#in my area of the u.s. there was one contractor who claimed to know how to do it

[qwuilleran]

There are quite a few barriers to adaption of new technology, not least among them, cost.

A recent history of under-floor heating

I live in new england and don't have them

[torturedwarrior]

John Wayne Gacy:

“I should never have been convicted of anything more serious than running a cemetery without a license.” -- John Wayne Gacy, “A clown can get away with murder.” -- John Wayne Gacy. Who is John Wayne Gacy?  What makes him a serial killer? How was he caught? American serial killer whose killings of 33 boys and young men in the 1970s attracted international media coverage and stunned his affluent Chicago neighborhood, where he was renowned for his sociability and success as a clown at charitable events and children's parties.

Gacy was raised into a blue-collar family and seems to have had a pretty ordinary upbringing. Yet he displayed an increasing inclination towards sadism, which resulted in a number of experiences with the law in the 1960s. In 1968, after his accusation that he had sexually assaulted a teenage boy, he was sentenced to the Iowa State Men's Reformatory (Anamosa State Penitentiary) and forced to undergo psychological evaluation. Following his release in 1970 and while still on parole, he was again arrested for sexual assault, but the charges were dropped later. In December 1978, the police found the first of 29 bodies buried in the affluent billionaire John Wayne Gacy's estate—26 in the crawl space beneath his residence in Norwood Park Township, and three more outside the building. He admitted to four further victims ' killings discovered in the waters south of Chicago. Forty years later, here's a roadmap to Gacy's trial, prosecution and execution, and ongoing attempts to identify the other six missing survivors. Gacy then became a fairly successful independent contractor and bought a house in Chicago's suburbs.

In 1975 teens in the uptown community inform the Chicago police that a man named "John" is circling the city in his car to pick up young people. It's John Wayne Gacy, a suburban man who runs a remodeling company. Officers are watching dozens of young men in and out of Gacy's house in Norwood Park Township. They're stopping many of them for questioning, but they don't say anything against Gacy. He is popular in his family to hold get-togethers and sometimes dress up as Pogo the Clown. In January of 1976 the police stake out John Wayne Gacy’s Home. Suspecting that Gacy might be responsible for the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy, the Chicago Police Youth Division is monitoring his house just east of O'Hare International Airport, although it is outside their jurisdiction. They're not in a position to make a case against Gacy.

“No, I don't think that's possible. I think it...after 14 years under truth serum had I committed the crime I would have known it. There's got to be something that would... would click in my mind. I've had photos of 21 of the victims and I've looked at them all over the years here and I've never recognized anyone of them.” -- John Wayne Gacy. Then in March of 1977 Gacy was suspected by police of a sexual assault. Twenty-seven-year-old North Sider Jeff Rignall says that Gacy lured him into his car by offering him marijuana before using chloroform to make him unconscious. Rignall claims Gacy then brought him to his home, arrested him, then sexually assaulted him before he let him leave. A $3,000 civil suit was dismissed in the incident. On December 31st, 1977 police had seized Gacy but then released him. He was charged by Chicago police when a 19-year-old North Side youth claims he was kidnapped by a gunpoint guy and compelled to participate in sexual acts. The police document reveals that when he was brought into custody, Gacy acknowledged that he was participating in activities with the youth—and their brutality—but declined to encourage the child to participate. The Deputy State Attorney chooses not to charge Gacy.

In December 11, 1978 a young boy by the name Robert Piest who was a 15-year-old sophomore at Maine West High School goes missing. Piest says to his mother to wait for a couple of minutes, because he has to see a man who pays 5 $/hour for a construction job, almost twice as much as he does in the drug store. But he has not been seen again. Then on December 12th, 1978 Lt. Kozenczak, whose son is attending the same high school as Piest, is insisting on a thorough investigation. He learns that Gacy, whose PDM Contractors had recently remodeled Nisson Pharmacy, was the man Piest went to talk about a job. Gacy was then asked to come to the station for investigation.

The next day on December 13th, 1978 Gacy leads police to a search warrant because he denied everything he was being charged with. Later investigators discover that Gacy's car was towed at 2 a.m. from a snowbank. On the Tri-State Tollway north of Ogden Avenue— about 38 miles north of where Gacy later claimed to have dumped the body of Piest. The tow truck company's reports help investigators assess the moment Gacy disposed of the youth's body within an hour. Around 3:20 a.m., Gacy marches with mud on his pants and shoes to the Des Plaines police station. He asks for a conversation with Kozenczak but is told to return later. He returns and gives a brief statement to the officers. Kozenczak asks Gacy to give him a search warrant for the keys to his house. Gacy is protesting but giving up his keys. Then December 21st, 1978 Gacy was arrested. Gacy is seen as passing a package containing cannabis to a gas station clerk while under police surveillance. According to Gacy, then arrested. Investigators were informed that Gacy has already confirmed that he has conducted "maybe 30" killings to his attorney. With Gacy in custody, police from Des Plaines and investigators from the office of Cook County sheriff get a warrant and enter Gacy's one-story. Police accuse Gacy against his will to hold Piest there and threaten to tear the floor to find the body of the teen. Gacy denies that Piest is there but says he was forced to kill a self-defense man and buried him under his garage's concrete floor. He directs police to the driveway and labels the place on the ground where the corpse is found with a can of spray paint., ranch-style house again.

On December 22nd, 1978 Gacy Finally confesses. "(Gacy's) giving all kinds of statements, saying there's a body here, a body there, a body in a lake or a lagoon, a body buried.” -- Cook County Sheriff Richard Elrod. In a rambling, repetitive speech that continues for several hours, Gacy tells police that after having sex with them, he murdered 32 young men. He speaks about himself in the third person, claiming "Jack" or "John" performed the murders and sex acts. He claims he hid the corpses of 27 people on his estate (29 would be found), most of them in the crawl space. Five other corpses (four would be found by police), including Piest's, have been dumped into waterways south of Chicago, claims Gacy. He sketches a diagram showing where the bodies are buried, offering six of his victims ' addresses. Gacy was convicted of the assassination of Piest, although the corpse of the teenager was not identified.  December 26, 1978 the police find eight bodies in the crawlspace in Gacy’s home; but nine bodies were recovered. " ... one of the most horrendous (cases) I have ever had anything to do with."-- Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey. eight so far from the crawl space in the northeast quarter of the house, in an area under the office where Gacy conducted his remodeling business.

The Police have found thirty-two bodies but only five were not identified. The victims of John Wayne Gacy are: John Butkovich (18 years old), James Mazzara (20 years old), Frank Landingin (19 years old), Gregory Godzik ( 17 years old), John Szye (19 years old), Rick Johnston (17 years old), Timothy Jack McCoy (16 years old), Michael Bonnin (17 years old), Robert Gilroy (18 years old), Jon Prestidge (20 years old), Russell Nelson (21-22 years old), Victim No. 28 (14-18 years old), Victim No. 5 (22-32 years old), Darrel Samson (19 years old), Samuel Stapleton (14 years old), Randall Reffett (15 years old), William Carroll (16 years old), Victim No. 26 (22-30 years old), Jimmy Haakenson (16 years old), Victim No. 21 (21-27 years old), William George Bundy (19 years old). Michael Marino (14 years old), Kenneth Parker (16 years old), Victim No. 10 (17-21 years old), Matthew Bowman (18 years old), John Mowery (19 years old), Robert Winch (18 years old), Tommy Boling (20 years old), David Talsma (20 years old), William Kindred (19 years old), Timothy O’Rourke (20 years old), and Robert Piest (15 years old).

"I don't know what this trial cost. Whatever the cost, it was a small price. My voice is cracking because I really feel it's a small price we pay for our freedom. What we do for the John Gacy’s of this world, we will do for everyone." -- Judge Louis Garippo. March 13th, 1980 John Wayne Gacy has been sentenced to death. Judge Garippo imposes an execution date for John Wayne Gacy for June 2, 1980, but the penalty is indefinitely postponed while the case is brought before the Supreme Court of Illinois. On May 15th,1980 Gacy’s Lawyers; Sam Amirante and Robert Motta who have been paid each of the amount of $44,424 for defending Gacy have withdrawn from the case and then they billed the county $57,603 for expenses. Then his judge-Judge Garippo resigns from the bench after twelve years as a Cook County Judge to go into private practice. "If his lawyers believed that deluging the court with paper at the last instant would lead us to delay the execution in order to have more time to read the documents, they were mistaken."-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, U.S. Court of Appeals. Gacy finally died after a lethal injection of drugs at 12:58 a.m., with all his civil challenges rejected. At the Corrections Facility in Stateville near Joliet and Fried chicken and butterfly shrimp was his last meal.

      Work Cited:

 Jenkins, John Philip. “John Wayne Gacy.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 31 Oct. 2019. Web. 14 Dec. 2019.

Rumore, Kori and Kyle Bentle. "Here are John Wayne Gacy's victims - Chicago Tribune." Chicago Tribune: Chicago news, sports, weather, entertainment. 17 Dec 2018. Web. 13 Dec 2019. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/history/ct-john-wayne-gacy-victims-20181215-htmlstory.html>.

"Timeline: Suburban serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the efforts to recover, name his 33 victims - Chicago Tribune." Chicago Tribune: Chicago news, sports, weather, entertainment. Web. 13 Dec 2019. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/history/ct-john-wayne-gacy-timeline-htmlstory.html>.

"Top 20 quotes of JOHN WAYNE GACY famous quotes and sayings | inspringquotes.us." Inspiring Quotes | inspiringquotes.us. Web. 13 Dec 2019. <http://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/1001-john-wayne-gacy>.

[orbemnews]

The Week in Business: Go Ahead, Put Off Your Taxes Good morning and happy spring. Here’s hoping you can enjoy another Sunday spent ignoring your tax returns (or, if you’ve already done them, feeling smug about it). But first, here’s what you need to know in business and tech news for the week ahead. — Charlotte Cowles What’s Up? (March 14 to 20) More Time for Taxes Good news for procrastinators like me, or anyone whose taxes were complicated by the pandemic: The Internal Revenue Service has extended the deadline to file taxes by one month, to May 17. The extra time will help people navigate new tax rules that took effect with the passage of the American Rescue Plan. The law made the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits tax-free for people who earned less than $150,000 last year, a significant benefit for many people whose jobs were disrupted. But if you’ve already filed, don’t worry — the I.R.S. said it would automatically send those refunds to people who qualify. Well, That Was Awkward Relations between China and the Biden administration got off to a rocky start last week at the first face-to-face meeting between diplomats. The United States set a confrontational tone on the eve of the talks by imposing sanctions on 24 Chinese officials for undermining democracy in Hong Kong. In turn, China’s top diplomat accused his American counterparts of being “condescending,” among other claims. The purpose of the three-day meeting, according to President Biden’s team, was to find common ground on climate change and on controlling the pandemic, and to address U.S. concerns about Chinese trade and military encroachments. The tension does not bode well for making headway in future negotiations. The Case Against Disney Ten women who are suing the Walt Disney Company for what they call “rampant gender pay discrimination” have added another accusation to their list: that Disney “maintains a strict policy of pay secrecy.” A new section of the lawsuit refers to an episode in which one female Disney employee was “disciplined for disclosing her pay to co-workers.” Pay transparency is considered an important part of closing racial and gender wage gaps, and retaliation for discussing your own salary violates California law as well as the National Labor Relations Act. Disney has denied the claims and vowed to defend itself. What’s Next? (March 21 to 27) Coming to a Walmart Near You Walmart is jumping on the vaccine passport bandwagon, saying it will provide standardized digital vaccination credentials to anyone who gets vaccinated at one of its stores or at Sam’s Club. The retailer will develop a health passport app that people can use to verify their status at airports, schools, sports arenas and other potentially crowded places. Walmart joins an existing push by major health centers and tech companies, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and the Mayo Clinic, as well as a proposal from the European Union, which would require vaccine verification for travel in certain areas. How Has the Pandemic Changed Your Taxes? Will stimulus payments be taxed? Nope. The so-called economic impact payments are not treated as income. In fact, they’re technically an advance on a tax credit, known as the Recovery Rebate Credit. The payments could indirectly affect what you pay in state income taxes in a handful of states, where federal tax is deductible against state taxable income, as our colleague Ann Carrns wrote. Read more. Are my unemployment benefits taxable? Mostly.  Unemployment insurance is generally subject to federal as well as state income tax, though there are exceptions (Nine states don’t impose their own income taxes, and another six exempt unemployment payments from taxation, according to the Tax Foundation). But you won’t owe so-called payroll taxes, which pay for Social Security and Medicare. The new relief bill will make the first $10,200 of benefits tax-free if your income is less than $150,000. This applies to 2020 only. (If you’ve already filed your taxes, watch for I.R.S. guidance.) Unlike paychecks from an employer, taxes for unemployment aren’t automatically withheld. Recipients must opt in — and even when they do, federal taxes are withheld only at a flat rate of 10 percent of benefits. While the new tax break will provide a cushion, some people could still owe the I.R.S. or certain states money. Read more. I worked from home this year. Can I take the home office deduction? Probably not, unless you’re self-employed, an independent contractor or a gig worker. The tax law overhaul of late 2019 eliminated the home office deduction for employees from 2018 through 2025. “Employees who receive a paycheck or a W-2 exclusively from an employer are not eligible for the deduction, even if they are currently working from home,” the I.R.S. said. Read more. How does the family leave credit work? Self-employed people can take paid caregiving leave if their child’s school is closed or their usual child care provider is unavailable because of the outbreak. This works similarly to the smaller sick leave credit — 67 percent of average daily earnings (for either 2020 or 2019), up to $200 a day. But the caregiving leave can be taken for 50 days. Read more. Have rules changed on charitable giving? Yes. This year, you can deduct up to $300 for charitable contributions, even if you use the standard deduction. Previously, only people who itemized could claim these deductions. Donations must be made in cash (for these purposes, this includes check, credit card or debit card), and can’t include securities, household items or other property. For 2021, the deduction limit will double to $600 for joint filers. Rules for itemizers became more generous as well. The limit on charitable donations has been suspended, so individuals can contribute up to 100 percent of their adjusted gross income, up from 60 percent. But these donations must be made to public charities in cash; the old rules apply to contributions made to donor-advised funds, for example. Both provisions are available through 2021. Read more. Back in the Hot Seat Chief executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter will be grilled in Congress this Thursday, this time over their failure to crack down on the spread of misinformation. Tech executives were last summoned by lawmakers in November 2020, when Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter faced a firestorm of questioning about content moderation, mostly regarding their attempts to prevent a wave of falsehoods about the presidential election. This time, they will be asked about coronavirus vaccine misinformation and about the election fraud conspiracy theories that continue to spread on their platforms. Elsewhere in Washington The two biggest names in economic policy — the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — will make their first joint appearance this week when they testify before the House Financial Services Committee on the progress of pandemic relief efforts. The hearing comes one week after the Fed revised its economic outlook to project stronger growth and offered more reassurances that it would keep interest rates near zero for the coming years. What Else? The Education Department jettisoned a Trump-era policy that limited debt relief for students who were defrauded by for-profit educational institutions. The newly hired Teen Vogue editor, Alexi McCammond, resigned over racist and homophobic tweets that she posted a decade ago. And retail sales dropped 3 percent in February as consumers grappled with declining stimulus effects and devastating winter storms. Source link Orbem News #Ahead #Business #put #Taxes #Week

[elijahjacobs1994]

low cost health insurance in tn

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :4carinsurance.xyz

low cost health insurance in tn

low cost health insurance in tn. the USA is not a good idea. I have a couple of people who are seriously injured, and I was not at fault. I have paid $1,000 up for surgery I m not 100% sure that cost, and I could not even get the doctor until I said you. I m just trying to get better. Just have a question because i would appreciate it. If i get into a wreck, my insurance would pay for medical bills my parents pay. If i did not have my own insurance but that would my parents would only keep some of my help even though im not in as much pain as they deal. To be honest I don t want to be under the care of a caretaker, but I can be found at fault is the insurance? i think my brother has been trying to get to his brother s and i did not receive anything even a little in regards to this, and in his office. It s the hospital company. He said he will get a letter. low cost health insurance in tn and lp and sn. This plan will be affordable for low cost health insurance in rt and sn. This plan will be affordable for low cost health insurance in rt and sn. This plan will be affordable for low cost health insurance in rt and sn. This plan will be affordable for low cost health insurance in rt and sn. This plan will be affordable for low cost health insurance in rt and sn. This is the coverage for your personal health plans. It is not. If you would like to make a payment for this insurance plan call us at . Please note that your policy does not cover all costs but a portion of your medical costs and benefits. You can request it, but the process is not complete. You can go to and give us your credit card. The amount of money that we receive for your insurance premium may not be 100% your health insurance provider, but we will keep your plan in force and do other administrative. low cost health insurance in tn America for women. As a woman with a life insurance policy with a female insurer, she is the top cost to insure in the US, in part due to her age and overall health history. As with other young man, it s a good idea to use an independent health insurance agent who can help you compare policies. The American General life insurance company doesn t operate on paper, but when you contact them about other policies on their insurance, they will find out in advance. In addition, their life insurance plans can offer coverage to people with disabilities or people that aren t able to hold regular health insurance. Most young men, in fact, are going to a health care provider who would be most expensive to have their children covered, because insurance companies must charge more for health insurance based on the risk it poses to the health. The only thing that isn t likely to happen is that the insurance company will try to deny your claim. So, whether your life insurance policy won t take you through the entire.

