China official October factory PMI unchanged at 49.8, shrinks for third month - from TRUNEWS

Activity in China’s manufacturing sector unexpectedly shrank for a third straight month in October, an official survey showed on Sunday, fueling fears that the economy may be cooling further in the fourth quarter despite a raft of stimulus measures.

The official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) was at 49.8 in October, the same pace as in previous month and lagging market expectations of 50.0.

A reading over 50 points suggests an expansion in activity while one below that level points to an contraction on a monthly basis.

Data last week showed the world’s second-largest economy grew 6.9 percent between July and September from a year earlier, dipping below 7 percent for the first time since the global financial crisis, though some market watchers believe current growth is much weaker than government figures suggest.

To shore up growth, the government has cut interest rates six times since November and lowered the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves four times this year. The latest cut in interest rates and banks’ reserve requirement came in late October.

Beijing has also ramped up infrastructure spending and eased restrictions on home purchases to revive the flagging property market.

(Reporting By Xiaoyi Shao and Nick Heath; Editing by Kim Coghill)

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Russian airliner with 224 aboard crashes in Egypt’s Sinai, all killed - from TRUNEWS

A Russian airliner carrying 224 passengers crashed into a mountainous area of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula on Saturday shortly after losing radar contact near cruising altitude, killing all aboard.

A militant group affiliated to Islamic State in Egypt, Sinai Province, said in a statement it had brought down the plane “in response to Russian airstrikes that killed hundreds of Muslims on Syrian land”, but Russia’s Transport Minister told Interfax news agency the claim “can’t be considered accurate”.

The Airbus A321, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia under the brand name Metrojet, was flying from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg in Russia when it went down in central Sinai soon after daybreak, the aviation ministry said.

“I now see a tragic scene,” an Egyptian security officer at the site told Reuters by telephone. “A lot of dead on the ground and many who died whilst strapped to their seats.

“The plane split into two, a small part on the tail end that burned and a larger part that crashed into a rockface. We have extracted at least 100 bodies and the rest are still inside,” the officer, who requested anonymity, said.

Both black boxes of the plane had been found, Mohamed Hossam Kemal, the civil aviation minister, told a news conference.

Kemal said communications between the plane and air traffic control before the crash had been normal and that nothing irregular had occurred before the accident.

“The plane did not request a change of route,” he said.

Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail also told the news conference that there did not appear to be any unusual activity behind the crash but the facts would not be clear until further investigations had been carried out.

Ismail said 129 bodies had so far been removed and the chances of finding survivors were now near-impossible.

Bodies were being transported to various hospitals with 34 arriving in the Zeinhom morgue in Cairo early in the evening.

Islamic State, in a statement on Twitter, said it had brought down the aircraft.

Sinai is the scene of an insurgency by militants close to Islamic State, who have killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police and have also attacked Western targets in recent months. Much of the Sinai is a restricted military zone.

Militants in the area are not believed to have missiles capable of hitting a plane at 30,000 feet. Islamic State websites have in the past claimed responsibility for actions that have not been conclusively attributed to them.

Russia, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, launched air raids against opposition groups in Syria including Islamic State on Sept. 30.

Two of Europe’s largest airlines, Lufthansa <LHAG.DE> and Air France-KLM <AIRF.PA>, said they would avoid flying over the Sinai peninsula while awaiting an explanation on the cause of the crash.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi promised Russia’s President Vladimir Putin he would allow Russian experts to join the investigation.

The prime minister said a Russian team would arrive in Egypt later on Saturday night. The country is also preparing to receive the families of the victims.

TELEPHONES RINGING

Putin declared a day of national mourning for Sunday. The passengers included 214 Russians and three Ukrainians.

A middle-aged man in a gray overcoat, who gave his first name as Nayeel, wept as he spoke to reporters as he came out of a hotel near St Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, where a special reception center has been set up for families of the victims.

He said that his wife had been on the plane.

“At six am she sent me a text message saying: I’m boarding. God be with me.’ And that was it,” he said. The man said the rest of the family had already returned from a holiday in Egypt, but his wife had opted to stay on, which is why she was on the Saturday morning flight.

The A321 is a medium-haul jet in service since 1994, with over 1,100 in operation worldwide and a good safety record. It is a highly automated aircraft relying on computers to help pilots stay within safe flying limits.

Airbus said the A321 was built in 1997 and had been operated by Metrojet since 2012. It had flown 56,000 hours in nearly 21,000 flights and was powered by engines from International Aero Engines consortium, which includes United Technologies <UTX.N> unit Pratt & Whitney and Germany’s MTU Aero Engines <MTXGn.DE>.

Emergency services and aviation specialists searched the wreckage for any clues to the crash. Wreckage was scattered over a wide area.

“We are hearing a lot of telephones ringing, most likely belonging to the victims, and security forces are collecting them and putting them into a bag,” the security officer at the scene said.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said it was checking fuel samples from the aircraft’s last refueling stop, in the southern Russian city of Samara, according to RIA news agency. Searches were being carried out at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport where the airline that operated the plane is based.

Kogalymavia was founded in 1993, and was earlier called Kolavia. Its fleet consists of two A320s and seven A321s.

Russia and other former Soviet republics have relatively poor safety records, notably on domestic flights.

Some Russian air crashes have been blamed on the use of aging aircraft, but industry experts point to other problems, including poor crew training, crumbling airports, lax government controls and neglect of safety in the pursuit of profits.

The aircraft took off at 5:51 a.m. Cairo time (10:51 p.m. EDT) and disappeared from radar screens 23 minutes later, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said in a statement. It was at an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,400 meters) when it vanished from radar screens.

Accidents at cruising altitude are one of the rarest categories of accidents but also among the most deadly, accounting for 13 percent of fatal incidents since 2005, according to Boeing.

Investigators would be looking into, among other things, the weather at the time, the pilots’ experience, maintenance records, signs of a stall and any evidence of an explosion.

Experts consistently warn air accidents are usually caused by a cocktail of factors, both human and technical.

According to FlightRadar24, an authoritative Sweden-based flight tracking service, the aircraft was descending rapidly at about 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) per minute when the signal was lost to air traffic control.

France‘s civil aviation safety agency (BEA) said it would send a team to Egypt on Nov. 1 to join investigators from Germany and Russia. The United States Secretary of State John Kerry offered U.S. assistance, if needed, a spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by Ehab Farouk, Ahmed Aboulenein, Lin Noueihed and Abdelnasser Aboul Elfadl in Cairo, Jason Bush and Christian Lowe in Moscow, Tim Hepher in Paris; Writing by Michael Georgy and Lin Noueihed; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Raissa Kasolowsky)

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Religious Freedom Bill Under Fire in Florida - from TRUNEWS

In Florida, a bill that would guarantee business owners religious liberty is coming under fire just days after it was introduced in the legislature.

State representative Julia Gonzalez sponsored House Bill 101, which would guarantee the freedom to refuse to “produce, create or deliver a product or service” to business owners, other individuals, religious groups, and health care groups if by doing so it would violate their religious or moral beliefs.

Gonzalez told the Herald Tribune, “There have been various situations where there are increasing possibilities of subsections of society having their religious freedoms encroached on.  Over time it became obvious to me we need to adopt some statutory protections.”

Not surprisingly, LGBT activists say the bill amounts to protection of bigotry, one spokesman called the bill “plainly malicious and proudly discriminatory.”

If the measure is signed into law by Governor Rick Scott, the bill would be a stark contrast to those states and communities that have disallowed or drastically limited how and when socially conservative views on marriage can be expressed.

According to the Herald Tribune, the legislation would allow adoption agencies the freedom to decide who is best to adopt children, and businesses with five owners or less could decide with whom they wish to do business.

The measure is similar to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which caused an uproar in Indiana.  That state’s Republican governor was pressured into negating the law, and one business was temporarily shut down due to death threats.

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9/11 virtual reality puts user inside World Trade Center and gets public backlash - from TRUNEWS

A virtual reality app that lets users experience the 9/11 attacks from the perspective of a worker inside the World Trade Center is receiving criticism for being too graphic. The app was not made to be “obscene or sensationalist,” its makers say.

