doctor. It is impossibly difficult to relive these experiences, she wrote, and it breaks my heart even more to think that, as I work towards my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have to continually return to the same training facility where I was abused. Later that month, partly in response to Biles criticism, USA Gymnastics announced that no further training would take place at the Krolyi Ranch.

Nassars crimes shocked, both in scale by some estimates, as many as 300 girls and young women were abused by him over a period of two decades and audacity. He abused girls under the auspices of treating them for injuries, sometimes with a parent in the room. After Nassar was sentenced, the then-CEO of USA Gymnastics, Steve Penny, was arrested for evidence tampering, and the organisation from which sponsors began to flee stood accused of negligence at best, complicity at worst, in the way it had handled years of allegations.

Last October, when the acting CEO of USA Gymnastics, Mary Bono, tweeted a picture in which she covered up a Nike logo in protest against Colin Kaepernicks Nike ad (the American football star had refused to stand for the national anthem in 2016) Biles pushed back. (Bono had previously worked for the law firm that represented USA Gymnastics, a firm that stands accused by some of Biles teammates of dragging its heels after the abuse was reported.)

*Mouth drop* tweeted Biles in response to Bonos tweet, followed by: Dont worry, its not like we needed a smarter usa gymnastics president or any sponsors or anything. After four days in the role, Mary Bono resigned.

For us, it was about helping the athletes, says Biles now. We needed someone who would stand up for them, and you have to put aside your opinions if youre going to come into an organisation thats already failing. She chose to put her own opinions and beliefs before getting to know the team and I think that hurt us. Because we needed a sponsor and then she tweets out the Nike thing, and its like, Well, thats one of our top sponsors. So that wasnt the smartest.

To many observers, USA Gymnastics still appears to be failing. The entire board resigned after Nassars conviction, but there has still been no definitive account of how early the organisation knew about concerns surrounding him, and why nothing was done. Does Biles think there is work to be done, in terms of a forensic investigation into the organisations response?

Barack Obama with Biles at the White House, during a ceremony to honour members of the US Olympic teams, 2016. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Well, I think so. But thats [on] the head of our organisation and we cant control that. Yes, we represent USA Gymnastics, but we can only do what weve been trained to do for so long. As athletes we are trying to be the best that we can, going out there and bringing back medals. Thats our job. The organisation has a different job.

What do you do with the anger over having been failed, to that degree, by this organisation one that owed you a duty of care?

Yes, but I Her eyes slide away. Biles bounced back so ferociously in competition last year, it is easy to forget how recent this all was. What can you do at this point? she says. Her mother Nellie, who has been sitting in, interrupts. I dont think that Simone analyses what goes on. And we dont, as a family.

They dont? No. We dont analyse what the organisation does. And we acknowledge that theyre working on getting it right.

I feel like weve acknowledged that they failed, says Simone, carefully. And then we do what we do.

There is little alternative if Biles is to hang on to her regard for gymnastics. I feel like, if I have kids, Ill probably enrol them, in spite of the horror stuff that happened to me. Because I know how much joy the sport has brought me.

Was she ever in danger of losing that of having gymnastics poisoned for her? I go to therapy to help with that because there were times when I didnt want to set foot in a gym. But am I going to let that keep me from my passion, and the goals that I still have? Its just another bump you have to get over.

Biles is strong and lucid as she talks about this, but her eyes are downcast and she directs her words to the floor.

Last year, Biles slammed her former teammate Gabby Douglas for urging women to minimise their risk of being sexually assaulted by dressing modestly. (Douglas later deleted the tweet.) I think the statistics are, one in three girls [experience sexual assault], says Biles. Thats just ridiculous. You teach girls to cover up, rather than guys to not touch girls? They blame it on clothes, what the girls wear, she asked for it. Sorry nobody asked for it. Its never a girls fault and I think thats the thing I had the hardest time understanding that it wasnt my fault.

I just have very good air awareness. Photograph: Dylan Coulter/The Guardian

In 2016, Biles won four gold medals at the Rio Olympics, three individual and one team, tying her with four other gymnasts for the Olympic record for most gold medals won by a female gymnast in a single games. In 2018, after winning another world championship, she became the most decorated US gymnast in history. But, she says, Even when I win, there are still times when Im upset. Like at Worlds, last year. It doesnt mean, because you win, youll be happy. Why? I fell twice. Yes, I still won. But I didnt put out my best performance.

The 2018 World Championships were Biles return to competition after a year out, which she took because, I was so physically exhausted that I needed the break. Mentally and physically I had earned it.

During the hiatus, she took advantage of all the opportunities shed had to turn down due to her training schedule. She took part in the television show Dancing With The Stars. She travelled extensively and collaborated on a book. She bought a house near her parents home in Houston. She didnt miss the gym, she says, but when she came back, although she was out of shape, it was an effortless re-entry. Everything came back pretty naturally because of muscle memory. After you do something for so long, its almost like riding a bike. Usually the only thing stopping you is fear.

There are things Biles does in the gym that shouldnt be physically possible. She stays in the air for what seems like minutes at a time. She flips and twists, yet somehow manages to land facing forward and knowing where she is. I just have very good air awareness, she says. You can train on the trampoline to know where you are [in space], but I feel like its just sort of instilled in me. Ive always been really good about knowing where I am and where my body is going.

More than winning the Olympics, her dream was always to win a scholarship to college, specifically the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and to compete on its gymnastics team. This sounds underwhelming for a record-breaking world champion, but after years of grinding competition on the international circuit, college gymnastics is, she says, where top-flight gymnasts go to kick back and enjoy themselves. She hopes that, after the 2020 Olympics, this may still be a possibility.

Does it give her vertigo to consider the fact that she is the best in the world? I still think, to this day, Im not the best in the country: Im the best in the entire world. And Im like, whoa. Its pretty ridiculous. She bursts out laughing. You cant think about it too much or youll hurt yourself. To resist the pressure, she reminds herself of something Mrtha Krolyi told her. She used to say, it doesnt matter where you are or how many people are watching, its still the same routine youre going to do. It helped me.

And she is learning to give herself a break? Gymnasts are taught to compartmentalise and deny their own needs. Emotions and hurting, youre just taught to deal with it. These days, Biles wonders if there might not be a better way to train. If Im not 100% in it, theres no point in me coming in and pretending. Because what I do is dangerous its high risk at this point. When youre younger, you dont have a choice: you go to the gym even if youre sick. But if Im feeling sick, why am I going to come in and torture myself?

Sometimes, during her midday break, she drives home for a nap before the afternoon session. She gives a huge yawn. Such a schedule might seem intolerable but, Weve trained our whole life to do this. This is our normal.