Best Health Insurance Providers in Tennessee

Best Health Insurance Providers in Tennessee, Inexpensive Insurance Providers in Kentucky, and Best Health Insurance Providers by Industry.com in all the states. If you’re looking for the best and cheapest health insurance in Tennessee, enter your zip code in the quote box on the side of this page to get started. If you don’t have health insurance on your current policy or would rather not answer the health insurance questions on this page, you could get a quote by entering your zip code in the quote box on this page. Read over our list of the  many ways to help make your health insurance cost more affordable. No one wants to waste a penny on expensive medical bills. And the best thing to do at this point isn’t just save on health insurance coverage – you’ll need to be very careful not to get ahead of the game. Here’s what you need to know about paying for health coverage on the open market. At this point, your premium is completely tied.

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Uninsured Tennesseans pay an average of $1,972 per year for auto liability insurance in the state. With so many variables impacting your profile and rate, even the most basic information can leave you wondering what kind of insurer you choose. Here’s a sample auto insurance quote for a driver living in Memphis. To get an estimate, get several estimates for the same profile. For example, an 18-year-old male will pay about $4,300 a year, while a 30-year-old male would be paying about $4,480 a year. That’s an extra $100 a month, it just depends on where you live. It’s likely that the cheapest auto insurance company you can get is Nationwide, which is only available in the Memphis area. Another best auto insurance company for young drivers is Geico, where Nationwide earned 5 out of 5 “Very Good” rated, which is the highest of the five APRs. To evaluate your rates,.

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A Deep Dive into Health Insurance Coverage in Tennessee

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[deybold]

Professional Cleaning Company Bleached My Carpet In Tampa, FL

Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever hired cleaning services for your house or office, only to have some “mystery” faded areas on your carpet? One day your carpet is fine, but the next, somehow after the cleaning company leaves, you notice this ugly yellow area in your carpets. And you think: What happened???!!!

If your carpet got bleached mysteriously, you are not alone.

If your carpets have ever been mysteriously bleached, you are not alone. Being a carpet dyer, unfortunately, I have received countless calls from desperate home owners and property managers who notice the bleached carpet, and many times, they notice it AFTER the cleaning company has left.  But that is not surprising. Given the fact that carpet is present in most residences and businesses, if not all of them, it seems that it would be just a matter of time before carpets get bleached accidentally. But what happens when the carpets lose color after the cleaning or janitorial company provides their service? If you have ever been in this position, your fist inclination might be to contact the possible culprit, and you contact the cleaning company and you try to explain that your carpets are bleached, and that you think it was caused by some chemicals  the cleaning company used, only to have them deny that fact altogether. Now, not all cleaning companies would deny this, I have known companies that have owned up to damaging their customers’ carpets, and I know that, because they have contacted DyeBold to restore the client’s carpets. But sometimes, the cleaning contractor denies the claim and it is up to the customer to attempt to fix the carpet damage on their own.

Finding How to Dye Carpet on Internet

When this happens, the home owner or property manager will turn to the internet to scout for some way to remove that ugly bleach stain from the carpet. And to their pleasant surprise, they will find many articles explaining and guiding the reader on how to remove that carpet damage. And for a little while they are hopeful that their carpets will be ok. But as a certified carpet dyeing professional, let me tell you that many of the articles giving instructions on how to remove bleach stains from carpets area actually outright wrong. Why? For starters, many articles are written by individuals who have no knowledge of carpet care, and are simply re sharing information they have encountered on the internet about how to fix a bleach stain. But if their instruction worked, or even if they made no difference to the carpet, it might even be ok. However, some of these articles written about fixing the bleached carpets can actually cause further damage to the carpet, but more importantly, it can lead to harmful fumes to the person applying the concoction that is supposed to fix their carpets. So if you are ever in a situation where your carpets get bleached, whether caused by you or a cleaning company, the first thing to do is to NOT panic.

Can Bleach Stain Be Removed?

When carpets get bleached, more often then not, the damage is repairable, but not in the way the internet presents the solution, as the way to fix or remove bleach stains. So the simple short answer is.

NO, bleach stains cannot be removed. Why not?

Because a bleached carpet spot is an area of the fiber that has lost dyes, meaning that carpet was actually and literally bleached, much in the same way as a piece of clothing can be bleached by bleach. But although bleach spots cannot be removed, they can be restored.

So How Is a Bleached Carpet Fixed?

To restore bleached carpets, the lightened carpet fibers have to be re dyed.

How? Via a carpet dyeing process. But not all carpet dyeing is the same. Even though this craft is not new, since it has been around for as long as carpets have existed, because carpet dyeing is such a specialty skill, it can be difficult to locate an experience certified carpet dyer. Most professionals who provide carpet dyeing services, also provide an array of other services, ranging from house cleaning, carpet cleaning, tile cleaning and even duct cleaning! And therefore, they cannot be highly specialized in one skill, carpet dyeing, when they also provide all those other services.

As a carpet dyeing professional who focuses 100% in carpet & rug dyeing services, I can report that many who claim to dye carpets are in fact not experienced in providing color restoration, and can many times end up damaging the very carpets they are trying to re dye.

How do I know that? Simply because I have been contacted countless times by either the carpet cleaner who tried to help out the carpet owner/manager and ended up adding too much of one color or another. But when the carpet is damaged by an inexperienced carpet dyer, typically, the carpets can still be restored, however, since the original botched carpet dyeing job will have to be undone, before being done correctly, the cost to restore the carpets will end up being much higher.

How To Find Qualified Carpet Dyer?

Carpet Dyeing is both a skill and and art. So when looking for a carpet dyeing professional, look for these attributes:

Carpet Dyeing Training – A carpet dyer should have carpet dyeing training. There are several trainings and certifications available, which is the first step in becoming a carpet dyer. However, certifications alone are not sufficient. Because carpet dyeing is also an art, it can take years for this skill to be developed.

Carpet Dyeing Length of Experience – That is why you should find out how long a carpet dyer has been restoring carpets.

Carpet Dyeing Specialization – It is not enough to have been dyeing carpets for years. There are many individuals and companies who have been doing so for years, but they are not specialized in carpet dyeing and restoration, meaning that they also clean carpets, homes, tiles and even ducts!!! So from this perspective, it is easy to determine companies and individuals who specialize in carpet dyeing alone. A highly specialized carpet dyer will also be deft at restoring intricate patterns in carpets and rugs.

Carpet Dyeing in Florida: Tampa FL, Orlando FL, Palm Beach FL, Miami FL, Tallahasee FL

We are proud to say that at DyeBold we focus 100% in carpet dyeing, and have extensive certification in carpet & rug dyeing courses from the leading experts in the industry, as well as extensive knowledge and experience in carpet dyeing. In this photo, we were privileged to restore bleached carpets at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. We have worked with countless clients throughout the US, from interior designers, to high end hotels and property managers. We serve clients in Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Tallahasee, Jacksonvile, Naples FL, Sarasota, Bradenton, Winter Garden, and all throughout US and overseas by request.

You can check out our certifications and more about our projects here.

Summary: What To Do When Your Carpets Get Bleached

So in summary, in case you are in a situation where your carpets get bleached, here is what you should know:

DO NOT throw at the spot random chemicals in an attempt to repair the carpet. This can lead to harmful fumes and can further damage the carpet and can be deadly to health. (Ex: Do not ever mix ammonia and bleach, this fumes are highly toxic and deadly).

Do absorb the bleach spill. Place an absorbent material such as white napkins or white towels to absorb the chemical.

Contact an experienced carpet dyer. Make sure to check their credentials and experience before having them touch your carpet.

There you have it.

Questions About Carpet Dyeing?

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us!

You can check out our website for more information about our carpet dyeing services. Also check out our specialty rug dyeing division, The Rug Colorist.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/u-s-tries-to-bolster-taiwans-status-short-of-recognizingsovereignty-the-new-york-times/

U.S. Tries to Bolster Taiwan’s Status, Short of Recognizing Sovereignty - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — A visit to Taiwan by an American cabinet secretary. A sale of advanced torpedoes. Talk of starting negotiations over a potential trade agreement.

The Trump administration has taken action in recent weeks to strengthen United States relations with the democratic island of Taiwan and bolster its international standing. The efforts are aimed at highlighting a thriving democracy in Asia and countering China’s attempts to weaken the global diplomatic status of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.

That feeds into a bigger campaign by national security officials: to set the United States on a long-term course of competition and confrontation with China that any American president, Democratic or Republican, will find difficult to veer away from in the future.

“Taiwan is the most important thing from a military and credibility point of view,” said Elbridge A. Colby, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development. Mr. Colby wrote the Trump administration’s national defense strategy, which emphasizes competition with China and Russia.

Taiwan has been a fraught issue between Washington and Beijing for seven decades, and it is re-emerging as a potential focal point of tensions, as United States national security officials press their campaign against China. The officials also see bolstering Taiwan in a more urgent light given the crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong by Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

President Trump himself admires Mr. Xi and is “particularly dyspeptic about Taiwan,” once comparing it to the tip of a Sharpie marker and China to the Resolute desk, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, wrote in his new book. And the president is willing to sacrifice U.S. support for the democratic government for trade relations with China, he added. But campaign strategists have told Mr. Trump that he needs to appear tough on China for re-election purposes, giving pro-Taiwan U.S. officials an opening.

President Richard M. Nixon began a process of diplomatic opening in 1971 with Communist-ruled China to get Mao Zedong’s help in countering the Soviet Union. The United States established diplomatic ties with China in 1979 and broke off formal relations with Taiwan, which had been a sanctuary for the Kuomintang, or Nationalists, since their loss in the Chinese civil war 30 years earlier. Every U.S. administration has tried to maintain an ambiguous position on Taiwan based on the “One China” policy.

The ambiguity has helped maintain stability across the Taiwan Strait, one of the most militarized areas in the world. But as China has grown stronger and more assertive, and as Mr. Trump has begun dismantling international commitments under his “America First” foreign policy, some U.S. officials and Washington policy experts say the United States’s traditional approach to Taiwan helps hard-liners in Beijing and increases China’s threat to the island’s 24 million people.

Those officials, as well as Republican and Democratic lawmakers, aim to do as much as possible to show explicit U.S. support for Taiwan. They want to send military signals to China and to make relations with Taiwan as close to nation-to-nation as possible, short of recognizing sovereignty. Though Mr. Bolton openly advocates full diplomatic relations, many U.S. officials, including even some China hawks, have been more reluctant, fearful that such a move would mean a complete break with Beijing.

In March, officials persuaded Mr. Trump to sign the bipartisan Taipei Act passed by Congress, which commits Washington to trying to help Taiwan improve its international standing and oppose what the bill’s Senate sponsors called China’s “bullying tactics.”

The White House has publicly criticized as “Orwellian nonsense” China’s efforts to force American companies, including airlines and hotels, to use language indicating Taiwan is part of China. Some officials have discussed bringing Mandarin Chinese-language teachers from Taiwan to the United States as they try to get American schools to break ties with the Beijing-run Confucius Institutes.

In May, American officials led a failed effort at an assembly of the World Health Organization to get Taiwan observer status, over China’s objections.

But last week, Washington and Taipei orchestrated a diplomatic show of force. Alex M. Azar II, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, met on Aug. 10 with Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, in Taipei, in what was the highest-level visit by an American official to the island since 1979. Two days later, Ms. Tsai gave a video talk hosted by two policy research groups in Washington in which she stressed the need to strengthen military ties and establish a free-trade agreement.

“Foremost amongst my priorities is to establish a constructive security relationship built on the clear understanding of our shared interests in the region,” Ms. Tsai said.

A core element of U.S.-Taiwan ties is the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which obligates Washington to provide weapons of a “defensive character” to Taiwan. Democratic and Republican administrations have adhered to this. Last summer, Mr. Bolton helped push through two big packages: an $8 billion sale of 66 F-16 fighter jets and a $2.2 billion sale of 108 Abrams tanks. In May, the administration notified Congress of an intent to sell $180 million worth of advanced torpedoes.

But some administration officials argue the arms sales, and increased transit by U.S. warships through the Taiwan Strait, fall short of what Washington needs to do. They say Washington must make clear to Beijing and Taipei that it would defend Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army tried an invasion or a blockade. The Taiwan Relations Act does not address that, and past administrations have left the matter vague.

“We need to change things on Taiwan to improve the deterrent and make clearer where we stand, especially by ending any remaining ambiguity about how we’d react to the use of force and altering our military force structure and posture,” Mr. Colby said.

The administration is unlikely to try to station troops in Taiwan. But a port call is possible, as are visits by officers in uniform and training programs in Taiwan, U.S. officials say.

From the perspective of Taiwanese officials, bolstering economic ties is also critical. In her talk, Ms. Tsai called for the start of negotiations over a free-trade agreement. “We hope that the U.S. recognizes the broader strategic implications such an agreement will undoubtedly have,” she said.

When asked on Thursday at a news conference in Slovenia about Ms. Tsai’s request, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “We’re trying to figure out precisely how to proceed with that.”

Market access issues, especially over exports of American pork and beef to Taiwan, could hinder talks. But Kurt Tong, a former U.S. ambassador who specializes in Asia, wrote in May that an agreement “makes good sense as a matter of trade and economic policy — as well as China policy and Taiwan policy.”

The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated August 17, 2020

Why does standing six feet away from others help?

The coronavirus spreads primarily through droplets from your mouth and nose, especially when you cough or sneeze. The C.D.C., one of the organizations using that measure, bases its recommendation of six feet on the idea that most large droplets that people expel when they cough or sneeze will fall to the ground within six feet. But six feet has never been a magic number that guarantees complete protection. Sneezes, for instance, can launch droplets a lot farther than six feet, according to a recent study. It’s a rule of thumb: You should be safest standing six feet apart outside, especially when it’s windy. But keep a mask on at all times, even when you think you’re far enough apart.

I have antibodies. Am I now immune?

As of right now, that seems likely, for at least several months. There have been frightening accounts of people suffering what seems to be a second bout of Covid-19. But experts say these patients may have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies, which are protective proteins made in response to an infection. These antibodies may last in the body only two to three months, which may seem worrisome, but that’s perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. It may be possible to get the coronavirus again, but it’s highly unlikely that it would be possible in a short window of time from initial infection or make people sicker the second time.

I’m a small-business owner. Can I get relief?

The stimulus bills enacted in March offer help for the millions of American small businesses. Those eligible for aid are businesses and nonprofit organizations with fewer than 500 workers, including sole proprietorships, independent contractors and freelancers. Some larger companies in some industries are also eligible. The help being offered, which is being managed by the Small Business Administration, includes the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. But lots of folks have not yet seen payouts. Even those who have received help are confused: The rules are draconian, and some are stuck sitting on money they don’t know how to use. Many small-business owners are getting less than they expected or not hearing anything at all.

What are my rights if I am worried about going back to work?

What is school going to look like in September?

It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.

No matter the policy options, the United States should “make clear its support for Taiwan,” said Shelley Rigger, a political scientist at Davidson College.

But she cautioned that U.S. officials should formulate Taiwan policy based on strengthening the island rather than striking at China.

“It doesn’t seem to get said enough: There’s a certain sense of conflation or confusion of what it means to be helpful to or supportive of or affirming Taiwan versus taking a position that is more challenging to the P.R.C.,” she said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “How willing are U.S. officials to pull Taiwan into that deteriorating picture, and how willing are they to be attentive to voices that say, ‘Be careful’? Beijing won’t punish Washington, but it can punish Taipei.”