The game, called ‘08:46′ after the exact time that American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, is a narrative-driven virtual reality simulation for Oculus Rift that allows users to“embody an office worker in the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 events,” according to the app’s makers, a group of French university students.

The project was created through “countless hours of research in order to try to properly recreate the atmosphere and dynamics within the top floors of the towers,” the makers have said. The app “was designed and developed as a school project during three months by a six members team, working in close collaboration with two actors for [motion capture] and voice acting.”

The project has been criticized as tasteless or exploitative of the tragic event. The app’s creators, however, insist they did not have sinister intentions.

“In the team, we are all in our twenties,” Anthony Krafft, a student at the French school ENJMIN, told Tech Insider. “And 9/11, on a global scale, changed as much our social interactions as our geopolitical context.”

The game is not commercial, he said. The team wanted to take on a historical event, and to “remind that 9/11 was, for the victims, first and foremost a workday like every other workday.”

“It was essential to us to be accurate, as we could never be obscene or sensationalist out of respect for the victims,” he said.

Others are not as open-minded as Krafft. Predictably, the game has fielded much opposition on social media and online discussions, including an at times heated Reddit thread from September, when the app was first introduced.

“Why would anyone want to create a real life horrific event? Keep it in fiction please,” YouTube user FrankyManky said.

YouTube user Pandemonium Lig added: “Am I wrong or is more than very unhealthy to have seek to make money creating and representing this horror of scene?!!”

Still others believe the app and potential games with similar attributes can provide a lesson about history and ways to prevent conflict, as the events of 9/11 led to two massive, drawn-out US ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“There is nothing Controversial about it,” said Reddit user vulkare. “It’s simply a re-creation of the events. Since the Rift came out, I have thought 9/11 would be a great subject for a VR experience because it can allow someone to see what that experience was like as if they are there. VR itself is just a medium, so what difference does it make if you watch a documentary about the events of 9/11 or try a VR experience of the same event?”

YouTube user deathpresent101 added: “If anything this is a good idea. hearing the planes crash into the building was scary. If kids were shown this in context to other disasters through out history. It could give kids perspective and real empathy to the situations. And a definite urge not to repeat history.”

YouTube user Augure Zera mocked some Americans’ double standard regarding violent video games: “Americans, 9/11: ‘Boo, why u do no respec memorize of victimz, pls’ Americans, Modern Warfare/Call of Duty: ‘F*** YEAH, m’gon kill sum dem trrrists, ups sorry fo the bumbs millions of civilize.'”

(Article reprinted by permission and courtesy of RT.com )

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RNC To NBC: Forget Any More Debates - from TRUNEWS

The Republican National Committee announced they have suspended their debate on the NBC Network in February. This move comes as outrage spread across the media Thursday over CNBC’s handling of this week’s Republican Presidential debate in Boulder, Colorado.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus sent an open letter to Andrew Lack, chairman of NBC News, declaring they are suspending the partnership because the CNBC debate had been conducted “in bad faith.”

Priebus wrote, “We understand that NBC does not exercise full editorial control over CNBC’s journalistic approach. However, the network is an arm of your organization, and we need to ensure there is not a repeat performance.”  NBC news called the statement a “disappointing development,” saying “we will work in good faith to resolve this matter with the Republican Party.”

A spokesman for Republican candidate Ben Carson said in an email to The Daily Caller, ““We have no objections to the RNC’s decision.  The debates must focus on the American voters and not on network ratings of moderator egos.”

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Gingrich Says Odds Of Hillary Indictment 1 in 3 - from TRUNEWS

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is publicly giving one in three odds that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be indicted over her actions connected to the terrorist attack in Benghazi in 2012.

Appearing on Fox News, Gingrich said, “if your friends understand, for example, that Hillary Clinton is a liar, and they go to the coffee shop Saturday morning, and they are armed with that information, then the independents and moderates may well start charging.”

Gingrich saying that he believes Clinton will eventually become the Democratic Presidential nominee unless she’s indicted, putting the odds of an indictment at one in three.

If that happens, says Gingrich, “there’ll be an enormous vacuum in the Democratic Party.”

Gingrich went on to describe Clinton as a “layer cake,” saying “she is Benghazi, then she is emails, then she is Cheryl Mills, who, as her chief of staff, took half a million dollars for negotiating with a foreign government while serving in the State department, then she’s Huma Abedin, who was paid more than the President while working for foreign companies and serving the State Department, and then she’s the Clinton Foundation. “

He also says part of the challenge for the news media is, in his words, they only cover one layer of the case at a time.  Adding, “it’s never going to end.”

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SPLC Debunked: Black Man Arrested For Arson of Six Churches in St. Louis - from TRUNEWS

An African-American man in his 30s has been arrested for setting a string of fires at black churches in St. Louis, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting.

The unidentified suspect is accused of setting seven fires at churches between Oct. 8 and Oct. 22. The first six fires occurred at black churches in predominantly black neighborhoods. The last fire was set at Shrine of St. Joseph, a white church in a predominantly black neighborhood.

The arsons causes minimal damage, but federal investigators were brought in.

Speculation swirled that the fires were racially-motivated, especially given the proximity to Ferguson, Mo., the St. Louis suburb that was the site of massive protests last year over the police-involved shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man.

A white priest at St. Louis’ Christ Church Cathedral asserted that the arsonist had racist motives.

“Holy God, if we ever needed a wake-up call to believe that racism is alive in St. Louis — if this is not it, I don’t know what it could be,” Mike Kinman said, according to CNN.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacist groups, suggested in an article last week that the arsons were carried out by white supremacists.

The group quoted a journalist who covers African-American issues who said that the fires were “both alarming and not surprising.”

“This is alarming because domestic terrorism is alive and well,” David A. Love told the SPLC. “It is such a problem that the U.S. Department of Justice recently predicted increases in violent acts by white extremists who are responding to a new reality in which people of color will become a majority in America.”

The SPLC also quoted Love blaming “a vicious cycle created by rightwing politicians, the NRA and hate groups who stir up anger, fear and resentment over changing demographics and want their country back.”

“Arson and other crimes are a natural outgrowth of that. These groups need a scapegoat, whether African Americans, Latino immigrants, the LGBTQ community or others,” he continued.

For its part, the SPLC did tweet a link to the Post-Dispatch’s article noting that an African-American man is the suspect in the case.

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U.S. Military Supreme Court Hears Case of Marine Discharged For Bible Verse - from TRUNEWS

The highest U.S. military court has agreed to take up the case of a Marine who was reduced in rank, court-martialed and given a bad conduct discharge for refusing to remove Bible verses from her work station.

Monifa Sterling, who was a lance corporal stationed at Camp Lejune in North Carolina in May of 2013, kept a Bible verse on her computer in three places. The verses read “No weapon formed against me shall prosper” from the book of 54th chapter of Isaiah.

Sterling’s staff sergeant demanded she remove the verse but she wouldn’t. The next day Sterling arrived at her station to find the verses ripped down, so she put them up again. This cycle repeated, and soon Sterling was court-martialed. She was convicted of disrespecting a superior commissioned officer, failing to go to an appointed place of duty, as well as disobeying a lawful order on four different specifications.

Mike Berry, Sterling’s attorney from the Christian legal group the Liberty Institute, called the court-martial a “pretty drastic step” that violates her First Amendment right to religious expression. Two lower courts have ruled against Sterling. Now, The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the military equivalent of the Supreme Court, will hear her case likely in the spring of next year.

Sterling now lives in North Carolina and has had trouble finding a good job because of the blemish on her military record. She also does not receive any benefits usually due to veterans because of the bad conduct discharge.

Berry acknowledged that military service members forfeit their full First Amendment rights when they join. Soldiers, for example, do not have full free speech when it comes to expressing their political views. But Berry told The Daily Caller News Foundation that doesn’t apply to religious exercise.