Earlier in the day, I watched as four men hefted a crash mat across the gym, a feat I had previously observed one of the tiny 10-year-old gymnasts, with Bilesian strength, achieve on her own. To one side, meanwhile, Biles was running the length of the runway. Pointing her toes, she sprang, rising to an elevation no human being should be capable of without a trampoline or jetpack. She flipped and twisted, and flipped and twisted again. Time slowed. In the air, she looked 10 feet tall.

Simone Biles headlines The Superstars Of Gymnastics at the O2 on 23 March

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George W. Bush on Monday praised the positive impact immigration has had on America as he described it as both “a blessing and a strength.”

The Republican former president also called on Washington to “dial down the rhetoric, put politics aside and modernize our immigration laws soon” during his address at a naturalization ceremony for dozens of new U.S. citizens at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

Bush acknowledged that his administration “came up short” with its unsuccessful attempt at comprehensive immigration reform.

Borders had to be respected, he explained, but so did the country’s history of welcoming immigrants as he struck a tone that was markedly different than the anti-immigrant stance often taken by President Donald Trump and members of the current administration.

America’s success was directly related to historically being “the most welcoming” when it came to immigration, Bush said. He noted how “so many of us can draw a line somewhere back to a man or woman who had the idea that life could be better, and that hope led them here.”

“A spirit of self-reliance runs deep in our immigrant heritage, along with the humility and kindness to look at someone less fortunate and see yourself,” he added.

And while “the great yearning of so many” to live in America posed difficult challenges to elected representatives, he said that “in meeting this responsibility, it helps to remember that America’s immigrant history made of us who we are.”

Check out the full speech here:

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In a more normal time, if a woman alleged the man who would become the U.S. president kissed her without consent, it might be a major national story meriting weeks of intense news coverage.

But the current president is Donald Trump, who has now been accused of sexual misconduct and harassment by more than twenty women, who was caught on tape boasting about groping, and who was elected to office anyway. So when Alva Johnson, a former Trump campaign staffer, revealed last month that Trump had forcibly kissed her prior to his election, her name was added to the long list, and the news cycle mostly moved on.

Other women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct and misbehavior are disappointed he has faced no repercussions, several told HuffPost. They feel as if many people simply don’t care. They also recognize there are so many accusations of wrongdoing by Trump at this point, it’s hard to keep track. But they support Johnson — and would still encourage other possible victims to come forward.

Rachel Crooks was not surprised to see Johnson’s claim because “we’ve seen this type of behavior from [Trump] over decades,” she told HuffPost in an email. She has alleged Trump forcibly kissed her without her consent more than ten years ago, when she was 22.

“I was also sad because we’ve let Alva Johnson down,” she added. “If our society would’ve held Trump accountable for his actions, she may not have had to endure this.”

Johnson claims in her lawsuit, filed last month against Trump in federal court, that in August of 2016 when she was working as a staffer for Trump’s campaign, he forcibly kissed her on the mouth. She tried to avoid the kiss by turning her head away, and the incident left her confused and humiliated. Johnson, who is black, also says she experienced race and gender discrimination and was underpaid compared to white and male employees. 

I was also sad because we’ve let Alva Johnson down. If our society would’ve held Trump accountable for his actions, she may not have had to endure this. Rachel Crooks, a woman who said Trump kissed her without consent

Less than two months after Trump allegedly kissed Johnson without consent, The Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape, where Trump bragged that he could grab women “by the pussy.” Many women subsequently went public about their own interactions with Trump. Johnson was horrified by the tape, according to her lawsuit, because the conduct Trump boasted of was so similar to what she had experienced. She quit his campaign shortly afterward, the lawsuit says.

“It seems right now we’re going backward,” Johnson told Teen Vogue in an interview published this month. “This wasn’t appropriate for a long time. Now the most powerful man in the world is making fun of people who are coming forward [about sexual abuse], calling them liars even though their stories are so consistent.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Johnson’s accusation “absurd on its face.” Trump has repeatedly denied allegations of sexual misconduct against him. “You are a disgusting human being,” he told a New York Times reporter who questioned him about some of the women’s claims. He dismissed his comments in the Access Hollywood tape as “locker-room banter.” He also in 2016 threatened to sue his accusers. That never happened.

It was only a matter of time before someone from Trump’s campaign or administration had a similar experience to what other women have been speaking about for years now, said Samantha Holvey, a former Miss North Carolina USA.

Holvey said that when she met Trump at an event prior to the Miss USA pageant in 2006, he eyed her like a “piece of meat.” She had “never felt so objectified and dirty,” she said. A few days later, she said, she was in her robe in the hair and makeup area, and he walked in, in a way that felt to her like he “wanted to exert his dominance and power.” (Trump has bragged about getting away with going backstage when contestants were getting dressed, though his campaign generally denied claims that he did so.) 

“He’s been sexually assaulting and harassing women for decades with no repercussions so why would he stop now?” Holvey told HuffPost in an email.

Although some women have accused Trump of behavior that fits the definition of groping, many of the reported incidents occurred a long time ago, and the statutes of limitations have expired. Johnson hopes to get justice, not just for herself, but all the victims, her attorney, Hassan Zavareei, told HuffPost a phone interview.  

He’s been sexually assaulting and harassing women for decades with no repercussions so why would he stop now? Samantha Holvey, a former Miss North Carolina USA

Most of her friends and family, even strangers on the street, have been encouraging to Johnson, Zavareei said. But “Trump’s behavior and bad actions have become so normalized, that it barely registers on the public consciousness,” he added.

Part of the reason Johnson wanted to come forward, he added, was to say, “it’s not normal, it’s not okay.” He raised the question of how the public might react if the accused were another president.

The living former president whose alleged conduct perhaps comes closest is Bill Clinton, who was repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct and whose affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky has drawn fresh scrutiny over the unequal power dynamics. In Clinton’s case, he denied the misconduct allegations, however, the Republican-led House of Representatives moved to impeach him.

The climate is different now. The #MeToo movement has ousted powerful men from their jobs and led to legal repercussions in some cases: Ex-film mogul Harvey Weinstein could face life in prison if convicted of sex offenses; Bill Cosby has already been convicted of aggravated indecent assault. Women who’ve accused Trump of sexual misconduct would also like to see him face consequences — but they aren’t optimistic.

“It would be nice to see something happen to him — it would be nice that he doesn’t get re-elected,” said Kristin Anderson, who claims Trump reached under her skirt and groped her at a nightclub in the early 1990s. The fact that he got elected the first time, despite the allegations against him, shows some people, “really don’t care about other people’s abuse. If it were them, they would care,” she told HuffPost in a phone interview.

She’d like to see, at a minimum, Trump apologize and change his ways, she said. But based on what Johnson says happened to her, it looks like “he’s still up to it,” she added.

The women HuffPost spoke with said they would still encourage women to come forward with their experiences.

“The more people who do it, the more it shows — it should at least — what kind of character he is,” said another woman who has publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct but asked not to be named because she fears the consequences for her family if she continues to speak out.