Some analysts have criticized Mr. Trump for his apparent lack of knowledge of the nuances in the U.S.-Taiwan relationship. In December 2016, before taking office, he and Ms. Tsai talked by telephone — the first time an American president or president-elect had spoken to a Taiwanese leader since 1979. Though pro-Taiwan policy experts in Washington welcomed it as an overdue move, the action created tensions with Beijing that Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, scrambled to defuse. It was clear Mr. Trump had no idea of the import of the call.

The administration took a restrained approach with Mr. Azar’s visit. Mr. Azar stuck to a carefully calibrated message throughout his three-day trip, referring to Taiwan as a “jurisdiction” and limiting his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party mainly to health-related issues.

U.S. officials said the visit was aimed at highlighting Taiwan’s success in containing the coronavirus outbreak.

China expressed its displeasure by sending two fighter jets across the median line of the Taiwan Strait. On Thursday, China’s military said it had conducted several live combat drills near Taiwan “to safeguard national sovereignty” and implied the exercises were connected to Mr. Azar’s visit.

Wang Ting-yu, a legislator from Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party who is on the foreign affairs and national defense committee, said in an interview that Mr. Azar’s trip was “a break for the Taiwan people.”

He batted away concerns about Taiwan inadvertently getting caught in the crossfire of U.S.-China relations, emphasizing that the island had its own diplomatic and defense strategies.

“If they want to give us a hand, then we appreciate it,” Mr. Wang said. “But Taiwan won’t be any country’s bargaining chip.”

Amy Qin contributed reporting from Taipei, Taiwan.

[stormhavenmedia]

Authors note; as always please follow the links and do your own research, believing random dudes on the internet is how we got here. I personally believe we should end the odious “Indian Act” and return sovereignty to Indigenous people so nothing here should be taken as an argument against Indigenous peoples, or their right to advocate for their future.  

  The Tallurutiup Imanga  agreement means a  massive chunk of strategic Canadian waters will be carved off and put under the stewardship of the Nunavut government, fully funded by the Canadian taxpayer of course.  In reality these areas will be subject to regulation under the United Nations “Sustainability 2030”  frameworks that aim to restrict citizens to approved human habitation zones and control and tax the use of all resources. It also leaves them open to exploitation by the Elite backers of these private foundations and is allowing the Liberal Junta to sell Canada off to these elites and their Chinese allies.

“At almost 110,000 square kilometres, Tallurutiup Imanga / Lancaster Sound will be the largest protected area ever established in Canada, more than twice the size of Nova Scotia. “..

  “United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Staff Report The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA“

This report examines in detail the mechanisms and methods of a far-left environmental machine that has been erected around a small group of powerful and active millionaires and billionaires who exert tremendous sway over a colossal effort. Although startling in its findings, the report covers only a small fraction of the amount of money that is being secreted and moved around. It would be virtually impossible to examine this system completely given the enormity of this carefully coordinated effort and the lack of transparency surrounding it. The failure to openly acknowledge this force and the silence of the media with whom they coordinate further emphasize the fact that until today, the Billionaire's Club operated in relative obscurity hidden under the guise of "philanthropy." The scheme to keep their efforts hidden and far removed from the political stage is deliberate, meticulous, and intended to mislead the public. While it is uncertain why they operate in the shadows and what they are hiding, what is clear is that these individuals and foundations go to tremendous lengths to avoid public association with the far-left environmental movement they so generously fund.

The so called Wet’suwet’en  blockade of the Coastal Gas-link pipeline has brought to the surface a very small part of massive funding of  Astro-Sage “Indigenous” organizations. This phenomenon is being used by massive private foundations to disrupt Canada, economically and socially. The strategy for these groups is laid out here by one of its principle authors

These Astro-Sage groups are also being used as a straw men by the Trudeau led Junta occupying the Canadian government. They advance their real agenda by creating controlled opposition to their public position, then inundating us with the “grassroots” actions of these sock puppets using their controlled press. This collaboration is natural because the exact same private Foundations creating these groups, the Rockefeller, Ford Foundations and dozens of others, including famously George Soros and Open Societies many guises, helped put the Trudeau Junta in power.

  From The JLS Report, “Local Wet’suwet’en and local residents, united against the invasion of the Bulkley Valley. We want the protestors out of our territory. You are no longer welcome here.”

My husband is the late Larry Tiljoe, a member of the Witset Band, Gilseyhu Clan and Unistoten “family” line. The Tiljoe family have lived and worked, off reserve, in the Houston area their entire lives. Larry’s father is Russell Tiljoe, Russell’s father was Alex Tiljoe, the late Chief Namox. Larry’s mother Elsie, is the granddaughter of Christine Holland, the late Chief Knedebeas. Elsie and Larry both hold trapline rights along the pipeline within Knedebeas territory and the family has a long standing and significant connection to the land in and around Houston and the Knedebeas territories. In 1993, we started a silviculture business, Nadina Mountain Contracting, located within the Morice Forest District. Our goal was to become a sustainable First Nation contractor who harvested, replanted and rejuvenated the areas we harvested. We managed our contracts and ensured their successful completion and established solid working relationships with local forestry industry key players. We were employing people from Moricetown to Burns Lake, both Native and non-Native. We were employed full time managing the land in forest health, building our business. Then the Office of the Wetsuweten of the Hereditary Chiefs came along.

The OW, situated an hour east of Houston, took over ALL the forest related activities earmarked as First Nations. We were forced us to work under the OW for contracts within our own forests; the OW took a portion of the contract value for the “service”. The OW’s lack of knowledge in forest health and neglect in their financial responsibilities continually caused our business to suffer hardship which rippled to our banker, our employees, and our suppliers. Logging has been acceptable to the OW within their territory and during our time under the OW we noticed the work was cornered by individual OW hereditary chiefs like Chief Kloun Khun – Alphose Gagnon, Chief Knedebeas – Warner William, and Chief ? Adam Gagnon.  They established their own companies and or employed down their own family lines. The OW chiefs negotiated contracts including the values and awarded contracts to themselves. The OW wanted ALL the work for the OW. We were forced out of our own forest district to the forest district an hour east of Houston”

https://www.jlsreport.com/2020/02/16/wolves-in-fancy-blankets/

The video below shows the connection between Tides and the “blockade”

“Some demonstrators from the Highway 19 blockade are apologizing, after they say there was misinformation about the K’ómoks First Nation’s involvement. Members from Extinction Rebellion Nanaimo were supporting the event and providing media outreach,”…

https://www.cheknews.ca/demonstrators-apologize-for-misinformation-about-komoks-first-nation-647384/amp/?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0LutSghXRVLSDsZSMUWCrHRNRY5I–LeuOOTL1-X5mqy8skdC0LKWzU4o

https://vimeo.com/391749233?fbclid=IwAR1aQvRoSr2-i9IAyEtZRmK0udbFWAh7IT12MS4fPCfpvapVvkY4SCo7xSo

  Dale Swampy, president of the National Coalition of Chiefs, suggests this isn’t the first and likely won’t be the last dispute of this kind. “We believe there are as many as 400 chiefs across the country that want to work with the natural resource industry – including alongside the CGL pipeline right-of-way,” he said from Alberta. “People who are opposed to the project – even though we respect their position on the matter – should respect the fact that the majority of the First Nations support the project through their elected officials.” There are 634 First Nations in Canada. But Swampy expressed doubts it’s First Nations people who comprise the majority of pipeline protesters. “I don’t think they’re Indigenous,” he said. “People in our communities around Calgary have been offered money to protest on the streets of Calgary and the streets of Vancouver.” APTN has not been able to verify this claim. Swampy said some were promised $300 a day and up to $500 if they wore a headdress. “They choose people who are disenfranchised, who have no job, no education, are in poverty, collecting welfare,” he said. “It’s a real concern for us that these corrupt environmentalists are taking advantage of our poor people, putting them in front of RCMP.” https://aptnnews.ca/2020/02/14/indigenous-rights/

 “A Wet’suwet’en hereditary subchief who helped translate a seminal Supreme Court decision that laid the foundation for greater control for Indigenous communities over their land says she opposes the blockades that have been roiling the country.  Rita George also said Thursday that she and other matriarchs have been feeling sick about the conflict and how it has split their community. She said the opposing hereditary chiefs and some of the people around them – including outside activists who have embedded themselves in the protest camp – have disrespected ancient feast-house traditions of how to treat one another.

Ms. George said it caused her great pain to have to exercise her leadership by speaking out against some of her own and particularly those outsiders who have turned her northern British Columbia community into a battleground over issues of climate change policy, resource extraction and reconciliation.”…

  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-thats-not-the-way-of-our-ancestors-wetsuweten-matriarch-speaks/?fbclid=IwAR0UCxdANaq0EIzS3guYLCmFgGtv80n9DImMM6bJib_E-Rml-kHbhDm3Rj4

As regards the ongoing blockades many of these activists are being shipped in from the U.S. All of the money comes from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Pew Trusts all founded by families involved the control of Oil. This is a foreign assault on Canada and its people , all of them.

Alot of the “leadership” are highly privileged university students mostly from the economic upper classes who fit in impersonating indigenous people with summer trips to Europe

Most of the foot soldiers are high school kids who have been so heavily propagandized in schools they don’t know which washroom to use and are convinced the world will literally end in 10 years’. In some jurisdictions theNeo-Marxist revolutionary group Extinction rebellion is allowed to directly propagandize children in schools

The cover of environmental activism and Indigenous rights is being used by some of the largest most powerful entities on earth in the ongoing effort to disrupt Canadian society and our economy. The scale of this aspect of the color revolution tactics being used should worry Indigenous peoples, and all Canadians. The people behind this want to control every aspect of all our lives. Many of the “spontaneous indigenous uprisings we saw in the last several years were not exactly what they seemed. Idle no more received some 75 000 dollars American from San Francisco based Tides Foundation in 2014.

They have however moved dangerously beyond protest groups and are now using there thin Indigenous cover to carve off large parts of Canada without public consultation, or indeed knowledge.

Destroying Canada’s Northern Sovereignty

Nunavut is an Indigenous governed province like entity. Fully funded by Canadian taxpayers under our treaty obligations. Nunavut’s Budget for the 2018 fiscal year was 2.3 Billion dollars. That represents 6,2162 per person. 1.9 billion of these funds direct come from direct Federal transfer payments. In the same period BC had about 2,0759 to spend per person most of it generated within the province. There have been repeated questions about senior salaries and bonuses among the political class. With a reported 551 persons making over 100k a year to administer 37 k people. There are also questions about the repeated and massive bonuses they award themselves.

The population in this completely externally dependent community has grown exponentially and is far outstripping the carrying capacity of this barren Northern region. With economic activity understandably low in this desolate windswept place unemployment is rampant with all its concurrent problems. The Nunavut government despite massive funding and program support seems to struggle to deal with these basic social issues.

All of the power generated in Nunavut comes from diesel power generation which in 2006 amounted to 40,280,886 liters of diesel that first must be shipped up to Nunavut as they produce none themselves. This figure would be orders of magnitude higher now. They are the only jurisdiction in Canada to generate power solely from fossil fuels in 2018.

There is currently a senior agent of the George Soros directed Tides Canada foundation  working successfully to carve out and lock off massive parts of Canada’s Northern waters, with little or no public consultation in the larger Canadian community.

Meet Sandra Inutiq. Sandra is listed as a  Languages commissioner of Nunavut, a 100k plus a year job paid out of Federal transfers.  She obtained a Law degree free of charge under a special governemnt program.

    Sandra Inutiq also seems to still be collecting up to 84k a year from Tides Canada. Nice work if you can get it, but somewhat strange considering Tides Canada has been working to completely shut down the Oil and Gas industry that supply’s Nunavut with 100% of its power. One wonders per force with whom and to what Ms Inutiq’s loyalties actually are .

 Tides Canada is a George Soros funded and directed organization. It is a foreign registered and based Foundation with more funds at its disposal than some Nation States. Yet somehow Ms Inutiq is not registered as a foreign political agent, no one questions her involvement with an organization that is been banned in 6 countries and is currently under investigation by both the US and UK authorities for various sorts of election and political interference.

Ms Sandra Inutiq  was one of the main negotiators between the Inuit and Canadian governments Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area. She got paid an additional consulting fee of course and no mention was made of her lobbying for a powerful foreign interest who’s stated goal is to erode national sovereignty and democratic control worldwide. In Ms Inutiq’s own words:

“It wasn’t until we started a conversation with Minister McKenna that the vision for protecting these waters started to become reality.”…

How convenient since Ms Mckenna’s Junta was put in power through large part by Sandra’s part time employers at Open Societies through another sock puppets called Leadnow and Vote together.

There are questions about this Foreign entities financial contributions and advocacy in favor of the Federal Liberal Party during the last election. there are also some questions about the relationship between Rockefeller connected organization World Wildlife Fund ex president Gerald Butts and these Oligarchs. Butts was given a golden parachute large enough to float an Elephant so he could leave the World Wildlife Fund and help bring Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Junta to power in 2015.

The Tallurutiup Imanga  agreement means a  massive chunk of strategic Canadian waters will be carved off and put under the stewardship of the Nunavut government, fully funded by the Canadian taxpayer of course.  In reality these areas will be subject to regulation under the United Nations “Sustainability 2030”  frameworks that aim to restrict citizens to approved human habitation zones and control and tax the use of all resources.

“At almost 110,000 square kilometres, Tallurutiup Imanga / Lancaster Sound will be the largest protected area ever established in Canada, more than twice the size of Nova Scotia. “..

So this agreement is based on power sharing between the Government of Canada and the Inuit. So lets explore how Open Societies Sandra feels about sharing with the larger Canadian society she has benefited from so much all her life. Seems when not getting paid boatloads of money by foreign oligarchs Sandra has time to do some writing for the CBC. Here is just a little example of her o,pinion on Qallunaat or “white people,”

1. You are a visitor on Inuit homelands. No matter how long your family has been in Canada or Nunavut, you are a settler on Inuit land.

2. Being close to Inuit, being proximate, does not make you an expert and voice for Inuit.

This includes those with Inuit children, an Inuk spouse, family or friends. Nor does having lived in or travelled back and forth to the North for a number of years, even knowing some Inuktitut. These situations do not give you Inuit identity, the right to claim authority over the subject of Inuitness or defining answers for Inuit. Neither does travelling to other “exotic” places make you automatically sensitive to Inuit culture.

Asking other non-Inuit how long they have been here is a common question to seemingly test legitimacy in the North, as if competing for expertise. Stop.

6. Reverse racism or racism against white people does not exist.

“Reverse racism” is often exclaimed when the opinions above are stated publicly. Or when one loses a job competition to an Inuk, an educational/training opportunity or are made to feel uncomfortable with their privilege. Reverse racism or racism against white people is not a thing.

7. Moreover, you cannot be the one to judge whether an act is racist, culturally insensitive or appropriate.

Also, by saying “I’m not racist,” or “There is no racism,” does not absolve racism or responsibility. You are assuming because you cannot see it, it does not exist.

If an Inuk or person of colour is calling something out, pay attention and listen. Listen to those that face racism every day, including shallow small talk, being spoken down to, not being listened to and clear differential treatment.

You have been socialized to be unconsciously invested in racism and there are many ways that you are willfully ignorant or racist. One is not exempt from racism because they are simply “a good person.” All white people are racist “….

Ill leave you to peruse the rest at your leisure, its a real treat.

Threatening Canada’s Boreal forests

The North isn’t the place where huge areas of Canada are being put under the thin guise of “Indigenous” management. This indigenous management in this case is funded and directed by the PEW Trusts a Privately managed foundation set up by the family owners of Sun Oil and working in lockstep with Open Societies and the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to wipe out sovereignty, control and tax the consumption of every joule of energy by every human being on the planet.

” The establishment of Thaidene Nene will bring the country closer to its commitment under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to protect 17 percent of its lands by 2020… these lands will be at the center of one of the country’s largest protected areas—covering over 2.6 million hectares (10,040 square miles).”…..

So this massive area will be administered by Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation. A spread out community of 3 300 persons. This will all be overseen by the Oligarchical PEW trusts and paid for by the Canadian Taxpayer. It will be subject to the regulation  of unaccountable mandarins of the UN.   Enjoy one of the PEW Trusts highly polished propaganda videos.