“Even though there are things that a person in the military would not be allowed to say under free speech, that same logic does not apply to religious expression,” Berry told TheDCNF. “Religious expression is  a unique subset that is given greater protection than free speech.”

Sterling was convicted of disobeying a lawful order. Berry said the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires that the government have a compelling interest to prevent someone from freely exercising their religion and they must do this using the least restrictive means possible. He said it’s hard to imagine a compelling government interest for making someone take Bible verses off their work station.

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Leftist O’Malley Parrots Globalist Agenda Against Gun Rights - from TRUNEWS

Martin O’Malley doesn’t know why he is so far back in the polls right now, but he knows he wants to enact stricter gun laws.

In an interview with MRCTV Wednesday, O’Malley, who was at the Boulder, Colorado GOP debate was asked why he was doing so poorly in the polls and he shot back at the reporter, “I don’t know man what do you think?” 

The reporter replied, “Hey, I’m the reporter,” and O’Malley said, “But I’m the candidate and I’m not going to answer your question. People will figure that out. Look man it’s early in the process.”

When asked about why he was at the GOP debate, O’Malley explained, “I’m here because gun safety legislation is critically needed for our country. All of these people here are part of a growing consensus that people and we see this content is coming together in the Democratic Party for common-sense gun safety legislation.”

“We bury far too many Americans from gun violence,” explained the former mayor of Baltimore. “And while we’ve had that discussion in our party. We’ve now had a few Democrat or Republican debates and it never has even come up as an issue. So I’m hopeful tonight that the moderators will ask the Republican candidates if 80% of Americans actually believe in universal background checks why can’t we find the backbone to confront the NRA and actually get it done as a nation?”

The reporter then commented, “You buried a hell of a lot of them in Baltimore didn’t you?”

O’Malley replied, “Yeah, we sure did man.”

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Washington Post Exposed as Paid Shill for Russian & Chinese Propaganda - from TRUNEWS

Chinese and Russian propaganda supplements are regularly included in The Washington Post, but the widely read newspaper won’t say how much money it gets on the deals.

China Watch – a China Daily publication – and Russia Beyond The Headlines – a Rossiyskaya Gazeta publication – have both appeared in the Post for years as paid advertising supplements. Both foreign periodicals are owned and operated by their respective governments.

“These paid supplements have run in the paper semi-regularly for many years, and have always been clearly labeled as advertising,” Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We give advertisers wide latitude to have their say — generally if the ads are not illegal or advocating illegal actions we try not to place limits on speech or content.  We have accepted the China Daily and Russia Beyond the Headlines ads for years under these standards,” Coratti said.

The Post also hosts a website for China Watch. Coratti refused to say how much the Post was paid for either publication. “We don’t disclose that type of information for any advertising,” she said.

The Russia Beyond The Headlines material has appeared in other major news papers, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

“Most, including The Washington Post, have very clear guidelines for advertising and how advertising is distinct from the main product,” The New Ethics of Journalism Editor Kelly McBride told TheDCNF. “Most consumers are not fooled by the printed product.”

McBride said she had not seen the online versions of the printed material published by the Post.

“China Watch Daily is slugged at the top of every page as ‘An Advertising Supplement to The Washington Post,’ and the first page of each advertisement states ‘This supplement, prepared by China Daily, People’s Republic of China, did not involve the news or editorial departments of The Washington Post,’” Coratti said as an example. “On top of all that, the layout and format of the supplements differs from our editorial content in a number of ways, including headline style, body font and column width.”

Previous news articles reported that the Post didn’t clearly mark that the supplements were separate from the newspaper, particularly online.

The Chinese government is “using the logo of The Washington Post to create the impression this is like any other section of The Washington Post,” Center for Investigative Journalism Accuracy In Media Director Cliff Kincaid told Life Site News in 2012. “If you didn’t know where this comes from, it looks like a regular newspaper.”

China Watch online has “few visual clues that the stories aren’t written or edited by the Post,” Nieman Lab reported in 2010. “The structure is the same as other Post sections.”

The Atlantic also pointed out in 2011 the ambiguity of China Watch’s website in an article titled “Official Chinese Propaganda: Now Online from the WaPo!” Reporter James Fallows did, however, note that the paper insert is “clearly labeled” and is necessary to “stay in business.”

Also, “small font” is used to note that Russia Beyond The Headlines is separate from the Post, the Washington Free Beacon reported in 2014.

Previous news articles also claimed that neither China Watch nor Russia Beyond The Headlines clearly described their relationships with their governments.

“There are issues of transparency associated with who publishes China Watch,” University of North Carolina journalism professor Lois Boynton told the Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo in 2012. “The ‘about’ blurb doesn’t provide that detail. Although many people may know that China mainstream media is government-controlled, it may not be clear for all readers.”

Meanwhile, Russia Today, another Russian-operated news organization, claimed the Post was motivated by coverage, rather than money.

“The Washington Post has sought to meet increasing demand for Russian news in the United States of America by publishing a six page news supplement devoted to the country,” wrote Russia Today, another government-owned publication, in 2006. “Even though the Washington Post didn’t create the spread they will ensure it corresponds with the paper’s editorial guidelines.”

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Friday October 29, 2015 – Carl Teichrib and Pastor Jamie Morgan - from TRUNEWS

Forcing Change’s Carl Teichrib gives Rick an update on his attendance at the world Parliament of religions in Salt Lake City. In part two, Pastor Jamie Morgan tells Rick why she advises her Assemblies of God congregation to abstain from Halloween festivities.

Download MP3
Carl Teichrib | Forcing Change
Pastor Jamie Morgan | Life Church | Williamstown, NJ

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Marco Rubio: Hillary Clinton Misled Americans on Benghazi - from TRUNEWS

“CBS This Morning” host Charlie Rose was shocked Thursday morning when Florida Sen. Marco Rubio stood by his stance that the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton misled Americans about the cause of the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.

“[Last night] I said Hillary Clinton lied about Benghazi,” Rubio said in a post-debate interview. “There’s no doubt about that, Charlie.”

Rose defended Clinton by blaming intelligence.

“The CIA was changing its own assessment of what happened there,” Rose told Rubio.

“That’s not accurate,” Rubio countered.

“What was very clear is that from the very early moments of that attack she knew that it was a terrorist attack, as she shared by email with various people, and yet she continued to perpetuate the lie that this was something —”

Rose was baffled as to why the former first lady would lie about Benghazi.

“If you’re calling her a liar by saying she perpetuated a lie, then why do you think she did that? What was her motive?” Rose asked.

Rubio laid blame for her lying on the 2012 re-election and how President Obama was trying to avoid any narrative that he wasn’t strong on terrorism after claiming al-Qaida was on the run.

The CBS host remained stunned: “You are saying, senator, that Hillary Clinton lied because she wanted to help Barack Obama in his re-election campaign. That’s a serious charge.”

“Yes. Well, it’s the truth,” Rubio responded. “That’s not only why she did it; that’s why everyone in the administration did it.”

“They didn’t tell the truth of what truly happened, and the families of those victims deserve better.”

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China Empowers Provinces to Implement New Two-Child Policy - from TRUNEWS

China’s top family planning authority said on Friday the central government will leave provinces to hash out the details of implementing a new policy allowing couples to have two children.

About 90 million families may qualify for the new two-child policy, which would help raise the population to an estimated 1.45 billion by 2030, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said in an online statement. China, the world’s most populous nation, had 1.37 billion people at the end of last year.

The policy, initially announced on Thursday by the ruling Communist Party, represented a further relaxation of the long-standing and controversial “one-child policy”. Beijing hopes it can help offset the burden of an aging population.

For decades, China harshly implemented the one-child policy, leading to forced abortions and infanticides across the country. In recent years, however, the policy has been relaxed, and some couples are allowed to have a second child. Others are permitted a second child if they pay a fine.

Despite Thursday’s relaxation of the policy, the government will remain heavily involved. Families wishing to have a second child would still need approval, although eventually the commission will seek to shift to a system of registration rather than approval, deputy director Wang Peian said in the statement.