For women who speak out, “whether he’s held accountable or not, you’ve released it,” Anderson said, noting she feels that it’s women speaking up for themselves that’s the most important part. “It’s very healing, and that’s what counts.”

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Fired by the president, the former US attorney has written his first book. He talks about if and when Trump will face justice and why he fears for his own safety

Preet Bharara is used to dealing with bullies. When he was the US attorney for the southern district of New York, the premier law enforcement body in America, his office prosecuted Osama bin Ladens son-in-law, Crips and Bloods gang leaders and mafia bosses. For going after the infamous arms dealer Viktor Bout he was banned from Russia, and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan once tried to persuade the then US vice-president, Joe Biden, to sack him (he didnt). The TV series Billions is loosely based on his legal battles with a hedge-fund billionaire. As he puts it himself: Neither I nor anyone I know was too afraid to prosecute rich men in suits.

So when Bharara says that even he is now feeling apprehensive about his personal safety, and that his fears relate not to al-Qaida or the Gambino family, but to the president of the United States, it comes as a jolt. I used to have great confidence that my government would protect me, he says. You understood that if you were an American citizen like me, or resident like Jamal Khashoggi, you werent going to be rendered somewhere, you didnt think that if you travelled to Madrid, say, and a BS red notice was issued for you, youd be on your own. Im a citizen of the United States and I served my country for 17 years, yet I dont have that confidence any more. I dont know that the government at its highest level thinks of Americans first its whether you are on his side, or not on his side.

Bharara, 50, has been thinking a lot lately about bullies, and their nemeses those unsung heroes who strive for whats right. His first book, Doing Justice: A Prosecutors Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law, takes us back to basics, asking us to reflect on what truth means when a serial liar sits in the Oval Office; what civility involves amid all the social media yelling; and how to uphold the rule of law when thuggish behaviour appears to be the order of the day.

The book is a love letter to the southern district of New York (SDNY) that he led for more than seven years until he was abruptly fired by Donald Trump in March 2017. He praises its spirit of independence its moniker is Sovereign District and the committed people who work there, such as the real-life mob-busting cop Kenny McCabe who took on all five families of the Cosa Nostra.

Stormy Daniels arrives southern district of New York courthouse for a hearing related to Michael Cohen, April 2018. Photograph: Yana Paskova/Getty Images

As one of the earliest law enforcement agencies in the country, its aligned federal court, known as the mother court, has sat continuously since 1789, hearing cases from the sinking of the Titanic to the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies. The reach of SDNY prosecutors is unlimited. When someone asked Bharara recently to define the agencys jurisdiction, he replied: Are you familiar with Earth?

At its most powerful, Doing Justice works as a metaphorical survival guide for the Trump era. As with everything Bharara does, he writes in a tone that is calm and considered, a warm bath after the outrage of Trumps daily tweets.

Thats what has made him such an unlikely superstar following his dismissal at Trumps hands. Since he was ousted from the southern district, he has created a hugely popular podcast, Stay Tuned, exploring the intersection between law and politics, and now has more than 1 million followers on Twitter. Can you imagine! A former prosecutor has a million Twitter followers it makes no sense, he says. Im told its anxiety, but theres also a desire to learn from those with experience about whats going on.

In the hour I spend with Bharara at his podcast offices in Manhattan, he treats me to the same measured analysis. The style of his conversation is soothing, reassuring, but its content is wholly alarming.

It starts with a phone call he received on 9 March 2017. The president of the United States was on the line, he was told, did he want to take it?

Bharara was puzzled. Hed been summoned to meet the president-elect in Trump Tower shortly after the November 2016 election, when Trump had invited him to stay on at the helm of the SDNY.

Before the meeting ended, Trump asked Bharara for his phone number. That struck the lawyer as odd, though he duly wrote it down on a Post-it note. Now, a few weeks after Trump had been anointed, here he was again on the phone and, against protocol, wanting to talk.

Bharara did not pick up. And he did not call back.

It has been two years since then, and Bharara is still at a loss about why Trump called him. He wonders why, the day after the call, he was told to resign, when Trump had specifically requested that he stay on. (Bharara refused to quit, forcing Trump to fire him 48 hours after his unanswered phone call, on 11 March.) More importantly, he asks himself what that call had been about. What had Trump been after?

Imagine what it would look like now if I were still US attorney and it became known that I had quiet little chats with the president at the same time we were investigating the Trump organisation and Michael Cohen. So I didnt call back, and its one of the best decisions I ever made.

Bharara has had no interaction with Robert Muellers investigation into possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, as the special counsel was appointed two months after Bharara was fired. He has watched the inquiry unfold with detachment but increasing agitation.

He sees Trumps relentless sniping at Mueller as nothing less than a threat to judicial independence. The incessant cry of witchhunt, the constant blurring of the line between politics and law enforcement A particular person in power doesnt want to be investigated, and wants to get his supporters to doubt the veracity of the result, so hes undermining peoples faith, in a direct way, in the rule of law.

That chipping away at public faith in the law, pumped out through Trumps Twitter feed the biggest megaphone of any human being on Earth, he calls it leads Bharara to be deeply fearful of what will happen when Mueller completes his report, as he may any day now.

I have a great fear that no matter what Mueller says if its a devastating indictment of the president or the opposite one half of the American people wont accept it.

How dangerous would that be? I think it would be terrible, he says. If someone like Bob Mueller, who volunteered to go to Vietnam and took a bullet wound, who held high-ranking jobs then chose to take on lowly homicide cases, if someone of that stature can be attacked and you can make tens of millions of Americans think he is a piece of shit, thats horrifying to me.

Its at this point, just as we are reaching full-blown despair, that we return to the subject of the southern district of New York and its fierce spirit of independence. In his book, Bharara takes us through the fundamental principles of justice and truth that motivate the SDNYs investigators under the agencys unwritten mantra: Do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.

Drawing on his past cases, he teases out good practice for the rookie prosecutor, as though he were preaching to his own younger self when he joined the SDNY in 2000. He spreads words of wisdom along the way. One of his favourite quotes is from Oliver Cromwell: I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.

Robert Mueller. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters

While most of the media has fixated on Mueller, the southern district, motivated by such values, has quietly been compiling a devastating case against Trump all of its own. It is not a random fact that the conviction of Michael Cohen, Trumps lawyer and fixer, for tax fraud and campaign finance violations relating to the pay-off of the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, was secured not by Mueller but by the SDNY.

Bharara, like most informed observers, thinks it highly unlikely that the SDNY will indict Trump while he is still in office. Though there is nothing in the constitution or in law to stop the SDNY from charging Trump, Department of Justice guidelines bar sitting presidents from being prosecuted, and Bharara does not expect to see his former colleagues going rogue in that way.

But when Trump leaves office, all bets are off.