I would note that the conservation reserves and green regulation created by the PEW trusts and their partners World Wildlife Fund in Australia and North America contributed considerably to the severity of the wildfires set by environmental activists. Handily advancing that other UN control mechanism, Climate Change.

In fact Australian scientists predicted this years massive Australian bush-fires 4 years ago.

“Forest fuel levels have worsened over the past 30 years because of “misguided green ideology”, vested interests, political failure and mismanagement, creating a massive bushfire threat, a former CSIRO bushfire scientist has warned….Victoria’s “failed fire management policy” is an increasing threat to human life, water supplies, property and the forest environment, David Packham said in a submission to the state’s Inspector-General for Emergency Management.”

And he argued that unless the annual fuel reduction burning target, currently at a minimum of 5 per cent of public land, “is doubled or preferably tripled, a massive bushfire disaster will occur. The forest and alpine environment will decay and be damaged possibly beyond repair and homes and people [will be] incinerated.”

He said forest fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous level in thousands of years….In 1999 this was taken over by the state authorities, which made any private involvement in preventing the spread of fire virtually impossible. They did not prioritise personal safety or the protection of property, or carry out the traditional spring burning to create the necessary fire-control lines.

Those who feared for trees or birds were allowed to impede the burning programmes.”..

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/bushfire-scientist-david-packham-warns-of-huge-blaze-threat-urges-increase-in-fuel-reduction-burns-20150312-14259h.html

Massive fires in California and other parts of the US are  caused by the same private foundation backed “environmental” policies.

Rep. Chenoweth fought heroically to reverse the many destructive federal policies that are destroying the health of our national forests, but with little success against the huge, well-funded Green Lobby that would rather see the forests burn down than have human beings obtain any benefit from them.

In our 1999 article on the Chenoweth hearing in Oregon, I wrote: “The federal eco-saviors … have created ecological disasters of near-apocalyptic proportions. Tens of millions of acres of once-beautiful forestland have been transformed into charred moonscapes and dying, bug infested, overgrown tinderboxes set to explode into blazing infernos.”

https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/16396-burning-up-the-west-feds-greens-cause-catastrophic-fires

So we are putting thousands of square kilometers at risk of catastrophic fire by turning over their management to “Green” foundations.

These are not the only Astro-Sage organizations at work in Canada. We must identify them and disrupt them. They threaten not only Canadian sovereignty but the well being of the Indigenous peoples they are using as shields for their freedom destroying agenda. This is truly a new form of colonialism.

“Fort McKay Chief Jim Boucher told The National Telegraph, “I remember back in 1982 when the Europeans imposed a fur ban on the sale of fur, and we watched the fight, and we tried to get involved, but they were successful because the environmentalists were on their side. What they did was they impoverished our people – right across the country overnight. Our people in McKay were in a situation where there was no employment, no prospects for employment, and no prospects for any economic opportunity after the fur ban went into place.”

https://aptnnews.ca/2018/12/21/hereditary-chief-in-b-c-says-community-needs-lng-pipeline/?fbclid=IwAR1WFN8fAJG55dPvStiJOsO-_h7YjSdlYKljRbVDySfwPVGoeaXQ_pw7nfA

The Trudeau Junta have purposefully made it harder to track all of this by changing the laws surrounding “civil society” financial disclosure. These foreign entities should be treated as hostile foreign no  state actors under the Anti Terrorism act.

Any agreements we have signed with their “Indigenous” fronts must be torn up and renegotiated in good faith with transparency for the benefit of Canadians and Indigenous people not the Oligarchs or the unaccountable supranational organizations like the U.N.

William Ray

https://www.mycomoxvalleynow.com/63817/komoks-first-nation-not-connected-to-mondays-highway-blockades1/?fbclid=IwAR1zLDQx6F-uc_mMR_TVy0loQnFajFJHUEpj_H17pwf-gSyQ-a0yQu8JUdU

https://thenationaltelegraph.ca/nationals/wetsuweten-activist-society-speaks-for-few-indigenious-people?fbclid=IwAR2_5T_B6FAp-dHIRwv-Rgr381PqF5pf0ITla9ESplpbKK8WaV2ICqlq2hU

  Elites are using Astro-Sage “Indigenous” Groups to sell Canadian resources to China Authors note; as always please follow the links and do your own research, believing random dudes on the internet is how we got here.

[contractorandconsulting]

Benefits of Being a Licensed General Contractor in NY

How General Contractor license Benefits You

Are you looking to become a licensed general contractor in NY? Or you have already got into this profession. Make sure you have a general contractor license, whether you are a newbie or an experienced pro.

Most homeowners often look for a contractor’s license while hiring a General contractor in NY.

After all, carrying a license tells that a contractor has passed the test and legally allowed to work on construction projects. Plus, they are insured enough to cover the damages to their client’s property during their course of work. No wonder why a license is the first thing a homeowner is likely to expect from their Residential contractor in NY.

It simply means a general contractor license is essential for your business. It’s not only required by the Law but helps you get more jobs.

Here we have outlined some key benefits of a licensed general contractor in NY.

License is required by the Law:

This is the very first reason why you should have a general contractor license. Every U.S. state requires a general Contractor in NY to own a license.

Keep in mind that contractor license laws are strict in New York. Operating without a license can make you subject to civil and criminal penalties. In fact, it can be considered as a Class A offense in many neighborhoods and counties in NY. Fine can range from $5,00 to $5,000 if you found guilty, and civil penalties can be $100 per day. Even worse, there is a provision of imprisonment under many statutes. A vehicle being used in unlicensed construction activity can be confiscated.

You can keep such legal hassles at bay by becoming a licensed contractor in New York.

You Can Get Compensation for Your Services:

Having a GC license also helps when it comes to seeking compensation, getting reasonable value for your services, and making your contract legal. With a license, you have legal recourse for recovering monies due to your job. According to the Law, it is irrelevant whether a contractor knows you are not an authorized before signing the contract.

You will Get More Customers:

Today’s homeowners are savvy and know how to choose a licensed contractor in NY. You can easily lose your job if you don’t have a GC license.

You are Insured:

Carrying a license also makes you insured. This is what most homeowners look for. If an uninsured contractor causes damage or meets an accident on a client’s property, they can sue the homeowner. With an insured contractor, clients are not prone to this risk. Well, there are many benefits of being an Insured contractor in NY.

It Makes You a Specialist:

There are a variety of different types of GC licensing requirements for contractors in New York. While this can make it more overwhelming to get the licensing required, it also helps to show a customer that you are an expert in specific areas. For example, if you are a licensed Commercial contractor in NY, your clients will have confidence in your work.

Preventing Scams:

One of the most important reasons to get a contractor’s license is to help NY residents from frauds and scams. If it becomes a usual thing to do this type of work without any license, many shoddy people will start providing their services and tricking people into giving them a lot of money. By following the licensing laws and regulations, NY general contractors are helping to maintain the quality, reputation, and safety of the contractor industry.

How to Get a General Contractor License in New York

You must have understood the importance of a general contractor license in New York. Although a general contractor is not required a state license in New York, municipalities and local governments within the state need you to have a license.

You can apply for a GC license through Licensing and Exam Unit, NYC Department of Buildings located at 280 Broadway, 6th Floor in New York.

You are required to submit the following documents:

· Notarized and Completed the LIC6 license application form.

· Child Support Certification Form.

· Notarized letter for your business name, home address, Social Security Number, and stakeholders.

· Employer Identification Number

· Last 3 Business Bank Statements.

· Original General Liability Insurance Certificate

· Original Photo ID

You are also required to submit a 330 fee for the compulsory background investigation. If your business is located outside New York State, ask for a certified copy of your Application for Authority from the New York State Department of State.

On average, it takes up to 3–4 weeks for a Contractor’s License to be issued. It allows you to operate a general contractor business legally across New York.

FAQS ABOUT GENERAL CONTRACTOR LICENSING IN NY I have a GC license, does my company require one?

Yes. It depends upon who will be contracting to do the job. You are not allowed to assign the job to an unlicensed person. Therefore, all contractors in your company should be licensed.

What Other Obligations are Associated with General Contractor?

The aggregate price of every contract for home improvement is $500 or more. It should be in writing and include a description of the work, notice to the owner of the possibility that a claim may be filed against for unpaid claims, that the contractor is required to deposit all payments received before the completion.

What If I Failed the Background Investigation for Licensing?

In this scenario, you are required to file for reconsideration within 60 days of the date of your denial letter. You should provide a letter for reconsiderations and submit additional information related to the background investigation.

Do I Need a License for Home Improvement?

You need a home improvement’s license for repair, remodeling, renovation, modernization, or improvement to any property. However, the conditions vary based on the counties. For example, some counties and local bodies also consider interior and exterior painting in home improvement. Most counties don’t consider the construction of a new home as home improvement.

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Private Chefs Risking Their Lives to Feed the Super Rich

For private chefs, coronavirus has forced difficult conversations with their wealthy clients

Everyone’s a little stir-crazy these days, even inside the sprawling Southern California mansion where Catarina* works as a private chef. The family she’s exclusively cooked for during the last eight years canceled their vacation last week, and now they’re practicing social isolation — at least, as far as they’re concerned. “The only people who are coming and going are myself, the housekeeper, the house manager, the dog walker, the dog trainer, and themselves,” she says, “because they’re going to the office, supposedly with no one else there.”

Caterina’s clients have rich-people blinders on when it comes to their own staff, she says, which is putting everyone in the house at risk. She’s doing her best to mitigate it: She wears gloves when she’s cooking in their kitchen. She maintains six feet of social distance. But the family fails to realize that an offhand request for omelets for breakfast can send her to grocery store after grocery store in search of a stocked egg case. If anyone’s going to be Coronavirus Mary, it’s her.

Like Caterina, Ashok* has been working on salary for a wealthy Arizona family for years, cooking soigne meals and catering parties at their house. When the state’s stay-in-place orders first came out his employers let him stay home, and he used the time to take on side clients for people in lower-income brackets: “less fancy things for people who just need food on the table,” he describes via text. He also started picking up extra food and cooking through the night to deliver free meals to older people in his community.

But the situation blew up last week when, coronavirus be damned, the wife of the couple he usually cooks for was determined to host a party for two dozen people. Ashok had to shut it down. “I told her there was no way to prepare the menu because I just cannot get a hold of the food supplies,” he explained on a chef-oriented Reddit thread. “Also told her I would not force my helpers — bartender, sous, servers, etc. — to come in during this time. I don’t want to lose my job, but it’s stupidly irresponsible of me to be going shopping on a near daily basis right now as well.”

The family agreed. In fact, he negotiated three paid weeks off, after which time he will deliver meals to them without making personal contact. It’s a good thing — in the last few days he started feeling feverish. He hopes it’s exhaustion. Now he’s at home, waiting out the symptoms, asking friends to take over the volunteer cooking he was doing on the side for other elderly neighbors.

Like delivery drivers and grocery store clerks, personal chefs who make a living cooking in other peoples’ homes are being asked to put their bodies on the line each day. But for what greater good? Some are comfortable with the extra safety steps they’re taking. Others aren’t sure they can afford to turn down the work. Most know that, in the face of blithe ignorance, it’s up to them to keep themselves and their clients safe. Even the employers who claim to be diligent about social distancing seem to think their kitchen is some kind of immunity bubble and that their chefs conjure up ingredients in a virus-free poof of smoke.

According to the U.S. Personal Chef Association, there are an estimated 9,000 private chefs working in the U.S. today. Association president Larry Lynch says 90 percent of the group’s 1,000 registered members cook meals in clients’ homes rather than in the relative safety of a rented commercial kitchen. That doesn’t count the untold number of private chefs like Catarina, under contract to a single wealthy family, or gig workers who book home-based dinner parties through popular online services such as MyTable, TakeAChef, Cozymeal, and Table At Home.

Many of these larger booking companies are operating like it’s business as usual. According to a March 19 email sent to participating chefs, Table at Home did relax its reservation policies and told chefs that canceling jobs wouldn’t count against their ranking, but at the same time, the company reassured them, “We will continue to try to drive requests on our platform using our marketing and promotional campaigns. If you are still interested in working, please propose on as many opportunities as you can.”

Another service, MyChef, is using the epidemic as a recruiting tool. On March 25, it placed an advertisement on the Boston job boards: “Are you out of work due to COVID-19?” it begins. “Would you like to still advance your career by creating your own culinary business?” The ad specifies, in fact, that its service brings cooks to clients’ homes, with no mention of ensuring their safety. (At the time this article was published, Massachusetts had not issued a stay-in-place order.)

Restaurants, too, have been asked to take on private cooking gigs — but they’re largely turning them down, not just because state and city stay-at-home orders only allow pickup or delivery. Taking their equipment over to an apartment that might be contaminated? Cleaning clients’ uneaten food off their dishes? One infection among the staff could be the death blow for an ailing business. But the situation is a little more fraught for personal chefs, many of whom operate as independent contractors or small businesses.

While Lynch says that some of his members have seen demand for prepared meals rise, that’s not the case for Grace*, a personal chef in the Washington, D.C., area. Grace has hung on to two meal-delivery clients, but others have canceled after losing their own jobs. “I’m empathetic because I understand if all you can afford is to go to the grocery. But then I don’t have a client.” She makes a good chunk of her income cooking private meals. One dinner in mid-March paid enough to cover her bills for the month. Nothing is on the books for April. She’s looking into a Small Business Association loan to carry her over until the work picks back up again.

“You can’t go home at night,” the client told him. “We need you to be here so we’re all sheltering in place together.”

DeWayne*, who normally spends his evenings cooking for small parties, has taken on grocery shopping for housebound clients to make up at least some of the income he’s short. Desperate to protect his 2-year-old daughter and her immunocompromised mother, he’s staying out of other people’s homes altogether for now. But the pandemic hasn’t stopped potential customers from asking. Some people, upset they can’t go out to their favorite place, have even directed him to the restaurant’s menu and asked him to recreate it. Not wanting to burn a potential future gig, he usually saves the lecture and just tells them he’s already booked. Another chef probably said yes.

Even though most state and municipal orders only consider restaurant takeout and food delivery to be essential services, Lynch of the Personal Chef Association believes that the work of providing nutritious meals to families in this crisis time fits the definition of an essential service, too. He’s working with lawyers to draft language making the case. One personal chef Eater spoke to said his wealthy client floated the “essential services” line past him — if he stopped working, the family would be stuck ordering takeout! — but he turned them down, essentially putting himself out of work.

In webinar after webinar, Lynch is sharing the latest information about contamination from the FDA, CDC, and EPA. Their safety guidelines suggest that cooked food itself won’t transmit the virus. That said, Lynch advises personal chefs to take many extra precautions. “You have to ask the right questions of clients and make it really clear: If you decide to engage, you’ll keep social distance,” he tells them. “You’ll be sanitizing every surface, including doorknobs. They’re to stay out of the kitchen. If you’re going to serve something, put it in the fridge and move out, sanitizing on the way out.”

Bill*, who has cooked for a family of Midwestern billionaires for many years, said that these added safety measures are just an extreme form of the social distancing that he already practices with his clients, and he’s fine with it. (“It’s not a Downton Abbey kind of thing, but I respect their privacy,” he jokes.) When they’re not traveling together to one of the clients’ coastal homes, he has begun cooking meals in his own kitchen and biking or driving the food over. He now puts on gloves once he enters the house and leaves dinner in the fridge, organizing it into plastic tubs with instructions on how to heat and assemble them.

But if it’s the coming-and-going and related exposure that’s the real concern, there’s one solution that a number of rich families have proposed to their chefs: Move in. DeWayne received one offer that sounded tempting at first: Full-time work at well above his $500-a-day rate. There was a catch, though. “You can’t go home at night,” the client told him. “We need you to be here so we’re all sheltering in place together.”

Catarina’s bosses have also suggested she self-quarantine in their home. She’s been close to the family for years, but for the moment, she is holding them off, smiling away the occasional snippy comment that she doesn’t have to be there if she doesn’t want to. “I’m concerned that I might have it as an asymptomatic carrier,” is what she tells them. “You don’t want me moving in.”

*To safeguard their livelihoods, Eater guaranteed anonymity to any source who requested it.

Jonathan Kauffman is a Beard Award-winning writer based in Portland, Oregon, and the author of 2018’s Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat.