Critics say the policy change comes too late and will not have the desired effect. By around the middle of this century, one in every three Chinese is forecast to be over 60, with a shrinking proportion of working adults to support them.

Wang said the commission expected a labor force aged between 15-59 years to rise by about 30 million by 2050, stabilizing expectations for economic growth.

After taking power in 1949, the Communist government promoted big families but in the late 1970s it introduced the “one-child policy” as a way to keep the population from spiraling out of control.

China’s birth rate stands at about 1.6 children per family, according to Lu Jiehua, a professor in Department of Sociology, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology in Peking University.

“If this figure doesn’t rise significantly after five years, I think the government will take further steps to cut restrictions on births. Ideally the rate should be 2.1, which can boost the economy and social development best,” said Lu.

With a modest rise in the fertility rate to 1.74, Zhou Hao, senior Asia emerging markets economist at Commerzbank AG, said the ratio of people over 65 years old to those aged 15-64 would climb to 43 percent by 2050 from 13 percent this year.

“In fact, under any projection, China’s old-age dependency ratio will pick up sharply, which means that the relaxation of population policy will only smooth the slope of old-age dependency ratio over time,” he wrote in a note.

Still, Credit Suisse saw business opportunities in any increase in births. The policy relaxation would result in three million to six million additional babies per year, or a boost of 17-33 percent from the current 16.5 million newborns per year, it said in a separate note.

Assuming the cost of raising a child to be about 40,000 yuan a year, the additional consumption would amount to 120 billion to 240 billion yuan a year from the end of 2017, or 4-6 percent of total retail sales, it estimated.

Investors were quick to trade on the news, pushing up shares of toy makers and other childcare-related stocks in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Shares of baby stroller maker Goodbaby International Holdings Ltd and diaper maker Hengan International rose more than 5 percent and 2 percent respectively. Instant formula makers also gained, with Beingmate Baby & Child Food Co rising by the daily limit of 10 percent.

Beijing loosened the family planning policy in late 2013, allowing couples to have a second child where one partner was an only child, but as of June, only 1.5 million of the 11 million eligible couples applied to expand their family, said the paper.

Yuan Xin, a scientist at Nankai University in Tianjin, was quoted by the China Daily newspaper as saying the latest change will have a greater impact on rural families who are more interested than city dwellers in having larger families.

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U.K. Seeks ‘Emergency Brake’ For Non-EU Countries - from TRUNEWS

Britain is seeking an “emergency brake” to allow countries which are in the European Union but outside the euro zone to delay decisions that could threaten their interests, the Financial Times reported.

Britain, which is not a member of the 19-member single currency bloc, is seeking to renegotiate its membership of the EU before a membership referendum that Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to hold by the end of 2017.

The FT, citing unnamed European ministers and officials, said Britain was seeking protections which would allow non-euro members close to being overruled in areas key to the single market to delay a vote and trigger additional consultations at the level of EU leaders.

However, British finance minister George Osborne has told his EU peers that London will not seek any veto or special carve-out for Britain’s large financial services industry, the newspaper said.

A spokesman for Britain’s finance ministry declined to comment on the FT report.

Cameron is due to spell out his proposals for changing Britain’s relationship with the EU next month.

Britain is also seeking measures to protect financial firms against discrimination based on where they are based, and guarantees that non-euro countries will not be forced to bear the costs of bailing out euro zone nations, the FT said.

A call for EU cash to tide Greece over until a euro zone bailout angered London earlier this year.

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Judge Orders Louisiana to Fund Baby Killing at Planned Parenthood - from TRUNEWS

A Louisiana judge issued an order on Thursday blocking attempts to defund Planned Parenthood clinics in the state, finding that more than 5,000 low-income patients would lose access to healthcare including cancer screenings and gynecology exams.

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles issued a preliminary injunction that requires Louisiana to continue providing Medicaid funding to the reproductive health organization’s clinics.

Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican candidate for president, moved to strip the group’s funding this summer after the release of secretly recorded videos about how Planned Parenthood handles the tissue of aborted fetuses.

Louisiana was the first of three Southern states to announce plans to end its contract with the organization to provide medical services to low-income residents.

Jindal’s efforts were met with a temporary block by deGravelles earlier this month, followed by the preliminary injunction on Thursday that will prevent attempts to defund the organization as both sides continue to wrangle in court.

Jindal has vowed to challenge the judge’s order in a federal appeals court. “We will appeal the decision to the 5th Circuit and we are confident that the court will reverse this ruling,” his office said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood does not provide abortions in Louisiana, court records show. The defunding efforts target other health services that it provides to low-income patients at clinics in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the reproductive health organization said.

“It is offensive that Governor Jindal continues to play political games with women’s health care,” Melissa Flournoy, Louisiana State Director of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, said in a statement.

“He cannot drown out the voices of Louisianans who want access to STI testing, birth control, and lifesaving cancer screenings. We are not going anywhere,” she said.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Alabama blocked attempts to defund Planned Parenthood clinics amid controversy over the release of covertly recorded videos about its handling of aborted fetal tissue.

Planned Parenthood has denied the videos show wrongdoing and challenged similar defunding efforts in other Republican-controlled states, calling them politically motivated.

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Greece Migrant Crisis: 22 Drown 144 Rescued - from TRUNEWS

Greece rescued 144 refugees and recovered the bodies of 22, including four infants and nine children, after their boats sank in two separate incidents in the Aegean sea, the coastguard said on Friday.

The death toll from drownings at sea has mounted recently as weather in the Aegean has taken a turn for the worse, turning wind-whipped sea corridors into deadly passages for thousands of refugees crossing from Turkey to Greece.

The coast guard said 138 migrants were rescued and 19 drowned after their wooden boat capsized off the island of Kalymnos late on Thursday.

In a second incident off the island of Rhodes, three people, including a child and an infant, drowned and four were missing. Six people were rescued at sea, the coastguard said.

Some 16 people, including two infants and eight children, were confirmed dead and 274 people were rescued when a wooden boat they were on literally fell apart in rough seas off the Greek island of Lesbos late on Wednesday.

Greece has been a transit point for more than 570,000 refugees and migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East and beyond this year, triggering bickering among European nations at odds on how to deal with one of the biggest humanitarian crises in decades.

Refugees have reported smugglers offering ‘discounts’ of up to 50 percent on tickets costing between 1,100 to 1,400 euros to make the journey on inflatable rafts in bad weather, UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Thursday.

Perceptibly sturdier wooden boats cost more, at between 1,800 and 2,500 euros per passenger.

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FBI Deployed Surveillance Planes During Baltimore Riots - from TRUNEWS

The FBI deployed at least 10 flights of surveillance planes equipped with advanced aerial surveillance technology, including infrared and night-vision cameras, to monitor the Baltimore riots earlier this year, according to government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The flights, totaling more than 36 hours and involving at least two planes, occurred over Baltimore from April 29 to May 3, showed the flight logs provided to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act. The ACLU, a civil rights group, released the logs to Reuters and other news organizations on Friday.

Half of the flights carried Baltimore police, in addition to FBI officials, and a majority of them occurred at night over Baltimore during several days of civil disorder that followed the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

The FBI has previously acknowledged that surveillance flights occurred.

In congressional testimony last week, FBI Director James Comey did not elaborate in detail on how surveillance flights are conducted or approved.

But he acknowledged that planes were also used at the request of local authorities during protests last year in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer.

The documents released by the ACLU “fill some of the gaps that we and the public have had about the government’s use of surveillance technology on these planes,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU, which is concerned about privacy and profiling issues raised by aerial surveillance.

The Baltimore Police Department referred questions about the flights to the FBI.

In a statement to Reuters, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said each Baltimore flight “produced infrared and day color, full-motion FLIR (forward-looking infrared) video evidence which is maintained in accordance with record retention policies.”

An FBI memo dated May 1 described the support provided at the request of the Baltimore authorities.

“The potential for large scale violence and riots throughout the week presents a significant challenge for the Baltimore Police Department for airborne surveillance and observation,” the memo noted in its justification of the flights.