The culture of the SDNY is such that if they feel they have sufficient evidence they will definitely go after him when he leaves the White House. Right is right, and no ones above the law. Thats not just lip service the SDNY is steeped in it. No one is above the law: I dont care who you are, how much money you have, who your friends are.

Bharara stresses that he has had no inside intelligence about his old stomping ground since he was fired. But when he detects SDNY activity the boxes of recordings they seized in raids on Cohens home and legal office, for instance it ignites in him his innate pride and confidence in the Sovereign District as a bastion against the forces of darkness. It seems to me that what the SDNY is doing is pulling on a thread. And when the thread is named Michael Cohen, God knows what other things lie ahead.

Doing Justice: A Prosecutors Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law by Preet Bharara is published by Bloomsbury (20) on 19 March. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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The family of the deceased Olympic cyclist believes a concussion rapidly sent a life of dizzyingly high achievement on the track and in academia into a tailspin

Kelly Catlins family spent time this week sifting through old photographs of her in action. As a girl it seemed like she tried every sport possible and excelled at them all, from tennis to archery, downhill skiing, pistol shooting, athletics and soccer, before settling on cycling. She was a relentless competitor.

Were kind of astounded at the number of different things that she did and she did so well, said her father, Mark. It reminds me of what a remarkable talent she was.

The past tense is because Catlin killed herself last week in her apartment at Stanford University about two months after suffering a concussion in a cycling accident. She was 23.

A triplet born and raised in Minnesota, Catlin took up cycling aged 17, switching from mountain bikes to track contests in 2015. The next year she was part of the American line-up that claimed silver in the team pursuit at the Rio Olympics. She also won three successive world titles in the same event.

Last year she finished an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and Chinese at the University of Minnesota and began a masters in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford last fall. She rode for the Rally UHC professional road cycling team.

As reported by the Washington Post, the family has donated her brain to the Veterans Affairs-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank, a renowned centre for research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain injuries. Her relatives hope that analysis will support their belief that the concussions effects spurred her to suicide.

She was always curious if her brain was somehow different from others, and would have loved to have her brain being studied in research, her brother, Colin, told the Guardian by email. I feel that if any good can come from her death, some small contribution to research would be important, especially if it leads to helping others facing her situation in the future.

Mark Catlin said that after the injury she had I think problems with reasoning, kind of befuddled, and she attempted suicide in January, leading to a month of rest and a spell in hospital after which she appeared to be improving. The suicide note was kind of disturbing and bizarre, we thought, Boy, she isnt the Kelly that we know, writing this way. She had changed and it was tough to see and it was a concern to us, he told the Guardian.

Catlin, third from left, helped the USA to a silver medal in the womens track team pursuit at the Rio Olympics. Photograph: Sipa USA/REX/Shutterstock

After her concussion, she told me on the phone that she felt that her mind was racing, and that she was feeling extremely, almost uncontrollably violent and angry. Her ability to memorize things, one of her prides, had become unstable, worrying her about her intelligence, Colin Catlin said. Above all, I think she was worried that she was going insane, with all the unstable moods the concussion and stress brought.

He recalled some of her many passions: Egyptology, science fiction, model horses, playing classical violin, reading for hours each day while listening to German industrial metal bands and eating tons and tons of chocolate. Her parents first noted her persistence when she was less than a year old, determined to figure out how to crawl and stand.

I can say that Kelly was the toughest person Ive ever met, exceptionally tough. Being a high-performance athlete, toughness is a prerequisite, but she was the toughest. She was the most driven individual I have ever met as well, which again, comes with high-performance athletics, but she set the bar, her personal coach, Stephen McGregor, said by email. She was also exceptionally smart and artistic, he added. Moreover, on a personal level, she was kind, humble and stoic; personality traits that endeared her to all that met her.

Catlin sustained a broken arm in a training crash last October. Underlining her tolerance for pain a trait she felt was vital for success in cycling she was reluctant to accept an anaesthetic during treatment, worried the drug would show up in a doping test. Then, during a steep descent on a training ride in California, her wheels slipped on a slick patch on the road and she tumbled off her bike.

She would later discover the impact had cracked her helmet, front and back. She had road rash but in typical fashion, her father said, she bounced up and went to a training camp a day or two later, only to endure a pounding headache that left her writhing in pain when she began a high-interval workout. Severe headaches continued and she developed sensitivity to light and a rapid heartbeat.

I said to her, Youve just got to quit this, get some good long-term rest, take six months off if you have to and then you can come back to it, Mark Catlin said. But she said, For me its therapy, I cant give up cycling and unfortunately when she cycles she cant give up trying to go hard, for some reason, he said. The most she could take off was probably two days without getting really stir-crazy.

While concussions in American football attract the most media attention in the US, they are also common in many other sports, such as gymnastics and cheerleading, said Taylor Twellman, an ESPN analyst and former MLS player who founded ThinkTaylor, a concussion awareness organization.

Twellman wants to see an increased emphasis on rehabilitation, including more studies. Rehabilitation of traumatic brain injuries is still way behind the discussion of education and awareness, he said. The awareness is there, were all having discussions, thats fine but it doesnt get you anywhere if no one is putting their energy and their money into: how do you rehabilitate this?

Missy Martin, an undergraduate and cheerleader on medical leave from University of California, Berkeley, said that learning about Catlins death is prompting her to ask for more expert help and resources and advocate for better treatment for student-athletes in general.

Martin said she suffered three concussions over several months during cheerleading stunts and now has headaches, vision problems and light sensitivity. People cant see concussions so I think thats why its difficult to understand it. With a broken leg you see the cast, the crutches, the persons limping, she said. I cant go to movie theaters, I cant be in loud restaurants, I cant be out with my friends and go dance to music, so I cant do everyday things that Im used to doing.

The 23-year-old added: Pushing myself is part of how I got to be successful as an athlete. And when you get a concussion it takes away that special part of you because you cant work, you have to rest.

It would be understandable if even someone in perfect health felt pressure from pursuing high-level academic and sporting ambitions in parallel. Catlin wrote a blog post for Velo News last month in which she described stepping off the podium after a World Cup race in Berlin to be told that she would have to retake a three-hour exam. Being a graduate student, track cyclist, and professional road cyclist can feel like I need to time-travel to get everything done. And things still slip through the cracks, she wrote.

Kelly worked harder than almost anyone you are likely to meet. She could be an Olympian and a full-time straight-A graduate student. We idolize such strength, but in the end it was destructive, burning out when she had not yet even begun to reach her full potential, Colin Catlin said.

She had survived, even thrived in this environment for years on her own, training in Colorado for her first Olympics. But it was living on the edge, and all it took was the addition of her crashes and concussion to push things to the breaking point.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected]. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.

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On one warm and unsuspecting day of July in 1860, a schooner named Clotilda, with the Captain William Foster and 110 African slaves on board, arrived in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Clotilda was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States. Among more than one hundred enslaved African people, there was also Cudjo (sometimes spelled as Cudjoe) Kazoola (or Kossula) Lewis – the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States.