Carolyn Figel is a freelance artist living in Brooklyn.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2R1Hh8J https://ift.tt/3dHEXxl

For private chefs, coronavirus has forced difficult conversations with their wealthy clients

Everyone’s a little stir-crazy these days, even inside the sprawling Southern California mansion where Catarina* works as a private chef. The family she’s exclusively cooked for during the last eight years canceled their vacation last week, and now they’re practicing social isolation — at least, as far as they’re concerned. “The only people who are coming and going are myself, the housekeeper, the house manager, the dog walker, the dog trainer, and themselves,” she says, “because they’re going to the office, supposedly with no one else there.”

Caterina’s clients have rich-people blinders on when it comes to their own staff, she says, which is putting everyone in the house at risk. She’s doing her best to mitigate it: She wears gloves when she’s cooking in their kitchen. She maintains six feet of social distance. But the family fails to realize that an offhand request for omelets for breakfast can send her to grocery store after grocery store in search of a stocked egg case. If anyone’s going to be Coronavirus Mary, it’s her.

Like Caterina, Ashok* has been working on salary for a wealthy Arizona family for years, cooking soigne meals and catering parties at their house. When the state’s stay-in-place orders first came out his employers let him stay home, and he used the time to take on side clients for people in lower-income brackets: “less fancy things for people who just need food on the table,” he describes via text. He also started picking up extra food and cooking through the night to deliver free meals to older people in his community.

But the situation blew up last week when, coronavirus be damned, the wife of the couple he usually cooks for was determined to host a party for two dozen people. Ashok had to shut it down. “I told her there was no way to prepare the menu because I just cannot get a hold of the food supplies,” he explained on a chef-oriented Reddit thread. “Also told her I would not force my helpers — bartender, sous, servers, etc. — to come in during this time. I don’t want to lose my job, but it’s stupidly irresponsible of me to be going shopping on a near daily basis right now as well.”

The family agreed. In fact, he negotiated three paid weeks off, after which time he will deliver meals to them without making personal contact. It’s a good thing — in the last few days he started feeling feverish. He hopes it’s exhaustion. Now he’s at home, waiting out the symptoms, asking friends to take over the volunteer cooking he was doing on the side for other elderly neighbors.

Like delivery drivers and grocery store clerks, personal chefs who make a living cooking in other peoples’ homes are being asked to put their bodies on the line each day. But for what greater good? Some are comfortable with the extra safety steps they’re taking. Others aren’t sure they can afford to turn down the work. Most know that, in the face of blithe ignorance, it’s up to them to keep themselves and their clients safe. Even the employers who claim to be diligent about social distancing seem to think their kitchen is some kind of immunity bubble and that their chefs conjure up ingredients in a virus-free poof of smoke.

According to the U.S. Personal Chef Association, there are an estimated 9,000 private chefs working in the U.S. today. Association president Larry Lynch says 90 percent of the group’s 1,000 registered members cook meals in clients’ homes rather than in the relative safety of a rented commercial kitchen. That doesn’t count the untold number of private chefs like Catarina, under contract to a single wealthy family, or gig workers who book home-based dinner parties through popular online services such as MyTable, TakeAChef, Cozymeal, and Table At Home.

Many of these larger booking companies are operating like it’s business as usual. According to a March 19 email sent to participating chefs, Table at Home did relax its reservation policies and told chefs that canceling jobs wouldn’t count against their ranking, but at the same time, the company reassured them, “We will continue to try to drive requests on our platform using our marketing and promotional campaigns. If you are still interested in working, please propose on as many opportunities as you can.”

Another service, MyChef, is using the epidemic as a recruiting tool. On March 25, it placed an advertisement on the Boston job boards: “Are you out of work due to COVID-19?” it begins. “Would you like to still advance your career by creating your own culinary business?” The ad specifies, in fact, that its service brings cooks to clients’ homes, with no mention of ensuring their safety. (At the time this article was published, Massachusetts had not issued a stay-in-place order.)

Restaurants, too, have been asked to take on private cooking gigs — but they’re largely turning them down, not just because state and city stay-at-home orders only allow pickup or delivery. Taking their equipment over to an apartment that might be contaminated? Cleaning clients’ uneaten food off their dishes? One infection among the staff could be the death blow for an ailing business. But the situation is a little more fraught for personal chefs, many of whom operate as independent contractors or small businesses.

While Lynch says that some of his members have seen demand for prepared meals rise, that’s not the case for Grace*, a personal chef in the Washington, D.C., area. Grace has hung on to two meal-delivery clients, but others have canceled after losing their own jobs. “I’m empathetic because I understand if all you can afford is to go to the grocery. But then I don’t have a client.” She makes a good chunk of her income cooking private meals. One dinner in mid-March paid enough to cover her bills for the month. Nothing is on the books for April. She’s looking into a Small Business Association loan to carry her over until the work picks back up again.

“You can’t go home at night,” the client told him. “We need you to be here so we’re all sheltering in place together.”

DeWayne*, who normally spends his evenings cooking for small parties, has taken on grocery shopping for housebound clients to make up at least some of the income he’s short. Desperate to protect his 2-year-old daughter and her immunocompromised mother, he’s staying out of other people’s homes altogether for now. But the pandemic hasn’t stopped potential customers from asking. Some people, upset they can’t go out to their favorite place, have even directed him to the restaurant’s menu and asked him to recreate it. Not wanting to burn a potential future gig, he usually saves the lecture and just tells them he’s already booked. Another chef probably said yes.

Even though most state and municipal orders only consider restaurant takeout and food delivery to be essential services, Lynch of the Personal Chef Association believes that the work of providing nutritious meals to families in this crisis time fits the definition of an essential service, too. He’s working with lawyers to draft language making the case. One personal chef Eater spoke to said his wealthy client floated the “essential services” line past him — if he stopped working, the family would be stuck ordering takeout! — but he turned them down, essentially putting himself out of work.

In webinar after webinar, Lynch is sharing the latest information about contamination from the FDA, CDC, and EPA. Their safety guidelines suggest that cooked food itself won’t transmit the virus. That said, Lynch advises personal chefs to take many extra precautions. “You have to ask the right questions of clients and make it really clear: If you decide to engage, you’ll keep social distance,” he tells them. “You’ll be sanitizing every surface, including doorknobs. They’re to stay out of the kitchen. If you’re going to serve something, put it in the fridge and move out, sanitizing on the way out.”

Bill*, who has cooked for a family of Midwestern billionaires for many years, said that these added safety measures are just an extreme form of the social distancing that he already practices with his clients, and he’s fine with it. (“It’s not a Downton Abbey kind of thing, but I respect their privacy,” he jokes.) When they’re not traveling together to one of the clients’ coastal homes, he has begun cooking meals in his own kitchen and biking or driving the food over. He now puts on gloves once he enters the house and leaves dinner in the fridge, organizing it into plastic tubs with instructions on how to heat and assemble them.

But if it’s the coming-and-going and related exposure that’s the real concern, there’s one solution that a number of rich families have proposed to their chefs: Move in. DeWayne received one offer that sounded tempting at first: Full-time work at well above his $500-a-day rate. There was a catch, though. “You can’t go home at night,” the client told him. “We need you to be here so we’re all sheltering in place together.”

Catarina’s bosses have also suggested she self-quarantine in their home. She’s been close to the family for years, but for the moment, she is holding them off, smiling away the occasional snippy comment that she doesn’t have to be there if she doesn’t want to. “I’m concerned that I might have it as an asymptomatic carrier,” is what she tells them. “You don’t want me moving in.”

*To safeguard their livelihoods, Eater guaranteed anonymity to any source who requested it.

Jonathan Kauffman is a Beard Award-winning writer based in Portland, Oregon, and the author of 2018’s Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat.

Carolyn Figel is a freelance artist living in Brooklyn.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2R1Hh8J via Blogger https://ift.tt/3bGoUhy

[lastsonlost]

The Ultimate Differential Theory of US Armed Forces (Snake Model)

I don’t know the first thing about the military but this is made laugh my ass off.

Upon encountering a snake in the Area of Operations (AO)...

Airborne: Lands on and kills the snake.

USAF O-6 and above: "Get that damned snake off the fairway!"

Armor: Runs over snake. Never knows it,as well as where the tank and the snake is on the battlefield. Continues directly ahead wondering what all those new buttons in his turret do.

Army Aviation: Has GPS ten digit grid to snake. Stands off at a range greater than any other weapon system and destroys snake with precision fires at a cost equivalent of one Mercedes 350SEL. Returns to base for fighter management and a "cool one".

Army Shrink: Attempts to get snake to explain its sexual feelings about its mother.  

Army Chaplain: Tries to get snake to attend services, mend its ways.

USAF Combat Controllers: Guides snake elsewhere.

Combat Engineer: Studies snake. Prepares in depth analysis based on obscure 5 series FM about how to defeat snake using counter mobility assets. Complains that maneuver forces don't understand how to properly conduct doctrinal counter-snake operations. (Engineer School tries to hide the fact that M9 ACE proves ineffective against snakes).

Field Artillery: Kills snake with massive Time On Target barrage with three Forward Artillery Brigades in support. Kills several hundred civilians as unavoidable collateral damage. Mission is considered a success and all participants (i.e., cooks, mechanics and clerks) are awarded Silver Stars.

Infantry: Snake smells them, leaves area.

Military Intelligence, G-2: Snake? What snake? Only four of 35 indicators of snake activity are currently active. We assess the potential for snake activity as LOW.

Judge Advocate General (JAG): Snake declines to bite, citing professional courtesy.

Force Recon: Follows snake, gets lost.

USMC Infantry: Kills snake by accident while looking for souvenirs. Local civilians demand removal of all US forces from Area of Operations.

Army Mech Infantry: Runs over snake, laughs, and looks for more snakes.

Military Intelligence, S-2: Reports to ground troops that snake is a non-combatant. Six Infantry wounded. MI states that if the ground forces would have read the nesting diagram provided in the 24 page enemy intel report, they would have known the snake was a possible threat.

Military Police, Criminal Investigation: Handcuffs snake's head to its tail, reads it its Miranda rights, then proceeds to beat snake to a pulp with night stick.

USAF Missileers: Lays in target coordinates to snake in 20 seconds, but can't receive authorization from National Command Authority to use nuclear weapons.

Military Police, Field: Snake safely infiltrates rear area of operations.

Navy SeaBees: Build snake elaborate rec room, complete with secret still.

Navy SEAL: Expends all ammunition and several grenades, then calls for naval gunfire in failed attempt to kill snake. Snake bites the SEAL, and dies of salt water poisoning. Hollywood makes film in which SEALS kill Muslim extremist snakes.

Navy, Surface Action Group: Fires off 50 cruise missiles fro several ships, kills snake and makes presentation to Senate Appropriations Committee on how Naval forces are the most cost-effective means of anti-snake force projection.

Ordnance: IDs snake as having improper scales. Deadline snake and order parts against snake. Parts come in 15 days later but the snake has been upgraded to FMC due to scrounging of parts through improper channels.

USAF Para-Rescue: Lands on snake upon descending, thereby injuring it, then feverishly works to save the snake's life.

USAF Pilot, A-10: Has Global Positioning Satellite coordinates to snake. Can't find snake. Returns to base for refuel, crew rest and manicure.

USAF Pilot, B-52: Pulls ARCLIGHT mission on snake, kills snake and every other living thing within two miles of target.

USAF Pilot, F-15: Misidentifies snake as enemy Mil-24 Hind helicopter and engages with missiles. Crew chief paints snake kill on aircraft.

USAF Pilot, F-16: Finds snake, drops two CBU-87 cluster bombs, and misses snake target, but gets direct hit on Embassy 100 KM East of snake due to weather (Too Hot also Too Cold, Was Clear but too overcast, Too dry with Rain, Unlimited ceiling with low cloud cover etc.) Claims that purchasing multimillion dollar, high-tech snake-killing device will enable it in the future to kill all snakes and achieve a revolution in military affairs.

USAF Pilot, Fighter, Generic: Mis-identifies the snake as a HIND and engages it with missiles. Crew Chief paints snake on airplane.

USAF Pilot, Transport: Receives call for anti-snake equipment, and delivers two weeks after due date.

Army Pilot, AH-64 Apache: Unable to locate snake, snakes don't show well on infrared. Infrared only operable in desert AO's without power lines or SAM's.

Army Pilot, HH-53 Jolly Green Giant: Finds snake on fourth pass after snake builds bonfire, pops smoke, lays out flares to mark Landing Zone. Rotor wash blows snake into fire.

Joint Security Area (JSA) Korea: Puts on Class B uniform and stares snake down for 40 years. Snake dies of old old age, but son of snake assumes staring contest.

Army Cavalry Troopers: Shoots near snake to prevent it from crossing FLOT because their mission is "Screen" and Not "Destroy." Put in for Silver Star, but is downgraded to ARCOM w/ "V" Device. Cav is successful in not becoming "Decisively Engaged"

NTC O/C: Shoots snake with Godgun, tells it to take off its fangs and wait for Medivac. Other Snakes berated in AAR for not knowing their 9-Line Medivac.

Military Intelligence (Tactical): Puts Rubber Snakes around Snake as "Battle Field Deception." Junior MI Soldier left near to make hissing noises because sound system is deadlined.

Retired SGM working at CIF: Gives snake a statement of charges for not having the same skin it was issued. Snake goes and kills other snake; Tries to turn in other snakes' skin. Spends 8 hours in CIF parking lot washing skin.

ROTC Cadet: Cadet dies of Snake Bite after asking Snake how he did at "Advance Camp"

SFOD-D: Deploys 2 man SR Team to maintain "eyes on" while squadron prepares for deployment. $2.1 M. worth of "Discretionary" funds are used to contract a company to produce a .50 cal subsonic round whose weapon effect closely resembles a mongoose bite. FBI's HRT is deployed to stand around while an Operator shoots the snake with the "Mongoose Round" while wearing an HRT Jacket. SFOD-D Cooks and Clerks expend a total of 1.7 Million Rounds of ammo back at Bragg so that it looks like SFOD-D was never deployed...

Army or Marine Quartermaster: Encounters snake, then loses contact. Can not identify who owns snake by hand receipts. Orders new snake through supply channels. Request is denied by higher authority; issuing the unit a snake will bring the manager to a zero balance; one snake must remain on hand at all times as per their boss' guidance.

Ranger: Plays with snake, then eats it.

USAF Ground Crew:  Runs back to truck after sighting snake, then after a half hour, sends lowest ranking airman out to beat snake to death with a set of wheel chocks.

USMC Band, "The President's Own": Oboe player charms snake into a saxophone case, which is then presented as a gift to former president Bill Clinton.

Army Band, "Pershing's Own": Snake's head crushed with a mallet by bass drum player. Snakeskin turned into cool sash for drum major.

Signal, Enlisted: Tries to communicate with snake . . . fails despite repeated attempts. Complains that the snake did not have the correct fill or did not know how to work equipment a child could operate.

Signal, Officer: Informs the commander that he could easily communicate with the snake using just his voice. Commander insists that he NEEDS to videoconference with the snake, with real-time streaming positional and logistical data on the snake displayed on video screens to either side. Gives Signal Corps $5 Billion to make this happen. SigO abuses the 2 smart people in the corps to make it happen, while everybody else stands around, bitches, and takes credit. In the end, GTE and several sub-contractors make a few billion dollars, the two smart people get out and go to work for them, and the commander gets what he asked for only in fiber-optic based simulations. The snake dies of old age.

Staff Judge Advocate (JAG): Swear they saw something like that on the Discovery Channel . . . spend weeks arguing if it was a snake or not.

Special Forces: Makes contact with snake, ignores all State Department directives and Theater Commander Rules of Engagement by building rapport with snake and winning its heart and mind. Trains it to kill other snakes. Files enormous travel settlement upon return.

Supply: (NOTICE: Your anti-snake equipment is on backorder.)

Transportation Corps: "Snake? What snake? We were sleeping in the truck."

US Congress Representative (D):  After initially voting in favor of anti-snake military action, suddenly realizes that the snake can never be defeated. Goes on TV and describes current operations as 'failed' before they begin and the calls the leading herpetologist in the world 'incompetent'. Pleads with snake not to hurt us. Then introduces legislation to re-deploy all military forces to Okinawa where they can more effectively engage snakes, world-wide. Then heads overseas to attempt to negotiate our surrender to the snake. Takes intern for 'support'.

Embed Main-Stream-Media Reporter: Decides snake is patriotic nationalist agrarian reformer being molested by imperialist U.S. forces, asks snake for directions to nearest bar. If bitten by snake, charges U.S. troops with neglect of duty to protect freedom of the press.