One plane used was a Cessna propeller plane that, according to documents from the Federal Aviation Administration, possessed an infrared camera mount and a multi-sensor camera system manufactured by FLIR Systems, an Oregon-based company.

The widespread and largely secretive use of aerial surveillance has drawn attention from Congress, where lawmakers in recent months have pushed the FBI to be more forthcoming about the legal authority and technical scope of such flights.

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Carson: Support For Biblical Marriage Not in Conflict w/ Views on Gay Rights - from TRUNEWS

Ben Carson, frontrunner in the struggle to become Republican presidential candidate, said on Wednesday that his support for gay rights initiatives when he was a director at major companies does not clash with his opposition to gay marriage.

But some leaders in the social conservative movement that has backed Carson say his more than 15-year record on the boards of retailer Costco Wholesale and food manufacturer Kellogg  could pose a challenge for him as he seeks the nomination.

Carson supported various initiatives at both companies, such as barring discrimination based on gender identity, providing health insurance for employees’ domestic partners, and offering more diversity training. Because of such changes the companies now are ranked as some of the best in the United States by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocates.

“I think he has to explain this,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Christian conservative lobbying group Family Research Council. “As he is pursuing the presidency, what he has to make clear is that the board positions should not be reflective of his public policy.”

Perkins and other conservative leaders say they fear that some of the changes at American corporations could be used to punish employees with unpopular political views. They worry, for instance, that workers who do not support same-sex marriage could be found in violation of anti-discrimination policies.

David King, a senior lecturer of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said Carson’s stance could cost him backing, especially in the early battleground state of Iowa. Those voters, King said, will “be the toughest group for him to try to convince that he can divorce boardroom politics from presidential politics.”

One of those voters is Lynn Proudfoot, a Republican activist and self-described social conservative in Des Moines, Iowa, who said he has not decided who to support in a party caucus to be held in February. Told of Carson’s stance in the boardrooms, Proudfoot said he was surprised and displeased. “I would look disfavorably on that,” he said.

To be sure, Proudfoot said other conservative may be more focused on backing Carson because of his fierce opposition to abortion and give him a pass on the boardroom matters.

Carson’s boardroom record appears to clash with his fiery rhetoric on homosexuality in televised interviews: he compared same-sex marriage to bestiality in 2013, and implied in March that sex acts among prison inmates show homosexuality is a choice. He has apologized for both statements.

But Carson has said his choices as a director are consistent with his broader claims that he is not anti-gay, only opposed to same-sex marriage: “My general attitude would have been, of course we protect the rights of everybody,” he told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.

He echoed those remarks during the debate between Republican candidates in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday when asked about his time on the board of Costco. “There is no reason that you can’t be perfectly fair to the gay community,” he said.

Gregory Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents gay conservatives, said the corporate initiatives may reflect new social attitudes and may not hold Carson back in primaries. “I certainly don’t see him as some fire-breathing homophobe,” Angelo said.

Fellow directors said they do not recall Carson opposing any of the initiatives presented to the board.

“Ben Carson never came into the boardroom with any kind of social policy commentary,” said Jeffrey Brotman, who chairs Costco’s board. Kellogg director Donald Knauss said he also remembers Carson went along with the policy changes.

Gay rights questions have drawn attention in the 2016 presidential campaign after this year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Many large U.S. businesses supported the ruling or have taken other policy steps favored by gay activists in recent years, tracking public attitudes.

Leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton mocked Carson for his views on same-sex marriage this month during a meeting sponsored by New York gay activist group Human Rights Campaign, saying Carson “says that marriage equality is what caused the fall of the Roman empire.”

Last year Costco was named “best perceived brand among LGBT Americans” by YouGov BrandIndex, an online measure of consumer perception. Kellogg and Costco also both ranked highly in recent surveys by Human Rights Campaign, with Kellogg getting a perfect score of “100” and Costco posting a “90”.

HRC also gave top scores to technology giant Hewlett-Packard Co. during the years it was led by another Republican candidate, Carly Fiorina.

In the interview, Carson acknowledged the stances he took as a director could be an issue for some conservative voters. But he said he has never strayed from his message. “As far as conservatives are concerned, I’ve made my position clear to them as well. I believe in traditional marriage. But I don’t have anything against the gay community.”

Carson joined the Kellogg board in 1997 and the Costco board in 1999 and left both boards in May of this year as he began to push for the Republican nomination.

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Backdoor Politics: Obama Scores Budget Deal in Dead of Night - from TRUNEWS

U.S. President Barack Obama early Friday won congressional passage of legislation that lifted the threat of a default on government debt through the end of his presidency and a budget blueprint easing strict spending caps through September 2017.

The Senate voted 64-35 to approve the measure, which was negotiated over the past few weeks by the White House and congressional leaders, including former House Speaker John Boehner, who retired from Congress.

Obama will sign the bill into law as soon as he receives it, the White House said in a statement.

Without action by Congress, the Treasury Department would have exhausted the last of its borrowing capacity on Nov. 3, according to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and risked default on U.S. obligations within days that would roil global financial markets.

The two-year budget provision provides new top-line spending levels for Congress for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and the one starting Oct. 1, 2016.

It loosens budget caps, allowing an additional $80 billion in spending on military and domestic programs over the two years.

U.S. President Barack Obama early Friday won congressional passage of legislation that lifted the threat of a default on government debt through the end of his presidency and a budget blueprint easing strict spending caps through September 2017.

The Senate voted 64-35 to approve the measure, which was negotiated over the past few weeks by the White House and congressional leaders, including former House Speaker John Boehner, who retired from Congress.

Obama will sign the bill into law as soon as he receives it, the White House said in a statement.

Without action by Congress, the Treasury Department would have exhausted the last of its borrowing capacity on Nov. 3, according to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and risked default on U.S. obligations within days that would roil global financial markets.

The two-year budget provision provides new top-line spending levels for Congress for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and the one starting Oct. 1, 2016.

It loosens budget caps, allowing an additional $80 billion in spending on military and domestic programs over the two years.

But lawmakers still need to allocate that money among thousands of budget-line items. They face a Dec. 11 deadline, when existing spending authority by government agencies expires, and a spirited fight is expected.

Obama called on Congress to build on the budget “by getting to work on spending bills that invest in America’s priorities without getting sidetracked by ideological provisions that have no place in America’s budget process.”

Conservative Republicans are likely to try to attach controversial policy add-ons, such as prohibiting funding for women’s healthcare provider Planned Parenthood to punish the group for an abortion-related controversy involving fetal tissue.

Some may also try to undo Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms enacted after the 2008-09 financial crisis or prohibit new regulations on carbon emissions.

During Senate debate on Thursday, conservatives railed against the budget and debt limit bill.

Republican Senator Rand Paul, who is running for the Republican nomination for president, complained in a floor speech: “The right’s going to get more military money. The left’s going to get more welfare money. The secret handshake goes on and the American public gets stuck with the bill.”

Senator Ted Cruz, a rival Republican presidential hopeful, returned to Washington from the campaign trail to accuse Republican majorities in Congress of “handing the president a blank credit card for the remainder of his tenure.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican who helped negotiate the bill, praised the measure for rejecting tax increases and noted that the added spending would be offset by savings elsewhere in the government.

He also said it would “enact the most significant reform to Social Security since 1983.” The estimated $168 billion in long-term savings from the program would be achieved by clamping down on medical fraud and excess claims associated with disability benefits.

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China Setback: International Court to Hear Dispute Over South China Sea - from TRUNEWS

In a legal setback for Beijing, an arbitration court in the Netherlands ruled on Thursday that it has jurisdiction to hear some territorial claims the Philippines has filed against China over disputed areas in the South China Sea.

Manila filed the case in 2013 to seek a ruling on its right to exploit the South China Sea waters in its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) as allowed under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration rejected Beijing’s claim that the disputes were about territorial sovereignty and said additional hearings would be held to decide the merits of the Philippines’ arguments.