Image credits: vpam

Cudjo Lewis, originally named Kossula (American listeners would later transcribe Cudjo’s given name as “Kazoola”), was born around 1840 into the Yoruba tribe, in the Banté region, which today belongs to the West African country of Benin. His father’s name was Oluwale (or Oluale) and his mother’s – Fondlolu. Kossula had five siblings and twelve half-siblings, who were the children of his father’s other two wives.

Image credits: Archive

Mobile Bay and wreckage of slave ship Clotilda are pictured above. In the spring of 1860, when Cudjo was only 19 years old, he was taken as a prisoner by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey. After the Dahomian tribe captured him, Cudjo was taken to the coast. There, he and more than one hundred other men and women, were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda – the last slave ship to reach the shores of the continental United States. The captives were brought to Mobile Bay, Alabama. The international slave trade was not legal at that time already for more than 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey proves how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo. However, to avoid detection of the authorities, the captors of the slaves snuck them into Alabama at dark hours and made them hide in the swamp for several days. To get rid of any hard evidence, they put the 86-foot Clotilda on fire on the banks of Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Ship’s remains are believed to be uncovered in January 2018.

Image credits: theimmagine

If it wasn’t for Zora Neale Hurston – an anthropologist and a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance – we may have never heard Cudjo’s story from Cudjo himself. Some 60 years after the abolition of slavery, she made an amazing discovery and located the last surviving captive – Cudjo – of the last slave ship to bring African slaves to the United States. Zora went on to conduct numerous interviews with Cudjo, but struggled to get them published. One of the main reasons for rejection, was that Zora refused to alter Cudjo’s words for them to fit into the frames of the standard American English. At that time, her anthropological interviews were often seen as controversial due to the use of vernacular dialogue. Even some black American thinkers thought that the use of vernacular might enforce the caricaturist views of the black people inside the minds of the white people. Zora wasn’t the one to back down, and the book with interviews with Cudjo was only published on May 2018 and it was named Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”.

Image credits: cudjolewisfamily.org

Zora’s book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis and his life. The heartbreaking narrative provides a first-hand look at the trauma enforced by the slavery. After Cudjo was abducted from his home, he was forced onto a ship with hundreds of strangers. They wound up spending several months together, only to be separated in Alabama to go to work in different plantations. “We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis recalled. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.” Cudjo also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one could speak his language and explain to where he was, what was going on, what was he ought to do. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis. Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

Image credits: Amy Walker

Understandably, Mr. Lewis expected to receive compensation for being captured and forced into slavery, and was angry to find out that the long-awaited emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Bitter and frustrated, Cudjo, together with a group of 31 other freepeople saved up enough money to buy land near the state capital Mobile, which they called Africatown. Today, the monument of Cudjo Lewis proudly stands in Africatown, Mobile, Alabama, reminding of the struggles its people endured. It was sculpted back in 2016 by April Terra Livingston and is located in front of the Union Missionary Baptist Church.

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Delegates at UN environment assembly say the oil producers are protecting their industries

The United States and Saudi Arabia have hamstrung global efforts to scrutinise climate geoengineering in order to benefit their fossil fuel industries, according to multiple sources at the United Nations environment assembly, taking place this week in Nairobi.

The worlds two biggest oil producers reportedly led opposition against plans to examine the risks of climate-manipulating technology such as sucking carbon out of the air, reflective mirrors in space, seeding the oceans and injecting particulates into the atmosphere.

Deeper analysis of the risks had been proposed by Switzerland and 12 other countries as a first step towards stronger oversight of potentially world-altering experiments that would have implications for food supply, biodiversity, global inequality and security. Some have been tried, but as yet none deployed at a scale that would affect the climate.

This call for caution was supported by the president of the assembly, Siim Kiisler, Estonias environment minister, We need to talk about governance of geoengineering. We need an international agreement on this in the future. Just ignoring the issue does not help. We need to talk about it and how to govern those technologies in the future.

But sources involved with the talks said the initiative was blocked, initially by the US and Saudi Arabia, then by Japan and other countries.

Once dismissed as reckless science fiction, geoengineering has risen up the political agenda of some nations as the climate crisis has become more apparent.

The petrochemical industry sees it as a way to justify further expansion of fossil fuel industries. Chevron, BHP and other high-emitting companies have invested in companies that are pushing ahead with experiments to pull CO2 out of the air.

US academics at Harvard are also poised to conduct the biggest outdoor test of stratospheric aerosol injection, which simulates the cloaking effect of a volcano eruption. The researchers say this test, known as Scopex, will probably take place in New Mexico.

One of the leading US scientists behind such research, David Keith, published a paper this week claiming the risks of geoengineering are not as great as previously feared.

Opponents counter that earlier, more thorough studies show serious impacts on Asian monsoon cycles, African droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme temperatures. They want the UN to impose a moratorium on outdoor experiments using this form of technology.

More than a scientific test, this is a political test. Its a way to establish the technology, warned Silvia Ribeiro of the industry watchdog ETC Group. Stratospheric aerosol injection would cause huge imbalances in the climate. We think it will also exacerbate geopolitical unfairness.

Many climate scientists argue such research is a distraction from proven methods of mitigating emissions through tree planting and a switch to renewable energy.

Jacqueline McGlade, professor of sustainable development at University College London, said she supported certain types of locally appropriate land-based geoengineering but was extremely concerned about efforts to play with the stratosphere. If we mess around with particulate matter, it could potentially affect everyone. As far as atmospheric physics are concerned, we dont know everything.

Currently, the main prohibition on testing is the Convention on Biological Diversity, which the US is the only country not to have ratified. There are also provisions in the London Protocol, which forbids ocean seeding another form of geoengineering, which aims to increase the capacity of sea water to absorb CO2. The question now is whether to strengthen the controls, by tightening rules and broadening oversight, or to narrow them down.

The US argues that geoengineering should be left to climate forums, such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This week, consensus proved impossible. On Wednesday evening, the Swiss delegation withdrew their resolution and expressed regret that some countries were reluctant to move forward. Our motivation was to get more information to inform discussions, the head of the delegation Felix Wertli said. Governance of geoengineering is an important topic today, and even more tomorrow. The topic is not off the table. It is the start of a further conversation.

This was seen as a defeat for the precautionary principle, under which nations are supposed to put safety first when faced with uncertain but potentially catastrophic risks. Campaigners warned future debates on the subject are now more likely to focus narrowly on science and politics, rather than other species, food supply, water use, inequality and peace.

It is regrettable that efforts to strengthen existing UN governance on geoengineering met with resistance from a handful of high-emitting oil-producing countries, said Lili Fuhr of the Heinrich Bll Foundation. This task is now more important than ever as we see real-world experiments and public support for these technologies growing in exactly those countries, like the USA and Saudi Arabia, that were blocking progress on this issue this week in Nairobi.