Public Affairs Officer: "We cannot comment on any snake-related activities, and anyway that would be up to the snake's chain of command to provide comments, if any are applicable. Be sure to check out our website on 'How to handle snakes in your AO' for the current command guidelines on snakes."

Naval Aviator, Jets:  Lobbies Congress for new funds to buy "Snake-seeking ordnance," while pressing the point that blue-water ops are the only effective way to display American might to the snake and have a psychological effect on it. Gets funds, then launches strike. Can't drop on Snake due to targeting pod being "bent." Has to jettison multi-million dollar Anti-Snake Bomb into ocean. Comes back to boat and traps on pitching deck in dead of night while bitching about how "Snake gets ten-thousand feet of solid runway to do this $%!T on." Proceeds to blame maintenance chief for bent pod. Chief goes out to jet, pulls tapes, finds that pod was never switched to "ON" position.

[bigyack-com]

Here's How Ex-Nissan Boss Carlos Ghosn Escaped From Japan

Sometime last fall, a security contractor based in Asia took a call that he found curious. The man on the other end of the line, a longtime acquaintance and, like him, an expert in protecting VIPs and valuable cargoes in challenging environments, was looking to hire for a job in Japan. He offered few specifics. The assignment would involve escorting someone out of the country, he said. It would pay well. And he was looking for operatives with military or police experience and, ideally, fair-skinned East Asian faces-the kind that wouldn't stand out in Tokyo. The contractor wanted to know more. Who would the operatives be protecting? What was the specific threat? Would the client be carrying cash or gold or something else of value? The caller wouldn't say. The contractor was noncommittal but said he would get in touch if anyone else came to mind. They hung up, and the contractor didn't really think about the job again-until he and the rest of the world saw the news about Carlos Ghosn. Just before New Year's, Ghosn, the ousted leader of Nissan Motor Co. and Renault SA, completed a daring escape from Tokyo, where he was facing criminal charges that could have put him in prison for more than a decade. Despite being under intense surveillance while out on bail, with a camera trained on his front door and undercover agents tailing him when he left his house, Ghosn somehow made it to Lebanon, where he lived for most of his adolescence and is a citizen.

 On January 8, 2020, Carlos Ghosn addressed the media in Beirut accusing Japan and Nissan of unfair treatment For Ghosn, who'd spent more than 100 days in solitary confinement in a Tokyo jail and was contemplating trial in a country where prosecutors virtually never lose, it was a stunning coup. Lebanon has a policy against extraditing its citizens, and as one of the most successful member of the country's diaspora, he's a national hero, with friends who include some of the biggest names in local business and politics. His face is on a postage stamp. Safely in Beirut, he could finally attempt to rebut the allegations against him, which he argues were the result of a conspiracy between nationalist factions, both within Nissan and the Japanese government, that were determined to take him out of play. And, most important for someone who spent the better part of two decades building and cultivating his public image, he could set to work restoring his reputation as a great man of business, maybe even preparing a comeback. A few weeks after Ghosn's escape, it's not at all clear that he'll be successful. While he is, for the foreseeable future, beyond the reach of Japanese law enforcement, his legal problems are nowhere near being resolved. Ghosn is still under investigation in France, where Renault is based, while the government of Japan has issued a so-called Red Notice in his name through Interpol, exposing him to possible arrest the moment he enters a country less hospitable than Lebanon. Japanese prosecutors have also obtained an arrest warrant for his wife, Carole, claiming she gave false testimony in their investigation. And the task of restoring his stature as one of the leading lights of global capitalism is enormous. Even some of his closest former colleagues remain unsure what to make of the allegations against him. It's hard to imagine major corporations, banks, or investors agreeing to work alongside a man who's officially a fugitive. Gathered with his family in the country of his youth, Ghosn has undoubtedly upgraded his personal circumstances. What remains to be seen, though, is whether he's simply traded one form of confinement for another. While out on bail, Ghosn spent much of his time at his lawyers' office in central Tokyo, in an anonymous mid-rise building near the Imperial Palace. Forbidden under the terms of his release from accessing the internet anywhere else, he'd been given the use of a cramped meeting room with a bare table, whiteboard, and a laptop. It was also the sole location where Ghosn was allowed to call Carole, and even then only with the approval of a Tokyo judge. From April, when he had last seen her, to the end of the year, he received this permission twice: once in November, and again, for one hour, on Christmas Eve. Being unable to see his wife was the hardest part of his ordeal, Ghosn would say later, an absence that "put me on my knees." His mood only darkened on Christmas Day, after a pretrial hearing during which he learned that prosecutors wanted to delay the second of his two trials until 2021. In all, his lawyers told him, it might take five years to fully resolve his cases. Ghosn was indicted four times, all for financial misconduct. The first two charges accuse him of underreporting his compensation in official filings, leaving out tens of millions of dollars that investigators say he intended eventually to get. In the third and fourth indictments, for breach of trust, prosecutors accused him of improperly benefiting from Nissan's relationships with partners in the Arab world, and in one case of diverting $5 million of company money to his own ends via a car dealer group in Oman. Ghosn has denied wrongdoing, arguing that the compensation prosecutors claim was misreported was only hypothetical, and that he never misused Nissan funds. (He also settled a civil complaint from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which claimed he failed to adequately disclose his compensation, agreeing to a $1 million penalty without admitting the agency's allegations.) Most criminal defendants, in Japan or elsewhere, don't have the option to simply exit their proceedings if they believe they can't win. Ghosn-with ample financial resources and passports from Lebanon, France, and Brazil-did. For months, a team of more than a dozen security operatives, led by a U.S. Army Special Forces veteran, had been designing a plan to get him to Lebanon, the country where Ghosn has the most extensive connections. The secrecy was intense: Some of the participants, according to a person familiar with the operation, didn't know the identity of the person they were going to extract, even after they'd accepted the job. The team's leader had a career that couldn't have been more different from Ghosn's. Born in Staten Island, N.Y., Michael Taylor joined the U.S. Army after high school and was accepted into the Green Berets, accumulating skills that included HALO jumps: the delicate art of leaping from a plane at 30,000 feet or more and free-falling as long as possible before opening the parachute. He was deployed to Lebanon during the country's brutal, 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990, and there met his future wife, Lamia-like Ghosn, a member of the country's Maronite Christian minority. After leaving the Army, Taylor put his abilities to work in the private sector, setting up a Boston-area company, American International Security Corp., that protected executives in dangerous places, prepared vulnerability assessments for critical infrastructure, and even planned operations to rescue kidnap victims. He also collaborated with agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, on one occasion working undercover to investigate Lebanese drug traffickers, and developed a relationship with Duane Clarridge, a legendary CIA officer who oversaw a private espionage network in his retirement. Taylor, 59, also had a habit of operating in gray areas. In the 1990s he was indicted in Massachusetts for charges including illegal wiretapping and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor offenses. Later, the New York Times reported that he was connected to an "off-the-books" espionage network in Afghanistan, which was operating in apparent defiance of military rules against using private contractors as spies. (Taylor wasn't accused of wrongdoing.) And in 2012 federal prosecutors charged him with bribing an Army officer to win $54 million in contracts and conspiring with an FBI agent in an attempt to kill an investigation into the matter. Taylor pleaded guilty to wire fraud and violating federal procurement law and was sentenced to two years in prison. AISC's business collapsed. It's not clear how Taylor was connected to Ghosn, although Lebanon is small enough that there would be only a couple of degrees of separation between their extended families. Even for Taylor, getting the executive out of Japan would be an extreme assignment. After almost 20 years at the top of one of Japan's largest companies, Ghosn was perhaps the best-known foreigner in Tokyo, hardly someone who could slip onto an airplane or ship without being noticed. And he wasn't a hostage of a militant group or an abducted child; he was a criminal defendant, under prosecution by the government of a bedrock U.S. ally. Taylor and everyone he hired might face charges if their identities were discovered, at the very least restricting their future travel and employment, and at worst landing them in prison. The security contractor who was approached about an operation in Japan said he would never accept an assignment as perilous as the Ghosn job; those who might, he said, would need extremely generous compensation for the risks involved, perhaps pushing the total cost to $15 million or more. Yet according to the person familiar with the operation, Taylor was eager to help, and not only because of the potential payoff. Despite their drastically different backgrounds, Taylor sympathized with Ghosn, the person said. Taylor had been denied bail in the runup to his own trial, confined to Utah jails half a country away from his home in Massachusetts. In Ghosn he saw someone in a similar situation, a man he felt had been treated unfairly. Whether Ghosn was guilty seemed beside the point. On the ground in Japan, Taylor would be assisted by an old friend from Lebanon, George-Antoine Zayek. A gemologist by training, Zayek had joined a Christian militia during the civil war, sustaining a severe leg wound during the fighting. Doctors in Beirut wanted to amputate; instead, Taylor helped arrange for more sophisticated treatment in Boston. Zayek kept his leg, but acquired a limp-and a lifelong loyalty to Taylor. He became a U.S. citizen and was involved with Taylor's companies in the 1990s, later working for him in Iraq. Taylor declined to comment on Ghosn's escape; Zayek could not be reached for comment. The final phase of the Ghosn operation began just before Christmas. On Dec. 24 a company called Al Nitaq Al Akhdhar was billed $175,000 by MNG Jet, a Turkish aviation group, for chartering a Bombardier Global Express jet, which has a range of more than 11,000 kilometers (6,835 miles). If anyone from MNG had tried to visit this client, they would have found it difficult: There's no company called Al Nitaq Al Akhdhar at the Dubai address it provided on the charter paperwork. Around the same time, MNG has said, a different client arranged to hire another plane, a shorter-range Bombardier, to fly from Istanbul to Beirut. On the morning of Sunday, Dec. 29, Taylor and Zayek landed at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, on the chartered Global Express. On board were also two pilots and, according to people familiar with the flight who asked not to be identified, a couple of large black cases of the kind concert roadies use to hold audio gear. Later the same day, according to surveillance camera footage reported on by Japanese media, Ghosn left his residence, a rented house in the busy Roppongi neighborhood. He wore a hat and a surgical-style mask. (Used to protect against germs, these aren't unusual in Japan.) Taylor's advance team had chosen Ghosn's next destination carefully. During the months its members spent observing the plainclothes agents following Ghosn around Tokyo, they'd noticed something, according to the person familiar with the operation. For some reason, the Japanese operatives typically didn't follow their target when he entered a hotel. Ghosn soon arrived at the nearby Grand Hyatt Tokyo, which is attached to Roppongi Hills, a giant mall and office complex with a confusing array of entrances and exits on different floors. From there, according to Japanese media, he made his way to Shinagawa station, a major rail hub, and onto a high-speed train to Osaka. Ghosn's presence on public transport wouldn't, in itself, have been suspicious. Under the terms of his bail he was permitted to travel domestically, and he'd previously visited Kyoto, which is on the same bullet-train line, with one of his daughters. Like everything else about Ghosn's escape, the means of departure from Japan had been chosen with utmost care, with Taylor's team evaluating a wide range of scenarios. Using a fake passport to get Ghosn onto a private jet as a passenger was a gamble: Japanese entry stamps contain QR codes, which if scanned would quickly reveal the subterfuge. Another option, spiriting Ghosn onto a cargo vessel that would be purchased for the operation, was eventually rejected as too complicated. As part of their reconnaissance, Taylor's people had surveyed airports all over the country, looking for terminals where security was lax. A few months ago, the person familiar with the operation said, the team observed that the X-ray machines in Kansai's private terminal were much too small to scan a large box-and oversize items were simply waved through. The routine was the same on the night of Dec. 29. Airport officials didn't examine the large black cases that Taylor and Zayek had with them, and they were loaded onto the Bombardier without incident. The plane was bound for Istanbul; filing a flight plan listing Lebanon as the destination would have raised too many red flags, according to a person familiar with the subsequent investigation. A little after 11 p.m., the jet was in the air. It landed at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport about 12 hours later. An MNG operations manager named Okan Kosemen, who'd helped arrange the charter, was waiting to greet it. In subsequent statements to a Turkish judge, Kosemen recounted that when he came on board, two Americans-presumably Taylor and Zayek-led him to the rear of the cabin. There, waiting in the bathroom cubicle, was Ghosn. Kosemen waited for the crew to leave, shooed away a technician who wanted to work on the aircraft, and bundled Ghosn into a Ford van to take him to the second plane and to Lebanon. (Kosemen says he didn't know he was aiding a fugitive when he arranged the charter and that one of the people involved threatened to harm his family if he didn't cooperate. MNG also said it had no knowledge Ghosn would be on the flights.) Ghosn's passports had been taken as a condition of his bail-with one exception. He had two French passports, a privilege granted to citizens with particularly demanding travel schedules. He'd received permission to keep the second one; Japanese law requires foreigners to carry their identity documents at all times. The caveat was that it had to be kept in a plastic case, sealed with a lock to which only his lawyers had the combination. But Ghosn got it open and later presented it to an inspector at Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport like any other traveler. It was the first legal act he'd performed since leaving Japan. For the first few days after Ghosn's departure, official Japan seemed unsure how to react. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his deputies made no official statements; at the Ministry of Justice and the Tokyo prosecutor's office, journalists struggled to get a comment from a spokesperson. The near-silence briefly fueled theories that Ghosn might even have had a subtle green light for his escape-that elements within the government had grown tired of the public-relations headache of prosecuting such a high-profile defendant and decided it would be better to be rid of him. Those theories were soon discarded. On Jan. 7 prosecutors said they'd obtained an arrest warrant for Carole, citing what they claimed were false statements she made more than eight months earlier. Ghosn's representatives viewed the move, which was soon followed by a report that Japan would seek a Red Notice for her, as a clear attempt to intimidate him before his first public appearance since his escape. That was planned for Jan. 8 in Beirut, in the offices of the national journalists' association, and billed by Ghosn as a chance for him to expose the "injustice and political persecution" behind his predicament. As the appointed time approached, Japanese camera crews thronged the sidewalk outside the venue; most had been denied accreditation to attend, a decision Ghosn said was motivated by what he viewed as unfair treatment by the Tokyo press. Shielded by bodyguards, he entered the room just before 3 p.m. His hair, previously jet black, was wispy and gray, and deep lines marked his face. But otherwise he was unmistakably Ghosn: confident, unflappable, and in total command of his material. His address lasted more than an hour, illustrated with documents projected onto the wall behind him. Ghosn argued that the allegations against him had effectively been cooked up, the result of a conspiracy to halt his plans to more closely integrate Nissan with its partner Renault. The plot's organizers, he said, included Hiroto Saikawa, his successor as Nissan chief executive officer, Hitoshi Kawaguchi, who was in charge of government relations, and board member Masakazu Toyoda. All have rejected his claims. Only two topics were off-limits: the particulars of his escape, to protect the people who helped him, and the identities of Japanese officials he believes participated in the conspiracy-a concession, according to a person familiar with Ghosn's planning, to concerns within the Lebanese government about complicating relations with Japan more than he already had. "I am here to clear my name. These allegations are untrue, and I should have never been arrested," he said. "I was presumed guilty before the eyes of the world and subject to a system whose only objective is to coerce confessions, secure guilty pleas, without regard to the truth." His escape, he said, was "a risk one only takes if resigned to the impossibility of a fair trial." But as Ghosn's speech went on, entropy took hold. He jumped rapidly from allegation to allegation at a pace that was difficult to follow even for observers versed in the latest Ghosniana. At one point he committed the No.1 faux pas for foreigners in Japan, comparing his arrest to the attack on Pearl Harbor. There were flashes of arrogance, with Ghosn describing Nissan as "in the dirt" before he arrived and boasting that "20 books of management were written about me." He devoted a significant stretch of time to a relatively minor issue-whether his comped use of a room at Versailles for his 2016 wedding celebration constituted a sort of kickback for Renault's sponsorship of the palace-providing a convoluted explanation that he later summed up with, "If I had thought there had been an ethical problem, I wouldn't have done it." He then spent more than an hour gamely answering questions, switching among English, French, Arabic, and, out of deference to a small but enthusiastic crew of Brazilian reporters, Portuguese. He may not have exactly been having fun, but he clearly felt liberated. That feeling won't last if his former captors have anything to say about it. The Red Notice initiated by Japan has triggered a legal proceeding in Lebanon, and the day after his press conference Ghosn was summoned by the country's Ministry of Justice. Prosecutors questioned him on the Japanese allegations as well as a separate issue: whether he committed a crime by visiting Israel as Renault's CEO. Lebanon considers Israel an enemy, and it's illegal for citizens to travel there, with violations punishable by a jail sentence-a reminder that Ghosn's globalist values may not be fully compatible with those of his new home. And it will, for now, be his home: The government has formally barred him from leaving, taking possession of his French passport. In an interview in Beirut, Justice Minister Albert Sarhan insisted that Lebanon will carefully consider any requests from Japan and that it's too early to say Ghosn won't be extradited. But given the political and legal context, that outcome is highly unlikely. 0 CommentsGhosn says he's eager to clear his name, something his lawyer has suggested could occur through a trial in Lebanon-a country that ranked 138th in the most recent Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International. At his press conference, Ghosn was more expansive, saying he would welcome being judged "anywhere where I think I can have a fair trial." When he puts it that way, it's a reminder that for everything he's lost, he still has plenty. Among the remarkable things about Ghosn's situation in Japan, where he stood a very real chance of becoming one of the few corporate leaders of his stature ever to be sent to prison, was the degree to which all his advantages-connections, money, access to the global media-seemed to count for nothing. That turned out to be only half right. Ghosn may not have been able to beat the system, but he didn't need to. He had the resources to go around it.(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.) For the latest auto news and reviews, follow CarandBike on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Read the full article

[mortgagebrokerplanotx]

Moody’s: Home Loan Servicing Solutions sale bolsters Ocwen’s future

Contents

Payment. bogusky points

Future auto sales

Individual corporate leaders

Possibly anti-trust secret zillow/trulia

Mortgage brokerage ceo jailed

Fannie mae (otcqb: fnma

Plan to Buy Home loan service solutions Gets Tangled in Ocwen’s Web Debt holders claim the mortgage servicer is in default, but a big investor is uneasy about its proposed $1.3 billion acquisition. General Electric (NYSE:GE), the legendary American institution, founded in 1878 by Thomas Edison, is in deep trouble.