China has boycotted the proceedings and rejects the court’s authority in the case. Beijing claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, dismissing claims to parts of it from Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

The tribunal found it had authority to hear seven of Manila’s submissions under UNCLOS and China’s decision not to participate did “not deprive the tribunal of jurisdiction”.

The Chinese government, facing international legal scrutiny for the first time over its assertiveness in the South China Sea, would neither participate in nor accept the case, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin told reporters.

“The result of this arbitration will not impact China’s sovereignty, rights or jurisdiction over the South China Sea under historical facts and international law,” Liu said.

“From this ruling you can see the Philippines’ aim in presenting the case is not to resolve the dispute. Its aim is to deny China’s rights in the South China Sea and confirm its own rights in the South China Sea.”

The Philippine government welcomed the decision.

Solicitor General Florin Hilbay, Manila’s chief lawyer in the case, said the ruling represented a “significant step forward in the Philippines’ quest for a peaceful, impartial resolution of the disputes between the parties and the clarification of their rights under UNCLOS”.

Bonnie Glaser, a South China Sea expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called the outcome “a major blow for China given that the opinion explicitly rejects China’s arguments that … the Philippines has not done enough to negotiate the issues with China.”

The United States, a treaty ally of the Philippines that this week challenged Beijing’s pursuit of territorial claims by sailing close to artificial islands China has constructed in the South China Sea, welcomed the decision, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

“It shows that judging issues like this on the basis of international law and international practice are a viable way of, at a minimum, managing territorial conflicts if not resolving them,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another U.S. official said the tribunal’s decision undercut China’s claims under the so-called nine-dashed line that takes in about 90 percent of the 3.5 million sq km (1.35 million sq mile) South China Sea on Chinese maps.

This vague boundary was officially published on a map by China’s Nationalist government in 1947 and has been included in subsequent maps under Communist rule.

“You can’t say that the nine-dashed line is indisputable anymore because by acknowledging jurisdiction here the court has made clear that there is indeed a dispute,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “To my mind, this announcement drives a stake through the heart of the nine-dash line.”

The court’s rulings are binding, although it has no power to enforce them and countries have ignored them in the past.

“QUESTIONABLE CLAIMS”

Nevertheless, the decision keeps the spotlight on China.

“Today’s ruling is an important step forward in upholding international law against China’s attempts to assert vast and, in my view, questionable claims in the South China Sea,” said John McCain, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s armed services committee.

On Thursday during a visit to Beijing, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested China go to international courts to resolve its rows over the South China Sea.

In a position paper in December, China argued the dispute was not covered by UNCLOS because it was ultimately a matter of sovereignty, not exploitation rights.

UNCLOS does not rule on sovereignty but it does outline a system of territory and economic zones that can be claimed from features such as islands, rocks and reefs.

The court said it could hear arguments including one contending that several South China Sea reefs and shoals were not important enough to base territorial claims on.

On seven other submissions, including that China had violated the Philippines’ sovereign right to exploit its own territorial waters, the court said it would reserve judgment about jurisdiction until it had decided the merits of the case.

No date has been set for the next hearings.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration was established in the Netherlands in 1899 to encourage peaceful resolution of disputes between states, organizations and private parties. China and the Philippines are among its 117 member countries.

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Chinese Naval Commander: Minor Incident Could Spark War With U.S. - from TRUNEWS

China’s naval commander told his U.S. counterpart that a minor incident could spark war in the South China Sea if the United States did not stop its “provocative acts” in the disputed waterway, the Chinese navy said on Friday.

Admiral Wu Shengli made the comments to U.S. chief of naval operations Admiral John Richardson during a video teleconference on Thursday, according to a Chinese naval statement.

The two officers held talks after a U.S. warship sailed within 12 nautical miles of one of Beijing’s man-made islands in the contested Spratly archipelago on Tuesday.

China has rebuked Washington over the patrol, the most significant U.S. challenge yet to territorial limits China effectively claims around its seven artificial islands in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes.

“If the United States continues with these kinds of dangerous, provocative acts, there could well be a seriously pressing situation between frontline forces from both sides on the sea and in the air, or even a minor incident that sparks war,” the statement paraphrased Wu as saying.

“(I) hope the U.S. side cherishes the good situation between the Chinese and U.S. navies that has not come easily and avoids these kinds of incidents from happening again,” Wu said.

Speaking earlier, a U.S. official said the naval chiefs agreed to maintain dialogue and follow protocols to avoid clashes.

Scheduled port visits by U.S. and Chinese ships and planned visits to China by senior U.S. Navy officers remained on track, the official said.

“None of that is in jeopardy. Nothing has been canceled,” said the official.

Both officers agreed on the need to stick to protocols established under the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES).

“They agreed that it’s very important that both sides continue to use the protocols under the CUES agreement when they’re operating close to keep the chances for misunderstanding and any kind of provocation from occurring,” the U.S. official said.

Indeed, Wu said he believed the Chinese and U.S. navies had plenty of scope for cooperation and should both “play a positive role in maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea”.

A U.S. Navy spokesman stressed Washington’s position that U.S. freedom of navigation operations were meant to “protect the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea and airspace guaranteed to all nations under international law”.

Chinese warships followed the USS Lassen, a guided-missile destroyer, as it moved through the Spratlys on Tuesday. The U.S. Navy is operating in a maritime domain bristling with Chinese ships.

While the U.S. Navy is expected to keep its technological edge in Asia for decades, China’s potential trump card is sheer weight of numbers, with dozens of naval and coastguard vessels routinely deployed in the South China Sea, security experts say.

China has overlapping claims with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei in the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year.

Next week, Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Vietnam and Singapore, while Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan will attend a meeting of Southeast Asian defense ministers in Malaysia that U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter is also due to attend.

Separately, China suffered a legal setback on Thursday when an arbitration court in the Netherlands ruled it had jurisdiction to hear some territorial claims the Philippines has filed against Beijing over the South China Sea.

The court said additional hearings would be held to decide the merits of the Philippines’ arguments. China has not participated in the proceedings and does not recognize the court’s authority in the case.

Manila filed the case in 2013 to seek a ruling on its right to exploit the South China Sea waters in its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) as allowed under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

China, facing international legal scrutiny for the first time over its assertiveness in the South China Sea, would neither participate in nor accept the case at the arbitration court, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said on Friday.

Liu told reporters the case would not affect China’s sovereign claims in the seas.

The Philippine government welcomed the court decision.

Solicitor General Florin Hilbay, Manila chief’s lawyer in the case, said the ruling represented a “significant step forward in the Philippines’ quest for a peaceful, impartial resolution of the disputes between the parties and the clarification of their rights under UNCLOS”.

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Oregon Girl Tests Positive for Bubonic Plague - from TRUNEWS

(Reuters) – A teenage girl in Oregon has tested positive for bubonic plague, state health officials said on Thursday. The girl was believed to have been infected by a flea bite during a hunting trip earlier this month, according to the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division and the Crook County Public Health Department.

The teen was in an intensive care unit at a hospital in Bend, in central Oregon, health officials said. Her condition was not known.

There were no other known infections in the state from the centuries-old scourge, health officials said.

“Many people think of the plague as a disease of the past, but it’s still very much present in our environment, particularly among wildlife,” said Emilio DeBess, Oregon state public health veterinarian in the Public Health Division.

“Fortunately, plague remains a rare disease, but people need to take appropriate precautions with wildlife and their pets to keep it that way,” he said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the plague was introduced to the United States in 1900 by rat-infested steamships that had sailed from affected areas, mostly in Asia.

In recent years, less than 10 human plague cases have been reported in the U.S. each year, the agency said.

Early symptoms of plague include high fever, chills, nausea, weakness and swollen lymph nodes in the neck, armpit or groin.

The plague germ that caused the “Black Death” in the 14th century and other ferocious pandemics has stalked humankind far longer than previously known.

A study unveiled on Thursday of DNA from Bronze Age people in Europe and Asia showed the bacterium, Yersinia pestis, afflicted humans as long ago as about 2800 BC, more than 3,000 years earlier than the oldest previous evidence of plague.