This was not the only agenda item in Nairobi that Trump administration diplomats were accused of watering down; they were also accused of undermining efforts to ensure strong environmental governance. They are trying to remove all targets and timelines, said one senior delegate.

An ambitious Indian resolution to phase out single-use plastics by 2025 has been diluted to resolving to significantly reduce them by 2030, said another delegate. The US was supported by Brazil and at least four other countries in pushing back the deadline and making the language more vague.

On marine waste, a Norwegian proposal to build an effective global strategy for dealing with plastics that enter the oceans has also met with resistance from the US. They want to postpone measures so they can protect their industry, said an ambassador from a large developing country.

Approached by the Guardian, a US official denied his country was playing an obstructionist role.

This could prove to be the last time the UK is part of the European Union delegation at an international conference, and there is speculation that after Brexit the British position may be realigned with the economy-first, environment-second approach of Washington.

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Madison, Wisconsin (CNN)The opening days of Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign were squarely focused on proving that he is the most electable candidate to take on President Donald Trump — in part because he will show up.

The former Texas congressman pledged Sunday in Wisconsin to “go everywhere” and take “no one for granted” during his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“When we don’t show up, we get what we deserve, and that is to lose,” he told reporters.

O’Rourke’s three-day, 13-county swing through mostly rural eastern Iowa included eight counties that Democrats had carried in the 2012 presidential election but lost in 2016. His next four stops — Wisconsin on Sunday, followed this week by Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — put O’Rourke in the states many Democrats believe are most crucial to winning the presidency in 2020.

His ability to maintain a grueling travel schedule is aided by his loss in the Texas Senate race last year: O’Rourke can stay on the campaign trail while other candidates who are currently in office have to return to Washington or their home states.

O’Rourke is an electrifying campaigner, and his events have all been packed, with overflow crowds spilling into the streets to see what made him a viral sensation in Texas. O’Rourke jumps onto coffee shop counters, chairs and whatever else he can find to ensure he is heard. But the cramped quarters are partially because that’s how O’Rourke’s campaign designed them: He’s holding events in coffee shops, bars and houses, rather than rallies at venues that can accommodate large crowds.

What’s not yet clear is how his campaign is being received nationally.

He told reporters at his first campaign event in Keokuk, Iowa, he plans to “run the largest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen.” But so far O’Rourke’s campaign has not offered evidence that his entry has begun to create such a groundswell of support.

Google searches for O’Rourke — and particularly just “Beto” — soared in his first days on the campaign trail. But no new polls have been released since he entered the race.

One important gauge of interest and enthusiasm for his campaign is fundraising — which was expected to be O’Rourke’s strength after he shattered Senate campaign fundraising records with his $80 million haul last year in Texas. But O’Rourke has so far refused to reveal how much he has raised.

“I can’t right now,” he said Friday in Washington, Iowa.

A reporter responded that O’Rourke could share his fundraising totals if he wanted to.

“You’re right,” he responded. “I choose not to.”

O’Rourke said Saturday night he’d have no problem with his campaign staff unionizing, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ staff did, and that he hopes to pay the highest wages and benefits of any 2020 hopeful — signs that he can afford it. But it’s not yet clear whether he has made any big-name hires to orchestrate his campaign from its El Paso, Texas, headquarters.

O’Rourke told reporters in Milwaukee on Sunday that he is “in talks” with someone to be his campaign manager and has offered that person the job. He did not reveal who that person is, but a source told CNN that O’Rourke is in discussions with Democratic veteran strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon.

So who is running his campaign right now?

“I’m working with an extraordinary team right now, some of whom helped me in the amazing Senate race that we ran in Texas, some of whom are new to this campaign,” O’Rourke said on Sunday.

O’Rourke is settling into a stump speech focused on a call to set partisanship aside to solve challenges like climate change. He told reporters Saturday that he is “trying to find the commonality in the midst of great division.”

O’Rourke is also leaning heavily on his life in El Paso on the US-Mexico border as what separates him from other candidates. His passionate answer about the Trump administration detaining children energized a crowd Saturday night in Dubuque, Iowa.

He is also delving into more specifics — including taking an anti-interventionist approach to Syria and Venezuela, criticizing spending on wars over the last two decades and praising diplomatic efforts like former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. He has also endorsed phasing in a $15-an-hour minimum wage and legalizing marijuana.

And he has won praise from crowds for refusing to criticize other Democratic candidates — even saying that former Vice President Joe Biden, who will likely compete with O’Rourke for moderate Democratic votes, should enter the presidential race.

Still, O’Rourke has also at times left audiences wanting more specifics from him on the policy front.

“Elizabeth Warren is the gold standard of policy, putting policies out there,” a woman told him in Independence, Iowa, on Saturday. “Right now you’re doing a good job of identifying what the issues are, but I don’t think that really any of us have heard any particular policies that you’d like to get behind.”

She then pressed O’Rourke for “particular policies that you are indeed behind” on health care — leading to an exchange in which O’Rourke explained his unwillingness to embrace popular progressive priorities like single-payer health insurance.

O’Rourke said that he backs a bill introduced by Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro called “Medicare for America.” It would allow people to keep their private insurance, but funnel those without private insurance or on other government programs like Medicaid and in Obamacare’s individual marketplace into Medicare. It would also allow those with private insurance the option of buying into Medicare.

He said a Sanders-style single-payer “Medicare for All” program would be “wonderful” and that he’d backed it during his Senate campaign, but that “if we become too ideological or too prescribed in the solution, we may allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.”

Earlier in Washington, Iowa, Ryan Turner had pressed O’Rourke on his previous comments that he would tear down the wall separating El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

“I don’t feel like he really answered it, honestly,” Turner said afterward. “I understand there is a lot of pressure and you’re getting a ton of questions, but you know you’re asking to be the leader of the free world, and so I think you should be on either side, called to the carpet and be able to back up what you say.”

Also dimming O’Rourke’s launch were the apologies he made, including one after saying his wife was raising their children, “sometimes with my help,” which had infuriated female Democratic activists and operatives who pointed out that a woman could never get away with such a comment while running for office.

In Cedar Rapids on Friday night for a recording of the podcast Political Party Live, O’Rourke said that “not only will I not say that again, but I’ll be more thoughtful going forward in the way that I talk about our marriage, and also the way in which I acknowledge the truth of the criticism that I have enjoyed white privilege.”

When CNN asked O’Rourke on Saturday what led him to apologize, he said he had called his wife, Amy.

“She said, ‘Look, I know what you’re trying to say, which is here I am in El Paso, I’m working, I’m also taking on the lion’s share of the responsibility of raising our children and you were trying to acknowledge that in your comments but it came off sounding a little flip. And you know, this is a serious thing, and I think you should treat it seriously,'” O’Rourke said. “So I thought that was great advice. And advice that I’m going to follow.”