The international trade of mortgage-backed securities is generally beneficial European banks that held the mortgages could earn a return on those holdings, while providing needed capital to U.S. financial markets to support borrowing for new home construction and other productive uses

In a new report, analysts from Moody’s Investors Service say that the $1.3 billion acquisition of Ocwen associate Home Loan Servicing Solutions (HLSS) will actually help to stabilize Ocwen’s.

According to the University of southern California’s Understanding America Study (USA) Financial Management Survey conducted in April of 2015, forty-three percent of retirees have mortgage debt or a home equity loan and, of those aged 60 and older, almost one third reported having experienced “major financial stress” within the previous 3 years.

Moody’s: Home Loan Servicing Solutions sale bolsters Ocwen’s future The #2 phone number for ocwen hazard insurance customer Service with tips to quickly reach and to call a live Ocwen support rep. If you’re going to to call an agent at 866-825-9265 be sure to read here for the best way to do it with alternatives and shortcuts.

Home Loans In Moody, Texas Moody’s: home loan servicing Solutions sale bolsters Ocwen’s future – In a new report, analysts from Moody’s Investors Service say that the $1.3 billion acquisition of Ocwen associate Home Loan Servicing Solutions (HLSS. He is a graduate of University of North Texas.

Pending Home Sales Paint Problematic Housing Picture Equally problematic is the effect on homebuyers, who may have no idea how many times a home has been listed, and may easily be under the false impression that the home they are looking at is a.House Republicans propose closing down FHA JW Showcase Celebs at a Jewellery exhibition – A model poses for the cameras during a jewellery showcase event by Tibarumal, held at JW Marriott, in Mumbai, on March 10, 2014.(Pic: Viral Bhayani) See more of : Celebs at a Jewellery exhibition.Market for home construction workers improves, still rough Professional construction and remodeling community. Includes forums, trade news, contractor projects, reviews, articles and blogs. Contractor Talk – Professional Contractor & Construction Community – Product Reviews, Projects Ideas, Forums, and more.The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 203k loan. 4% (up to $6,000) of closing costs and down payment. bogusky points out that the main question that needs to be answered is, does the proposed.Aimco on legal war path, taking on Airbnb in Florida SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 23 (Reuters) – Airbnb backer General Catalyst said on Monday it has established a new $675 million venture-capital fund to invest in early-stage technology firms. The firm, known.Cash home sales continue decline, falling to 35.5% Home Sales Drop As All-Cash Buys Fall To 5-Year Low. Existing-home sales unexpectedly dipped in August, but the decline likely represents investors pulling back, a long-term positive for first-time buyers and the overall market. Sales ran at an annual rate of 5.05 million, down 1.8% from July, the National Association of Realtors said Monday.

 · Ocwen Financial: Calling Republican Lawmakers What Is Going On With The CFPB. owners of Home Loan Servicing Solutions. phony Gibbs EOD Notice" with a letter I wrote to Moody’s.

Moody’s: Home Loan Servicing Solutions sale bolsters Ocwen’s future – In a new report, analysts from Moody’s Investors Service say that the $1.3 billion acquisition of Ocwen associate Home Loan Servicing Solutions (HLSS. He is a graduate of University of North Texas. It pays to shop around for mortgage rates in Moody, TX.

Foreclosures, short sales increased 1% in Dec. Mortgage Delinquencies Set to Soar: Report Certainly, a quick look at the 61+ day delinquencies in General Motors’ subprime securitization book would seem support our rather negative thesis on future auto sales with january 2017 delinquency rates soaring to the highest levels since late 2009 / early 2010.The supply of foreclosed homes and short sales from the "shadow inventory" pipeline has been steady, Yun said. Sales of "distressed" homes, including foreclosures and. Sales of condos also.Here’s how a dodgy network of commercial mortgage brokers may cost Morgan Management their multifamily empire MBA Hall of Honor gives back to military veterans Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) is inducting 17 companies into the Hall of Honor program. The Hall of Honor recognizes both corporations and individual corporate leaders for their commitment to veterans and active-duty military personnel.The dirty, possibly anti-trust secret zillow/trulia don’t want you to know Fannie Mae announces latest sale of non-performing loans mortgage brokerage ceo jailed for stealing homes, renting them back to struggling homeowners Home prices up the most since 2006 Across US, 40% of homes are overvalued, including Miami, LA and NY. In the Los Angeles metro area, home prices ticked up 7.6 percent in July. is a product of loose lending – people are having more trouble making their.You are here. Home Blog Struggling to make your mortgage payments? The programs are designed to meet homeowners’ different needs and financial situations. Why is USBank Trust allowed to steal homes? They tefuse to provide me the balance to reinstate my home they want to.WASHINGTON, June 25, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — fannie mae (otcqb: fnma) today announced the winning bidder for its fifteenth Community Impact Pool of non-performing loans.Bank of America down in mid-day trading Bank of America logo. History & Heritage. The bank that saved Nantucket. There’s only one bank in Bank of America’s heritage that can lay claim to the discovery of a comet, the squelching of a huge fire, the hosting of a great American author and the rise of a fortune on Nantucket Island.The Truth About Trulia And Zillow Trulia and Zillow can be great resources when looking at Russian River Real Estate in terms of what is available however, if you are selling a home in the Russian River, you will need to be careful because rural property is often priced using different elements and therefore Trulia and Zillow can be extremely.You might find yourself unsure about whether or not you should use a property management company. We think you should, and we’re here to tell you why. Here’s how a dodgy network of commercial mortgage brokers may cost Morgan Management their multifamily empire.

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The post Moody’s: Home Loan Servicing Solutions sale bolsters Ocwen’s future appeared first on Mortgage Broker Plano Texas.

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[keywestlou]

MORNING STEW #5

Morning Stew time once again! I got caught up in the Virginia race and sex items and wrote about racism and sexism 2 days in a row. Catch up time now.

Two days of notes shared in no particular order.

Squeaky Fromme. Remember that name? She was part of the Charles Manson cult/family back in the late 1960’s. She did not participate in the Sharon Tate murders, however.

Squeaky spent 34 years in jail for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. She was released August 14, 2009.

Why is she of significance to my blog? When released, she went to live at 6772 Benton Road, Marcy, New York, with her boy friend Robert Valdner. He had pled guilty to a manslaughter charge in 1988.

Marcy is next door to my home town Utica. They actually adjoin.

I wonder how many know she lives there.

Marcy is a tiny town. Around 8,000 people. In a Wikipedia listing of Marcy under Notable People, 2 are named. One is Squeaky.

How a town gains fame!

A huge crowd sunday at Hot Dog Church. Close to 200, I would estimate. The crowd to celebrate Nancy’s 60th birthday. An Age of Aquarius party.

Many dressed for the occasion. In the hippy style of the day. Many men in attendance in honor of Nancy’s birthday. They too were dressed. What is good for the goose is good for the gander on such occasion.

The Back Bar, Side Bar and inside rooms were packed. People dancing in between people standing and talking. Everyone having a good time!

Donna and Terri in attendance. Terri sang a couple of songs. Blew everyone out! Donna was dressed as she probably did back when. Looked fantastic! Black pants and blouse. White bandanna around her forehead.

Nancy is very well liked. Helpful to all. All the time. This past year has been a bad one for her. A double mastectomy and then a fall resulting in a broken wrist. May all the bad things be behind her and her future years illness free.

Knew many. Including Laurie, Ingrid, Lynda and Bob. Pam, too. I had not seen Pam in a year. She had a heart attack near the time we last met. Everything fine now! God bless her!

John telephoned from the Chart Room. Someone wanted to see me. Would I come over? Eventually did. Glad I did. Met a terrific couple. Michael and Carolyn. Both extremely interesting.

Presently hail from New Mexico. Michael aka Michael Norviel an artist. His works locally show at the Art Gallery at 830 Caroline.

They have been visiting Key West for years. Michael actually lived in Key West in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. He was 8-14 years old at the time. His Dad a contractor working for the Navy.

Michael is 80 and Carolyn 75. Both young and vital.

Michael still paints. Carolyn is retired from a most interesting position. She worked years at the University of New Mexico. A fundraiser. Her job to bring in the big dollars. We shared many stories. I was a big donor at one time at Syracuse. She knew all the tricks surrounding fund raising. I learned many by being the one solicited.

Chatted with another couple sunday night after Michael and Carolyn left. I am ashamed. I failed to write their names in my note book. Whatever, another great couple. I had met them the night before, also.

Visiting From Syracuse.

The husband into Presidential libraries and the like. He had visited Hemingway House earlier in the day. He was the one who told me about Squeaky Fromme living in Marcy.

Last night was Dueling Bartenders. Terri guest performer. What a voice! Joined with Rick Dery, a volatile combination.

Liz, Josephina, Mary, Myra, and Donna enjoying the evening. As well as the other Mary.

I had never met Myra before. She came over to thank me for being so kind to Liz. Whenever I see Liz, I hurry over to her and give her a hug and kiss.

Liz  is moving on. Now in a wheel chair. They let her sit on a bar stool. However, she must be picked up and placed thereon as well as lifted when returning to the wheel chair.

I met Liz 3 years ago. She was vibrant. We hit it off immediately. She 2 years older than me. Her mind sharp. Liz in her other life had been Dean at 2 law schools and the head of the Law Boards for years. A big time legal career!

We dated for a while. Dinner at Berlin’s and the like. She would prepare lunch or dinner for me at least once a week. Her culinary skills outstanding. Knew her wines.

Always a good time!

Now, she barely talks. In and out of the hospital frequently.

Such is life.

Met Teresa and Sam from southern Illinois at the bar. Corn and soybean farmers. I got into China, the tariffs, cash flow, etc. Teresa surprised me. She said they were not hurting. Their production was selling. No change.

It was difficult for me to follow. I suspect how and who you sell to or through has something to do with it.

Teresa and Sam have been coming to Key West for 25 years. They are renting a condo at Truman Annex for a month.

They have a son and daughter. The son is in business with them. The daughter in investments with Edward Jones. Plus 4 grandchildren.

Mary and I had dinner afterwards at La Trattoria. Tiffany bartending. Tiffany and I have known each other for 25 years. Amazing!

I enjoyed spaghetti with oil and garlic. So much for love making afterwards. Mary went to Virgilio’s and I home.

A measles update.

Mother does NOT always know best. Measles were eliminated 20 years ago. But…..

The epidemic is world wide. In the U.S., in certain areas. Generally where a large number of parents exempted their children from inoculations.

Washington is one of the States experiencing an epidemic. A particular County a large number. Clark County. Fifty three infected. Mostly children. One in 4 overall. Forty percent of them kindergartners.

Clark County parents had gone to court and received exemptions from the law requiring children prior to beginning school to have certain inoculations. The grounds for exemption had to be religious or personal beliefs.

One physician said that letting a child go unvaccinated against measles is like dropping a lighted match into a can of gasoline. The explosion/fire spreads rapidly. How an epidemic begins.

Big time in El Paso last night! Trump and O’Rourke speaking at different places. Close however. At one point, Beto’s group marched across the street to where Trump was speaking.

Numbers in attendance important to Trump. He was in a building holding 6,500. He claimed 35,000 there to hear him.

O’Rourke in a park. Police estimated 7,000. Trump said 600. Even dropped the number to 15 at one point.

I give them a tie as to numbers. As to content, not even close. O’Rourke came out way ahead.

Bum Farto, where are you?

Farto was the Key West Fire Chief back in the mid 1970’s. Highly successful. Besides protecting the populace from fires, ran drugs and hookers.

He was arrested and tried in Federal Court. Found guilty of 3 drug violations.

On the day he was to be sentenced, he left home in his car. Never to be seen again. Disappeared! Did not make it to court. No one sure what happened to him.

Some believe he disappeared Jimmy Hoffa style. Others believe to this day he is lying on a beach somewhere with a beautiful young lady next to him having successfully avoided paying his debt to society.

I close with the lovely Judy Blume.

The world knows Judy Blume. Successful author. Wrote books for young ladies/teenagers initially. Many. Her books have sold in excess of 80 million world wide and have been translated into 30 languages.

She is up there with Hemingway and Tennessee Williams.

Judy now a Key West resident. She and her husband own Books & Books in Key West.

I make mention of Judy today because it is her birthday. She was born this day in 1938. Happy birthday, Judy!

Almost forgot. One last item. My podcast show this evening. Tuesday Talk with Key West Lou. Join me at 9 for a quick interesting half hour. Listen to me rant and rave about this and that. www.blogtalkradio.com/key-west-lou.

Enjoy your day!

MORNING STEW #5 was originally published on Key West Lou

[shirlleycoyle]

‘Privacy Protecting’ Car Location Data Seemingly Shows Where People Live, Work, and Go

On Friday February 19th, someone drove past the Lake Merced Golf Club, along freeway 280, and were outside the Dignity Health-GoHealth Urgent Care facility. But their car was most frequently parked outside a specific address in the fancy Noe Valley area of San Francisco.

I know this because a company called Otonomo sells the granular location data of vehicles across the United States and the rest of the world. Otonomo also makes some of its location data available as part of a free trial. The data is supposed to be pseudonymous, linked only to a non-descript identifier for the car, but Motherboard found it is relatively easy to find who a car potentially belongs to and follow their movements. A source pulled data from Otonomo en masse and provided Motherboard with GPS coordinates of drivers in California, Berlin, and other cities, and that data can be mapped to track unsuspecting drivers wherever they go, and to determine their likely home addresses and identities.

The news highlights the nascent market of vehicle location data, tapped into by insurance firms, advertisers, and others who can obtain it. Government contractors have also offered to sell such data to the U.S. military for surveillance purposes. The experiment shows how fragile the anonymity of location data can be, with one of the few barriers being an agreement in Otonomo's terms of use to not try and unmask real people in the data.

Otnomo's data offering is a "privacy nightmare," Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Motherboard. Schwartz added that the EFF has been concerned that the location data of vehicles would be "bundled and sold to data brokers, who want to turn a profit," and pointed to how Otonomo had some of this data on their public facing website.

Do you work at a location data company, or are you a location data customer? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

Otonomo, founded in Israel, has agreements with some car manufacturers to source location data from vehicles. A Otonomo presentation made for investors says the company has partnerships with 16 OEMs with an installed base of over 40 million vehicles, and that it collects 4.3 billion data points a day. The company also obtains data from telemetry service providers (TSPs), which are other sources such as navigation apps and satnavs that can act as a proxy for a vehicle's location and movements. The presentation adds that in turn "thousands of organizations" have access to Otonomo's data.