The plague has killed untold millions of people over the centuries in pandemic flares that reshaped human society.

“It seems to have started impacting human populations over large geographical scales way earlier than we thought,” said evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and University of Cambridge.

They studied DNA from the teeth of 101 people from six sites: three in Russia, one in Poland, one in Estonia and one in Armenia. Seven had evidence of Yersinia pestis infection.

The researchers also tracked the timing of a pivotal event in plague evolution, a mutation that made the germ capable of being transmitted by fleas. They found Yersinia pestis with this mutation in a person who died in Armenia in about 951 BC, the most recent of the 101 studied.

The study, published in the journal Cell, showed plague was widespread across Europe and Asia during the Bronze Age. The oldest evidence of infection was found in the DNA of people from about 2782 BC and 2794 BC buried in a mass grave in Bateni, Russia, in Central Asia’s Altai mountains.

Previously, the oldest evidence of plague came from about 540 AD in Germany, Technical University of Denmark geneticist Simon Rasmussen said.

“The Bronze Age plague represents an intermediate state where it had not yet evolved the capabilities to be transmitted by fleas or cause bubonic plague. However, it was still able to cause septicemic and pneumonic plague,” Rasmussen added.

Septicemic plague infection is confined to the blood. In bubonic plague, it infects lymphatic tissue. In pneumonic plague, it spreads to the lungs and can be transmitted person-to-person via droplets.

The germ was spread mainly by such human-to-human contact until a genetic mutation allowed it to survive in fleas’ guts, choking their digestive tract and causing them to bite anything they can, wildly spreading plague.

Yersinia pestis caused two of humankind’s deadliest pandemics: the 6th century Justinian Plague, named for the Byzantine emperor who was sickened but survived, and the 14th century “Black Death.”

 

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

 

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Scalia Warns of Liberal Supreme Court destroying America - from TRUNEWS

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came out swinging at his own institution this week and declared during a speech at Santa Clara University that the “liberal” court is undermining American democracy.

“It’s the destruction of our democratic system,” Scalia told students at the California college when speaking about how the court reaches its decisions. “I cannot imagine the system can continue with more and more of the basic rules made by the Supreme Court.”

According to SFGate.com, the conservative judge took particular issue with how some of his fellow justices imagine the country is guided by a “living Constitution.” In Scalia’s opinion, this translates to: “the meaning of this document shall be whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it is.”

Scalia said that the court has been on a “slippery slope” in disregarding the text of the Constitution for nearly a hundred years and “at the bottom of that slope, I can’t imagine how you can go any further, is the right to same-sex marriage.”

He also claimed that, “The whole time I have been on my court, it has been a liberal court.”

Over the last year, Scalia has been outspoken in his opposition to the high-profile majority rulings of the highest court. When the court made gay marriage legal in all 50 states in late June, the 79-year-old justice wrote a scathing dissent.

“The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” he said of the decision reached in Obergefell v. Hodges

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Disturbing ‘Thriller’ Trend In Evangelical Churches - from TRUNEWS

(TRUNEWS) – A number of churches in recent years have taken to the course of being ‘relevant’, by offering alternatives to Halloween.  One congregation that has taken this to an extreme is Passion Church of Maple Grove, Minnesota by incorporating the evil-themed Michael Jackson video ‘THRILLER’ in its services.

In an interview with local TV station KSTP, church leader Jason Bailey says:

“Everyone loves Michael Jackson so it’s an easy invite.  As a church, we just want to take a strong stance to say that you can overcome your fear, regardless of what it is,” he said. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.  As a church, we just have a strong belief that do not have to be anti-culture to be pro God.”

The church has made this an annual event, having performed the ‘THRILLER’ feature in previous years.  A number of other churches around the country have also tried to copy the ‘success’ of Passion Church’s performance, and have created Halloween activities featuring the video and dance routine.  A search on YouTube reveals more than a dozen congregations that have posted videos of their production using the Michael Jackson song, including Ignite Church in Winterville, North Carolina, The Potter’s House in Denver, Colorado, and Celebration Church in Georgetown, Texas.

When Michael Jackson produced the ‘THRILLER’ video, his family’s long-time association with the Jehovah’s Witnesses brought him under fire, and he was excommunicated from the church because of the video’s overarching Satanic themes.  Jackon’s attempts to add a disclaimer to the video only served to ignite further controversy:

“Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult – Michael Jackson

The lyrics of the superstar’s song and video speak for themselves:

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’awl’s neighborhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell

The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller

Yet, in spite of this overtly Satanic message that the video promotes, followers of Passion Church testify to ‘many coming to Christ’, as revealed in the following post from Twitter:

Use of haunted house imagery, including skulls, tombstones, and zombies are prevelant not only in the performance, but also the sermon devlivered by Pastor Jonathan Brozozog.

 

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Chick-Fil-A Sponsors LBGT Film Festival - from TRUNEWS

(TRUNEWS) – The discovery that the popular fast food restaurant Chick-Fil-A has been listed as a sponsor of a so-called faith based homosexual film and arts festival has shocked customers and resulted in the launch of an online petition.

The festival, called Level Ground, branded as the world’s “first faith-based Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender film Festival,” now running in six cities across America, including not only film but music, visual arts, comedy, theater and a number of workshops.

The stated goal of the festival is to “elevate the public discourse around the otherwise polarizing topics of gender identity and human sexuality.”

Aside from various church sponsorships in cities where the festival is held, Level Ground lists a number of corporate sponsors, including the Whole Foods grocery chain and Chick-Fil-A.

The restaurant chain came under fire in 2012 from homosexual advocates after company CEO Dan Cathy spoke out in favor of biblical marriage.  In addition, the Washington Post quoted Cathy as saying on a radio broadcast that he believed that the promotion of homosexual marriage was evoking the wrath of God upon America.”

A concerned patron of the restaurant chain has launched an online petition to bring the sponsorship to the attention of the company’s corporate headquarters, citing the sponsorship of Chick-Fil-A as “many other groups that promote an agenda which is contrary to Chick-Fil-A’s corporate stance on Christian values regarding marriage and stewardship.”

The petition seeks a response from the company’s corporate leadership.

 

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Justice Kennedy: Christians with convictions resigned under Hitler and they should today too - from TRUNEWS

(LIFESITE NEWS) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy told a Harvard Law School audience that government employees with religious convictions about marriage should resign.

The Ronald Reagan appointee said on Wednesday that if a public official has a moral objection to homosexuality, he must either follow the law or quit public service.

The judge’s comment came in answer to a question a student asked about government officials who disagree with the Supreme Court’s decisions on gay marriage, or abortion, and if those citizens have the constitutional right to act according to their sincerely held moral beliefs.

Kennedy replied that no, they do not have the right to refuse to comply with the law.

Curiously, Kennedy cited as buttressing his point the fact that few judges resigned under the Third Reich. “How many judges, do you think, resigned in the Third Reich?” Kennedy asked, to the response of silence in the great hall. He answered his own question by raising three fingers.

At one point, his words made quitting sound noble: “Great respect, it seems to me, has to be given to people who resign rather than do something they view as morally wrong, in order to make a point.”

The justice admitted that Christians who must “enforce a law that they believe is morally corrupt” face “difficult moral questions.” “However,” he said, “the rule of law is that, as a public official, in performing your legal duties, you are bound to enforce the law.”

Responses from Christian leaders noted the irony of saying that for public employees, the moral thing to do is follow immorality. Kennedy made no mention of religious convictions as actual, universal truths.

Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver commented to LifeSiteNews, “Unjust lawsshould be resisted.” “The history of the United States includes non-compliance, even by presidents, to immoral laws.”

Staver told LifeSiteNews, “Religious freedom and conscience should be protected.”  In fact, Staver said, morality requires the reverse of what Kennedy advocated. “Justices or judges who disregard the Constitution and impose their own will should resign.”

Gay activists were quick to applaud. The online journal The New Civil Rights Movement reported that Justice Kennedy “left no wiggle room for the ‘religious accommodation’ the renegade Kentucky clerks are demanding for themselves.”