At the same podcast recording O’Rourke also apologized for his writings as a teenage hacktivist that were reported by Reuters — including one murder fantasy from the perspective of a serial killer.

O’Rourke has also taken heat in the past for his frequent use of profanity. On Sunday in Wisconsin, he told reporters when asked about his profanity, “I don’t intend to use the F-word going forward.”

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The suspects live broadcast of the New Zealand killings reveals such acts are always as much about instilling fear as inflicting violence

Terrorism is effective because it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal. Ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialised cities of the west in the late 19th century this has been true.

It feels personal because, although statistics may show we are many times more likely to die in a banal domestic accident, we instinctively conclude from an attack on the other side of the street, the city or, in the case of New Zealand, the other side of the world, we might be next.

Terrorism always seems near at least when it happens in an environment resembling our own because the shocking images on our phones, televisions or newspapers erase the distance between us and the source of danger. It always seems new because although each attack follows a familiar timeline the first reports amid chaos and confusion, statements by police and politicians, analysis from commentators waking up in successive time zones, the identification of attackers and victims, condolences and flags at half-mast, debates about radicalisation etc each is unique. In the 1970s, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins famously said that terrorism was theatre. This succinctly captured its spectacular, performative nature. These days, it seems more like an endless TV series that everyone wishes was over but that everyone watches nonetheless.

That Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian who shot dead 49 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, broadcast the attack live on Facebook via a helmet-mounted GoPro camera is a new low, but a logical and sadly inevitable one.

Most people naturally assume that the technological changes that influence terrorism are those involving weapons or explosives. But the big shifts in this field happened long ago. Dynamite was patented in 1867 and automatic weapons became widespread after the Second World War. If terrorists have made the occasional use of chemical weapons or a hijacked plane, the vast proportion of modern-day attacks use technology that, in its essentials, is not new. What has changed beyond recognition are the media that enable individuals or groups to disseminate their message.

On 11 September 2001, Osama bin Laden knew no one could stop live images reaching a billion people in the Islamic world. Photograph: Allsport UK/Allsport

The significance of this is often missed because we are too focused on the violence. Terrorism is propaganda by deed, the term coined in the 19th century by its first modern practitioners. Violence alone is not enough. That violence has to terrorise inspire irrational fear and so change minds but has to radicalise and mobilise too. It has to send a message to enemies, supporters and, perhaps most importantly, those who are neither. Al-Qaida and Isis made this explicit. So did Tarrants manifesto. Every change in media technology over the past half century or more, arguably much longer, has made it easier for terrorists to achieve this aim. In the 1950s and 60s, radio and the new photojournalism meant violence could influence public opinion thousands of miles away in colonial powers. So extremists chose terror tactics in the last days of the British mandate in Palestine and during the Algerian war of independence against France.

In the 1970s, terrorists were quick to grasp the potential of overseas TV broadcasts. The terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 was covered live by the worlds networks. The operation had been designed to exploit this new capacity. In the 1990s, it was the advent of satellite TV. No longer did western editors or those working for Arab regimes control what news went out to the masses of the Middle East. The channels of communication were becoming more direct and that was hugely empowering for the militants. On 11 September 2001, Osama bin Laden knew no one could stop live images of his groups massive attacks in the US reaching the billion people in the Islamic world who were his primary audience.

Then came the biggest change: digital. As media organisations evolved, so did terrorist ones. Top down was out, peer to peer was in. There were citizen journalists who followed broad guidelines but were not formally affiliated to an organisation and freelance terrorists who did much the same. The mainstream media were increasingly redundant. Why fight to get on the BBC or al-Jazeera if you could just create your own channels and reach your audience directly? Isis showed how effective that could be.

The terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 was covered live by the worlds networks. Photograph: Associated Press

Rightwing extremists were slower to exploit the potential of this seismic shift. Now, with the Christchurch attack, they have caught up. There have been live streams of terror attacks before a French extremist streamed on Facebook the knife murder of a policeman and his partner in 2016 but none as high profile.

It is often said we get the media we deserve but that is a simplification. But the media, like terrorism, are part of our societies and, like terrorism, are influenced by broader trends. Perhaps the most striking element of the atrocity in New Zealand is how the filming of the video was an integral part. Lets get this party started, Tarrant says, as he gets into his car, talking directly to the viewer. He shoots images of his face in a twisted version of that most contemporary of phenomena: the selfie. The point of the attack is not just to kill Muslims, but to make a video of someone killing Muslims.

Tarrant said in his manifesto that he did not seek to die, but accepted that might happen. But he will still be seen as a martyr to the cause by supporters. The word martyr is of Greek origin and refers to a witness. The Arabic equivalent has similar roots. Witnesses need an audience or their acts are empty. For some terrorists, that witness is God alone, but these are few. For a growing number, that audience, via Facebook, via virtually unmoderated sites in the dark corners of the web, via the mainstream media they so detest and suspect, is everyone.

In Tarrants world, on his live stream, in his own mind and those of his followers, he is a warrior, a racial hero, a leader but also, in a wider contemporary sense, a celebrity, if only for a moment. In a terrible, twisted way, he is not wrong.

Jason Burkes latest book is The New Threat

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(CNN)Guitarist Dick Dale, whose fast, thunderous sound pioneered the California “surf rock” genre of the early 1960s and gained a new generation of fans decades later through its appearance in “Pulp Fiction,” has died. He was 81.

Dale had a “wet,” reverb-heavy guitar sound that evoked crashing waves and sought to echo the sounds he played in his mind while surfing, according to the Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame. His singular, staccato picking drew upon Middle Eastern music (his father was Lebanese) and influenced the Beach Boys, the Ventures and other surf-rock artists of the era.

His best-known song, 1962’s “Miserlou” (sometimes spelled “Misirlou”), was an adaptation of an early-19th century Middle Eastern instrumental folk tune. In Dale’s hands it became a furious rave-up that packed dance floors — and has had a long life in pop culture.

Quentin Tarantino used it over the opening credits of “Pulp Fiction,” giving the song a new veneer of retro cool, and the Black Eyed Peas sampled it prominently in “Pump It,” their 2006 hit. That same year the song also appeared in a “Guitar Hero” video game.

Dale’s early fame and impact brought him the nickname, “King of the Surf Guitar.”

“I’m sorry to hear about Dick Dale passing. Dick’s guitar playing was a big influence on all of us, and we covered ‘Misirlou’ on our Surfin’ USA album in ’63,” Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson said on Twitter.

Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour in Boston but moved to Southern California as a teenager and quickly discovered surfing.

He and his band the Del-Tones began playing weekend gigs in the late 1950s at the Rendezvous Ballroom in the seaside Balboa neighborhood of Newport Beach. He played a Fender Stratocaster guitar and used a customized Fender amp to develop his signature thick sound and ear-shredding volume.

Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin,'” first played in 1961, is viewed by many as the first-ever surf rock song. His debut album, “Surfers’ Choice,” came out in 1962 and earned him appearances on Ed Sullivan’s show and in “Beach Party,” the 1963 Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello movie.

Dale’s later career was interrupted repeatedly by health problems. He had recurring battles with rectal cancer and toured into his 80s to help pay his medical bills.

“I want to thank all my music lovers for supporting me these last 3 months with your wonderful heartfelt letters praying for my speedy recovery as I battle this demon that attacks so many other friends and their loved ones,” he wrote on his website in 2008. “For now, no touring for a while.”

But Dale returned to the road and was still performing as recently as December.

Watson, his former drummer, called Dale “the creator of an entire genre of Southern California indigenous music — not by him, but by his fans who were surfers — a new craze that had taken over the beaches up and down the coast.”

Watson said Dale was a gracious performer who would stay for hours after each show talking to fans and signing autographs. Onstage, he said, Dale was “a true force of nature … delivering a punch that would ricochet off the back wall and punch us all in the chest.”

Bolle, the bassist, said Dale’s wife Lana was with him when he died.

“He taught me to live your life the way you want to live it. He definitely did that with vigor and ferociousness of spirit,” Bolle said. “I’m so happy and stoked that he was able to entertain and bring joy to people’s lives as long as he did.”

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(CNN)New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Saturday morning that “our gun laws will change” following the mass shooting at two Christchurch mosques that left 49 people dead.

She said the suspect, identified as Brenton Tarrant, obtained a gun license in November 2017 and began purchasing guns legally in December 2017.

“While work is being done as to the chain of events that lead to both the holding of this gun license and the possession of these weapons, I can tell you one thing right now. Our gun laws will change.” Ardern said.

Nation’s last mass shooting 3 decades ago

Until Friday, the biggest massacre in the country’s history happened 30 years ago, when a man named David Gray went on a shooting rampage, killing 13 people.

Following that attack, the nation’s gun laws — which were first passed in 1983 — came under scrutiny. The ensuing debate led to a 1992 amendment on the regulation of military-style semi-automatic firearms.

Despite those laws, New Zealand’s weapons legislation is considered more relaxed than most Western countries outside of the USA. Gun owners do need a license but they aren’t required to register their guns — unlike in neighboring Australia.

While authorities do not know exactly how many legally or illegally owned firearms are currently in circulation in New Zealand, estimates put the number at about 1.2 million, according to New Zealand Police. This figure equates to about one gun for every three people — a rate that is considered high when compared with Australia, which has 3.15 million guns, approximately one for every eight people.

That said, gun-inflicted fatalities remain relatively low in New Zealand. The number of gun homicides per year in the decade up to 2015 was in the dozens, according to figures compiled by the University of Sydney. This equated to an annual rate of about one death per 100,000 people — in contrast to the United States, which had 12 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017.

Potential gun owners in New Zealand must be over the age of 16 and pass a police background check, according to GunPolicy.org and its founder Professor Philip Alpers.

According to Alpers, New Zealand firearm legislation has remained substantially unaltered since 1992. Five years later retired High Court judge Thomas Thorp’s year-long Review of Firearms Control in New Zealand (1997) recommended major changes, among them that all firearms be individually registered; that restricted weapons like privately held machine guns be permanently disabled; and for a buy-back of military-style semi-automatic weapons.

Alpers, who is based at the University of Sydney but originally from New Zealand, told CNN: “Not one of these measures has been addressed by legislation. Government has since considered a range of similar recommendations, but special interest groups prevent meaningful change.”

In 79 countries surveyed by the United Nations, firearm registration is the accepted norm and a cornerstone of gun control, according to GunPolicy.org. Among developed nations, New Zealand’s decision not to register 96% of civilian firearms makes it a stand-out exception, alone with the United States and Canada, Alpers said.

Weapons legislation in Australia

Gun laws in Australia were tightened following a 1996 mass shooting in which 35 people were killed by a lone gunman in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Within two weeks, Australian lawmakers banned rapid-fire rifles and shotguns and introduced tighter laws governing ownership of other weapons. New applicants must undergo thorough background checks and present a “justifiable reason” for ownership — with self defense not applicable.

The laws have had a dramatic effect on the frequency of mass shootings, as well as homicides. In the years after the Port Arthur massacre, the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia fell by more than 50% — and stayed there.

A 2012 study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University also found the two nationwide, federally funded gun buybacks and voluntary surrenders of firearms led to a drop in firearm suicide rates of almost 80% in the following decade.

Using those measures, Australia collected and destroyed more than a million firearms, perhaps a third of the national stock, according to Alpers. The national government also banned the importation of new automatic and semiautomatic weapons. And the buyback was paid for by a special one-off tax on all Australians.

The gun lobby is “small but very strong,” in New Zealand, according to Alpers. He told CNN: “They are very vocal and have managed to foil every attempt to tighten the gun laws since 1992. It’s a powerful little lobby group, whereas the gun lobby in Australia had its back broken by the Port Arthur massacre.

“In New Zealand the gun lobby has gone from strength to strength and has dominated policy advice to the police and government.”

That said, Alpers believes things will now have to change. He told CNN: “It’s always a terrible surprise when this sort of thing happens. You can never predict where it’s going to happen. The most common comment you get from people when this sort of thing happens is that they never thought it could happen here and that’s how the people of Christchurch must be feeling.”

Despite the relatively lax controls, “guns are rarely used in the way they are in the US so to New Zealanders this will be a tremendous shock,” said Alpers. He added: “It has shocked the country to the core and I can’t imagine any country less likely to let this slide.”

New Zealand police support carrying guns

New Zealand police officers are not routinely armed, but recent figures suggest more officers are in favor of carrying guns.

A 2017 survey from the New Zealand Police Association showed that that 66% of its members support arming officers, according to TVNZ.

That figure has significantly increased from a decade ago, when 48% of officers supported general arming in 2008.

New Zealand also has a low murder rate, with a total of 35 homicides in 2017 — fewer than the number of people who died in Friday’s double mosque attack.

Iain Overton, author of “Gun Baby Gun” and executive director of London-based charity Action on Armed Violence, told CNN: “The gun laws of New Zealand are not that contentious and fit into broad line with many other nations, with one exception — the reported permission to use, albeit with a special permit, pistols, semi-automatic weapons and machine guns.

“Many European nations outlaw semi-automatic weapons full stop, and the UK — for example — bans handguns, except under exceptional and rare circumstances. The possible, more concerning issue is the ubiquity of firearm ownership in New Zealand — with as many as 1.5 million guns there.

“People may cite that as many as one in three New Zealanders will be gun owners based on this, but this would be wrong. Gun owners often have multiple weapons, so it is likely that it is a smaller group of rural gun owners holding the most guns there. The presence of so many guns, though, in a small nation raises challenges when it comes to over-burdening a police force with regulation.”

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