"[TSPs] have operated on the cusp of this new wave of innovation, capturing data directly from cars to improve fleet operations. The Otonomo Automotive Data Services Platform gives TSPs new opportunities to […] extract value from their data," a Otonomo product description reads. Jodi Joseph Asiag, head of content and communications at Otonomo, told Motherboard in an email that the data available to free accounts is provided by the TSPs, and that there is no "freely available automotive OEM data."

Gaining access to some of Otonomo's data is fairly straightforward. Motherboard created a free account on Otonomo's website using a Gmail address, entered a fake company name, and was able to request a spreadsheet of 10,000 location points from a specific U.S. state soon after. This data included a unique identifier Otonomo assigned to the device or vehicle, the recorded latitude and longitude, a hash of the source or provider of the data, and the street the data point related to.

The researcher source independently repeated this process and built a large collection of Otonomo data spanning different states and countries across time. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to protect them from retaliation from Otonomo. The source then determined which locations were most frequently visited by each vehicle in the data to find a potential home location.

"Even if they [Otonomo] have what they believe to be de-identification and aggregation, those techniques notoriously are ineffective at actually protecting peoples' privacy," Schwartz from the EFF said about Otonomo's approach to data privacy.

A second source who works in a company that uses car location data said that such data is "relatively easy to deanonymize."

A screenshot from a Otonomo product description. Image: Otonomo.

"I don't believe there's truly a way to anonymize this data, without completely modifying it and losing its value," they added. Motherboard granted the source anonymity as they weren't authorized to speak to the press. "Perhaps you could delete all the frequently visited areas to try and remove the chance [of] mapping it to a residence, but even then, there's always the potential of joining it to third party sources."

When told about the large data scraping, Asiag from Otonomo said in a statement that "Privacy is at the core of our platform, technology and vision."

"This is supported by our growing list of patent pending technologies which are focused on providing secure, privacy-preserving, rich and harmonized vehicle data to application developers and service providers across the automotive and mobility spectrum. This vehicle data drives new innovative and valuable services benefiting drivers, smart cities and the transportation ecosystem as a whole. These benefits range from road services, increased road safety, improved urban parking, reduced congestion, and paving the way for the electrification revolution to enabling innovative insurance," the statement added.

Asiag said Otonomo's terms of service prohibits users from attempting to derive "either directly or indirectly, the identity of an individual from any data set."

"Your message suggests that you, or the individuals that have shared with you data sets derived from free trial accounts, have used the data to identify individuals. To the extent that this was the purpose and the use in practice of the data, we request that you cease this type of processing and permanently remove any instance of these data sets," Asiag added in an email to Motherboard. Having a clause in a company's terms of service that asks users not to try and deanonymize people may not be generally considered a robust protection; malicious parties often violate terms of service to produce their own privacy-infringing products, such as facial recognition company Clearview AI scraping images from major social media sites.

"I don't believe there's truly a way to anonymize this data, without completely modifying it and losing its value."

Asiag said that "TSPs typically provide data from aftermarket telematics devices and not directly from a modem built into the vehicle by the vehicle manufacturer," and said that "TSPs have approval from their customers to share this data."

Otonomo may face problems with how it handles consent and its data under the California Consumer Protection Act, the state's privacy law which deals with user consent to give up data and other related issues, however.

"Unless Otonomo is specifically listed in every one of those agreements, that is not going to reach the 'freely-given and unambiguous' threshold for consent, particularly if users are unable to purchase the cars without providing their data to Otonomo. In addition, there would have to be consent for Otonomo to sell/share that personal data with additional parties (which, under their current practices, appear to be literally anyone)," Calli Schroeder, a privacy attorney, told Motherboard in an email. "Essentially, they're making a lot of consent claims here that I'm not sure they can back up. In addition, it's unclear whether the obligation to obtain consent extends to service providers like TSPs. That could be a real area of liability as well."

Schroeder also pointed to problems with Otonomo's opt-out mechanisms; following the "Do Not Sell My Personal Data" link at the bottom of Otonomo's website directs visitors to a page where they must select their region, and then asks them to create an account.

"Current understanding is that you cannot force a user to create an account in order to exercise their rights. There is a privacy email listed as well, but it's unclear whether users can actually exercise their rights this way or whether they will be redirected to the portal," Schroeder added.

Andrea Amico, the founder of Privacy4Cars, which sells tools to help dealerships remove data from vehicles, told Motherboard in an email that "Most consumers don't know that when they purchase, lease, or rent a car, they inadvertently consent to their data being collected and shared with third parties, and the third parties of the third parties, and so on. Even when they do, it is very uncommon for vehicle manufacturers to publicly disclose the individual names of any parties with whom they share personal data."

"Consequently, while individuals around the world gain more and more rights over their data, the extreme murkiness of the automotive data ecosystem means it is very, very challenging for drivers and vehicle occupants to exercise those rights in practice—because they have no idea who has their data in the first place!" he added.

Representative Anna G. Eshoo told Motherboard in a statement that "The results of this investigation are extremely troubling and speak volumes to the need for stronger privacy regulations. That’s why Congress should pass comprehensive privacy legislation, as I've proposed in the Online Privacy Act, to protect Americans from malicious use of their data."

Asaig said Otonomo has now introduced more vetting to the free account creation process on the company's site. Otonomo’s website now offers potential users access to a 30 day free trial if they contact the company, rather than the trial just being open for anyone to use immediately.

"Otonomo will conduct further internal review and explore ways to strengthen the ability to prevent unauthorized use of the data. To that end, in the short term we have removed direct access to the free trial from our website and added additional layers to the vetting process prior to granting free trial access to the limited randomized data on the platform," she said.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast CYBER, here.

‘Privacy Protecting’ Car Location Data Seemingly Shows Where People Live, Work, and Go syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[sinrau]

August 20, 2020 at 1:07 PM EDT

Federal prosecutors in New York unsealed criminal charges Thursday against Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, and three other men they alleged defrauded donors to a massive crowdfunding campaign that claimed to be raising money for construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a news release, prosecutors said Bannon and another organizer, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, lied when they claimed they would not take any compensation as part of the campaign, called “We Build the Wall.” Bannon, prosecutors alleged, received more than $1 million through a nonprofit entity he controlled, sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage while keeping a “substantial portion” for himself.

The campaign, publicly supported by several of the president’s allies, raised more than $25 million through hundreds of thousands of donors, the news release states.

Prosecutors alleged that Bannon and Kolfage along with two others — Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea — routed payments from the crowdfunding campaign through the nonprofit and another shell company, disguising them with fake invoices to help keep their personal pay secret.

All four were arrested Thursday and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. They were expected to make court appearances later in the day.

Bannon, a law enforcement official said, was taken into custody off the coast of Westbrook, Conn., while aboard a 150-foot yacht owned by a friend, Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui — who is wanted by authorities in Beijing on charges of fraud, blackmail and bribery. This official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation.

Another law enforcement official said that Attorney General William P. Barr was briefed about the matter in advance.

Bannon, 66, served on Trump’s presidential campaign and then as the White House’s chief strategist. He was ousted in the summer of 2017 amid what appeared to be a major falling out with Trump, who derided his onetime confidant as “Sloppy Steve.” An attorney and a spokeswoman for Bannon did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

Asked about the matter Thursday, Trump said he felt “very badly” but asserted of Bannon, “I haven’t been dealing with him for a very long period of time.” Trump said he felt the private fundraising effort was “something I very much thought was inappropriate to be doing.”

“I don’t like that project,” the president said. “I thought it was being done for showboating reasons.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump had “no involvement in this project” and pointed to a tweet he issued last month in response to a ProPublica story about a privately funded section of wall, saying: “I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads. It was only done to make me look bad, and perhaps it now doesn’t even work.”

“President Trump has always felt the Wall must be a government project and that it is far too big and complex to be handled privately,” McEnany said in a statement. During the last presidential campaign, Trump vowed that Mexico — not U.S. taxpayers — would fund the border wall.

Those involved in the project had close ties to the administration, and campaign memorabilia was often pictured on the privately built section of the border wall.

Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. was a guest at a symposium hosted by the We Build the Wall group in New Mexico in 2019, praising the organization as “private enterprise at its finest.”

“Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else,” he added.

One of the group’s advisers, Kris Kobach, is the former Kansas secretary of state known for his hard-line views of immigration and close ties to the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Kobach was defeated in a Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Kansas.

In January 2019, Kobach told the New York Times that he had described the organization to President Trump in a personal phone call and that he had given it his blessing.

“I talked with the president, and the We Build the Wall effort came up,” Kobach said. “The president said, ‘The project has my blessing, and you can tell the media that.’ ”

Other board members included Erik Prince, a conservative activist and defense contractor close to Bannon, as well as former congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.).

In a statement, an attorney for Prince said he joined the group’s advisory board because he was a believer in its mission to build a wall on the southern border. “He had nothing to do with the conduct alleged in today’s indictment, was never contacted in connection with any investigation, and doesn’t know anything about it,” attorney Matthew L. Schwartz said.

Kobach and Tancredo could not be immediately reached for comment.

Bannon was brought in to lead Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 after it had cycled through two other campaign managers and was trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton in the polls. He was the impetus for some of Trump’s populist ideas and a provocateur, coming up with ideas such as bringing Bill Clinton’s accusers to a debate after damaging audio emerged of Trump suggesting he could sexually assault women. Before working for Trump’s campaign, Bannon had promoted many of the same ideas that Trump espoused during the race, via the conservative news site he had run, Breitbart.

Once joining the White House as the president’s top political strategist, he kept a whiteboard of campaign promises in his West Wing office, along with newspaper articles on which Trump had written messages to him with a Sharpie.

He was ousted after seven months in the White House, having clashed with a number of senior officials — most notably the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Bannon was frequently profane and was accused by a number of other administration officials of leaking damaging information about them.

But he kept a prominent role in Trump’s Washington, throwing parties at his Capitol Hill townhouse, which he called the “Breitbart Embassy,” and hosting prominent government officials and media figures.

In early 2018, Trump viciously attacked Bannon for his comments published in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” which included on-the-record quotes by Bannon criticizing Trump’s family, the president and the White House’s operations.

He has slowly come back into Trump’s orbit, though he is not in regular touch with him. The president appreciated Bannon’s fierce defense of him during his impeachment, and Bannon hosted a pro-Trump podcast with Jason Miller, now a Trump campaign strategist, until earlier this year.

In private, Bannon was often critical of the president’s focus and performance in the White House, people who know him say, though he has remained publicly supportive.

Kolfage, 38, of Miramar Beach, Fla., is a military veteran who in 2004 was severely injured in a rocket attack while he was stationed in Baghdad. According to the We Build the Wall website, he lost both of legs and his right arm instantly and was in a coma for three weeks. He would later take a civilian role in the Air Force, work on a veterans advisory committee for then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and found a coffee company.

Kolfage’s wife declined to comment.

In a 23-page indictment, prosecutors described how Kolfage and others in December 2018 launched the wall-building fundraising campaign to immediate success, raising almost $17 million in the first week — money they claimed would be given to the federal government. But with success came scrutiny, and GoFundMe, the site the group had been using to collect funds, suspended the campaign and warned Kolfage the donations would be refunded if he could not identify a legitimate nonprofit to which they would be transferred.

Around that time, Kolfage recruited Bannon and Badolato, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, prosecutors alleged. The two took significant control of the campaign’s day-to-day activities and oversaw creation of a nonprofit, We Build the Wall Inc., to which funds could be transferred and then spent on private construction of a border wall, prosecutors alleged.

The group claimed publicly and to the crowdfunding website through which it had initially raised funds that Kolfage would take no salary and that “100 percent” of the money raised would be spent on wall construction, prosecutors alleged. It also agreed that existing donors would have to opt in to having their funds transferred to the new nonprofit.

“I’m taking nothing! Zero,” Kolfage wrote on social media. He also wrote a mass email to donors asking them to buy from his coffee company because that was how he “keeps his family fed and a roof over their head.”

For his part, Bannon said during interviews, “we’re a volunteer organization,” prosecutors alleged.

Privately, prosecutors alleged, the men discussed how that messaging would drive donations and opt-ins, and from January to October 2019, they collected more than $25 million from new or existing donors. And contrary to their public assertions, they schemed to make sure they were paid, the indictment says.

“As alleged, the defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” acting Manhattan U.S. attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement announcing the case. “While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.”

In total, prosecutors alleged, Kolfage received more than $350,000 in donor funds, routed through various accounts and shell companies to help keep them secret, and used them to pay for home renovations, a boat, a luxury SUV, a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery and personal taxes and credit card debt. Bannon and the others also received hundreds of thousands of dollars, spending it on travel, hotels and personal credit card debts, the indictment says.

After learning of authorities’ investigation from a financial institution in October, prosecutors alleged, Kolfage and Badolato began communicating on encrypted messaging apps and added a statement to the campaign’s website that Kolfage would be paid a salary starting in January. On Wednesday, Kolfage tweeted that he had deleted the campaign from the GoFundMe site, alleging it had blocked a separate attempt by him to raise money for those wanting to sue the Black Lives Matter group.

The We Build the Wall project had worked with Fisher Industries, a North Dakota company. Trump has regularly promoted the company, saying it should get a bigger border contract — comments that have concerned some officials in the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security.

Earlier this year, Fisher received its biggest contract yet for work associated with the border wall.

Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.

[brajeshupadhyay]

Does Blood Plasma Work for Covid-19 Patients? No One Knows.

Randomized trials outside the United States have not been able to prove plasma’s effectiveness, either. A trial at seven medical centers in Wuhan, the likely ground zero for the virus, concluded that convalescent plasma did not significantly improve patients’ recovery time.

The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated August 4, 2020

I have antibodies. Am I now immune?

As of right now, that seems likely, for at least several months. There have been frightening accounts of people suffering what seems to be a second bout of Covid-19. But experts say these patients may have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies, which are protective proteins made in response to an infection. These antibodies may last in the body only two to three months, which may seem worrisome, but that’s perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. It may be possible to get the coronavirus again, but it’s highly unlikely that it would be possible in a short window of time from initial infection or make people sicker the second time.

I’m a small-business owner. Can I get relief?

The stimulus bills enacted in March offer help for the millions of American small businesses. Those eligible for aid are businesses and nonprofit organizations with fewer than 500 workers, including sole proprietorships, independent contractors and freelancers. Some larger companies in some industries are also eligible. The help being offered, which is being managed by the Small Business Administration, includes the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. But lots of folks have not yet seen payouts. Even those who have received help are confused: The rules are draconian, and some are stuck sitting on money they don’t know how to use. Many small-business owners are getting less than they expected or not hearing anything at all.

What are my rights if I am worried about going back to work?

Should I refinance my mortgage?

It could be a good idea, because mortgage rates have never been lower. Refinancing requests have pushed mortgage applications to some of the highest levels since 2008, so be prepared to get in line. But defaults are also up, so if you’re thinking about buying a home, be aware that some lenders have tightened their standards.

What is school going to look like in September?

It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.

As in the U.S. trials, the Wuhan study had trouble recruiting participants and concluded early with just 103 volunteers. An analysis recently conducted by researchers, including Drs. Joyner and Casadevall, found that several overseas studies hinted that plasma was effective, but not all of them were randomized.

An Opening for President Trump

The Trump administration has framed convalescent plasma as a rare bright spot in the pandemic.

Eager to present his administration as marching toward a “cure,” Mr. Trump has mentioned plasma alongside remdesivir and dexamethasone, two coronavirus treatments that have been shown to be effective in randomized trials.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the leader of the White House’s coronavirus task force, at one point pushed for the federal government to secure 500,000 bags of plasma to store for a possible wave of infections in the fall, according to a senior administration official. She also pushed for plasma transfusions in nursing homes, the official said.

When asked about these claims, a task force official said that Dr. Birx wanted to move quickly to capitalize on the period of time after a person is infected, when their plasma contains higher antibody levels. Dr. Birx said she wanted clinical trials to include vulnerable people in nursing homes, the official added.

Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, began discussing the benefits of plasma at White House briefings in March. In interviews and congressional testimony since then, he has presented it as one of the few therapeutics the agency can publicly endorse.

Last week, he said the F.D.A. was “encouraged by the early promising data that we’ve seen” and that it was “studying these data to determine, ultimately, the safety and efficacy of this product.”

The post Does Blood Plasma Work for Covid-19 Patients? No One Knows. appeared first on Shri Times News.

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