(Content provided courtesy of LIFESITE NEWS.  Read the full article here )

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DC MDs Face ‘LGBT Competency Training’ - from TRUNEWS

In the face of increasing numbers of homosexual and transgender people in the District of Columbia, the city council wants to force doctors to undergo cultural competency classes to better serve them.

Activists testifying before the council Wednesday, urging them to pass legislation that would make “LGBTQ cultural competency training” part of their continuing education requirements.

If a physician wants to work in DC, or obtain or renew a license or certification, they’d have to take two courses on LGBTQ competency.

The measure says the classes would “teach attitudes, knowledge and skills that enable a health care professional to care effectively for patients who identify as LGTBQ”.

If it gets passed, that would make DC one of six states to require the training.

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UCC Congregation Holding Drag Queen Festival - from TRUNEWS

A Drag Queen Gospel Festival will be held this weekend in at First Church Somerville UCC in Massachusetts.

The annual event began in 2011 to bring the “good news of Jesus Christ with a distinctly loving message for LGBTQ”, according the group’s website. Notice the “Q” added to the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

James Adams, also known as Serenity Jones will put on his full drag queen attire with makeup, a wig and high heeled shoes and preach Pentecostal-style during the gathering.

“God is good all the time. That means God is a Diva,” Jones said on the website.

There will be a drag performance Friday night to raise money for a gay charity. Worship on Sunday will include Adams and other pastors in drag, followed by brunch.

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Rick Wiles: Chick-Fil-A Should Add ‘Weasel’ To Their Menu - from TRUNEWS

On the Thursday edition of TRUNEWS, host Rick Wiles breaks the story on radio that restaurant chain Chick-Fil-A is listed as a leading sponsor of a “faith-based” homosexual film and arts festival.  The festival is sponsored by the group Level Ground, who describe themselves on their website as:

There are too few places for gracious conversation about the things that matter to us most deeply. Our churches, our families, and our selves are being broken in the crossfire. Cultural tensions continue to rise, along with rates of suicide, homelessness, and general absolution of faith. Each of us — whether gay, straight, old, young, religious or post-faith — have something at stake in the dialogue about faith, gender, and sexuality.

Chick-Fil-A in the past has presented a ‘conservative’ or even ‘evangelical’ image, which has gained the support and loyalty of Christians nationwide.  Chick-fil-A came under fire in 2012 from homosexual advocates after President Dan Cathy spoke in favor of Biblical marriage.

The sponsorship of the film festival, which took place earlier this month in Nashville, has garnered the reactions of Chick-Fil-A customers to start a petition drive to bring the matter to the attention of believers around the country, and to the corporate management of the fast-food chain.

Rick Wiles pointed out that in August 2012, over 600,000 people stood in line at Chick-Fil-A restaurants nationwide to show their support for traditional marriage.  He also pointed out that this recent step away from those values follows the restaurant’s participation in providing food for a homosexual pride parade this summer in Iowa.

Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-Fil-A, now says he “made a mistake in endorsing traditional marriage…every leader goes through different phases of maturity, growth and development and it helps by recognizing the mistakes that you make, and you learn from those mistakes. If not, you’re just a fool. I’m thankful that I lived through it and I learned a lot from it.”

Rick Wiles skewered these comments by Cathy, and the recent sponsorship of the pro-homosexual event in Nashville, by recommending that the fast food chain add a new item to their menu.

“Yellow-bellied weasel,” Wiles suggested.

Listen to the entire program including these comments at the following link:  TRUNEWS 10/29/15

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Thursday October 29, 2015 – Pete Hoekstra - from TRUNEWS

Rick blasts Chick-fil-a over the Southern Baptist company’s betrayal of Biblical principles by donating to LGBT activities. Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra tells Rick that Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints are all over the destruction of Libya.

Download MP3
Pete Hoekstra | Official Website

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U.S. Mint Suspends Coin Exchange Program Due to Unlawful Activity - from TRUNEWS

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Mint is suspending a coin exchange program for six months due to the possibility of “unlawful activity”, a Federal Register notice said on Thursday.

The U.S. Mint will assess the program’s security and develop additional safeguards during this time, the notice stated.

The program allows people and businesses to exchange bent and partial coins for reimbursement.

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New Law May Force Doctor’s to Take LGBTQ Cultural Competency Course - from TRUNEWS

With the number of gay and transgender people on the upswing in the District of Columbia, city council members want to force doctors to take cultural competency classes to better accommodate them.

The council heard testimony Wednesday from local activists urging them to pass legislation that would make “LGBTQ cultural competency training” a part of their continuing education requirements.

The new regulations would require any medical professional to take two courses on LGBTQ cultural competency in order to obtain or renew their licenses or certifications to work in the District.

According to the new law, the classes must “teach attitudes, knowledge, and skills that enable a health care professional to care effectively for patients who identify as LGTBQ.”

If passed, the new law would make D.C. one of just five other states that require cultural competence training.

Laquandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department Of Health, said the training would teach doctors about body language and social interactions and how those from other cultures may have different opinions about what certain things mean.

“[The training] helps you to identify skills that help you to have interactions that are not offensive to people of other cultures,” she said.

She said the regulations aren’t designed to make doctors experts on how different cultures work, but to give them a better idea on how to handle people of different backgrounds.

Several advocates at the hearing said they were personally denied care or treated in a discriminatory way when they sought medical care from doctors.

Allison Gill, senior legislative counsel at the Human Rights Campaign, a gay equal rights organization, said just because transgender people have access to healthcare, it doesn’t mean doctors are adequately informed about transgender-specific issues.

“I find that, as a trans person, you’re constantly having to educate your health professionals,” she said.

Rick Rosendall, president of Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, said that one in five transgender people have been denied healthcare due to their sexual identification, and when he, personally, looked for “culturally competent” doctors, he didn’t have much luck.

“Our community faces the particular problem of invisibility,” he said, while other minority groups already have protections in place for them.

The new law would force doctors to understand “the intersections between systems of oppression and discrimination” experienced by gay and transgender people.

In order to meet this expectation, doctors would need to establish best practices for obtaining and using terminology, like titles and pronouns deemed acceptable by the LGBTQ community, when addressing patients. Doctors would also need to train their support staff on how to treat LGBTQ people.

If the law is passed, Mayor Muriel Bowser will grant funding to organizations with experience in cultural competency to develop and implement programs to train doctors.

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Americans Renouncing Citizenships at Record Rates in 2015 - from TRUNEWS

A record number of Americans are renouncing their U.S. citizenship in 2015, new figures released by the federal government show.

Since 1996, the IRS has published a list of citizens renouncing their citizenship every three months. The most recent IRS report, released Monday, reveals that 1,426 Americans ditched their citizenship in the past three months.

That brings the running total for the year to 3,221, the highest amount ever recorded for the first 9 months of a year. If at least 196 more people renounce their citizenship before the end of the year, a new annual record will be set.

The new record comes even though the government has substantially hiked the cost of surrendering citizenship. Simply applying to renounce citizenship now costs $2,350, way up from the $450 fee of a few years ago, meaning the IRS made over $7.5 million just by processing renounced citizenships. The figure is actually even higher than that, as wealthier Americans who renounce their citizenship are hit with an expatriation tax that can total into the millions.

For some expatriates, renouncing citizenship is intended as a political statement. More frequently, it’s an effort to escape U.S. taxation.

Unlike every other country in the world except Eritrea, the United States levies income taxes on citizens who live and work abroad, not just those who live inside the country. The U.S. also imposes tough income and wealth reporting requirements on expatriates, with stiff financial and even criminal penalties placed on those who do not properly comply.

In 2010, burdens on foreign taxpayers were increased with the passage of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), intended to reduce Americans’ use of foreign accounts to dodge taxes. Since the law was passed, citizenship renunciations have surged to new highs.

Some may be moving to get out before the cost of abandoning the U.S. grows even higher. In 2012, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer  proposed the Ex-PATRIOT Act, which would have substantially hiked the taxes imposed on people renouncing citizenship.

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