Democrat presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is reportedly “fuming” over President Donald Trump’s attacks on his height and is preparing to enact his revenge against the president for the attacks.
Trump, who has repeatedly referred to Bloomberg as “mini Mike,” hit the former New York City mayor hard during a Fox News interview that aired during the Super Bowl pre-game show when asked by Sean Hannity what the first thing was that came to his mind when it came to each of the top Democrat presidential candidates.
When Trump was asked about Bloomberg, he said, “Uh, very little. I just think of little. You know, now he wants a box for the debates to stand on. Okay, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong. You can be short. Why should he get a box to stand on, okay? He wants a box for the debates. Why should he be entitled to that? Really. Does that mean everyone else gets a box?”
FOX Business Senior Correspondent Charles Gasparino reported on Sunday that Bloomberg was furious over the insult and appears to have already planned out how to hit back at the president.
Gasparino tweeted: “SCOOP-inside the @MikeBloomberg campaign advisers say Bloomy is fuming over @realDonaldTrump’s attacks, mocking of his height. BBG now says he will fund even @BernieSanders to beat Trump. He plans to ramp up the personal attacks vs Trump through even more pointed TV ads”
SCOOP-inside the @MikeBloomberg campaign advisers say Bloomy is fuming over @realDonaldTrump’s attacks, mocking of his height. BBG now says he will fund even @BernieSanders to beat Trump. He plans to ramp up the personal attacks vs Trump through even more pointed TV ads
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) February 2, 2020
While Trump and Bloomberg are both billionaires, Bloomberg reportedly has much deeper pockets than Trump does as he is worth $60.2 billion compared to Trump’s estimated $3.1 billion net worth.
Bloomberg’s wealth is already becoming a problem in the race as his Democrat rivals struggle to keep up with the amount of money that he is spending in advertisements, which also attack Trump.
“To date, Bloomberg has dished out a massive $248 million to run commercials since declaring his candidacy for president in late November, according to the latest data from the ad-tracking firm Advertising Analytics,” Fox News reported. “By comparison, no other candidate in the Democratic presidential primary field has topped $30 million in spending.”
Advertising Analytics account manager Ben Taber told Fox News: “Bloomberg’s buy is truly unprecedented. For context, the Clinton campaign in 2016 spent $230 million throughout the course of the entire election, including the general. Bloomberg has spent more than that since November 25th. This cycle, Bloomberg has spent three times more than Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden, combined.”
A Michigan woman, who says she was a victim of sex trafficking and abuse for years at metro Detroit hotels, is going after two of the world’s largest hotel companies — Marriott and InterContinental — for failing to stop it.
Instead, the lawsuit alleges, the companies turned a blind eye to turn a profit. The case filed in the U.S. District Court in Detroit last month adds to a growing number of lawsuits against hotel operators and chains, asking the hospitality industry to help police human trafficking.
“It’s part of an effort around the country to hold the hotel industry accountable for what they do — or what they should have known and didn’t do — to prevent sex trafficking in their hotels,” Tiffany Ellis, the attorney who filed the Detroit case, said Wednesday. “Obviously, the story we tell in the complaint is compelling and tragic and awful, but we believe it’s part of a larger picture of what’s happening in Michigan and around the country and world.”
On Thursday, Ellis added, a hearing before a judicial panel on multidistrict litigation is expected to be held in Tampa to decide whether her case and 35 others that have been filed separately in 21 different jurisdictions against 15 hotel brands should be centralized in the same court.
In addition to Michigan, similar lawsuits have been filed in Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington state.
In Michigan, 172 human trafficking cases were reported in 2019, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Nationally, there were 4,585 cases. More than 1,000 cases were against children.
The Detroit lawsuit alleges the hotel chains “knew and should have known for more than a decade that sex trafficking repeatedly occurs under their flag throughout the country,” but instead of thwarting it, ignored “open and obvious” signs, “enjoying the profit from rooms rented for this explicit and apparent purpose.”
In the 43-page Detroit case, the victim — who is identified by her initials H.G. for her protection — says she was just 17 in 2003 when she was sold for sex and trafficked throughout eastern Michigan and subjected to multiple instances of rape and physical, verbal and psychological abuse.
H.G. was chained up and sexually exploited in rooms for days at the Fairfield Inn at 3285 Boardwalk in Ann Arbor, and Holiday Inn Express and Suites at 1020 Washington Blvd. in downtown Detroit, the lawsuit said.
The Fairfield Inn — a franchise of the Bethesda, Maryland-based Marriott and managed by Portfolio Hotels — said it condemns “all forms of human trafficking,” takes it seriously and is “committed to the training and engagement of our hotel teams.”
Portfolio added that it “took over management” of the hotel in late 2013, and all employees “have successfully completed the required Marriott training on preventing human trafficking.”
The Holiday Inn, which is a franchise of Atlanta-based IHG, declined comment.
The lawsuit alleged the abuse was so open and obvious it would have been difficult to ignore: H.G. looked “malnourished and withdrawn”; she was dressed “in skimpy clothes” that were “always ripped”; and the rooms were filled with blood, used condoms and other “sex paraphernalia.”
At the Holiday Inn, the lawsuit said, the victim once asked for help from the front desk. Blood was running down her leg and she was “visibly in danger” and in need of medical attention, but she received no help as her trafficker “pushed her back upstairs.”
In a different situation, she screamed as she was “penetrated vaginally with a broken bottle.”
“The staff,” the lawsuit said, “was, or should have been, aware.”
Moreover, the lawsuit concludes that the hotels should have known that there were drug dealing, prostitution and safety concerns because they had video surveillance and verbal and written complaints; but didn’t do anything about them.
In addition to the obvious signs, the lawsuit takes aim at the hotel chains for not providing training and policies to address sex trafficking and makes the case that the hotel chain received a percentage of the rate charged on the rooms where the victim was trafficked.
According to the lawsuit, H.G. got away from her abusers in 2008, but they continued to stalk and threaten her for three more years until she finally moved to the West Coast in 2011. She now lives in Solano County, California, where, her attorney said, she is safe.
The lawsuit also makes the argument that hotels and motels have the highest obligation to protect guests from dangers, including sexual exploitation, and this is even a tenet of the hospitality industry.
In addition to unspecified compensatory damages, medical expenses, and attorney fees, the lawsuit seeks that the hotel chains be required to make changes, including audits, new policies, rules and requirements for employees, agents and franchisees.
“It’s hard to put a number on it,” Ellis said of the damages. “Unfortunately, when we seek justice against wrongdoers, sometimes money is the only thing we can put in its place because we can’t make up what happened to them.”
But, she added, her client wants to make sure the hotel industry takes precautions and steps to train employees on how to spot signs of sex trafficking and to protect other people so that “this doesn’t happen again to anyone else.”
Updated 2:27 PM ET: A couple of hours after this outage began, things seem to have calmed down. AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, U.S. Cellular, and Straight Talk all have substantially less reports flowing in. Things have also settled a bit with Verizon, but as of 2:09 PM ET, there were still 1146 outage reports.
What you need to know
- As of January 31, every major phone carrier is having service issues.
- Affected companies include Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and others.
- The main problem seems to be with making phone calls.
If you live in the United States and are having problems with your wireless phone service, you aren’t alone. In fact, regardless of your carrier choice, there seems to be widespread funk across the board.
Around 9:00 AM ET on January 31, numerous reports began flooding Down Detector with service outage complaints. We aren’t talking about just one carrier, either. Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T (though not as bad) are all having problems — even Straight Talk and U.S. Cellular are spiking with outage reports.
CIA Director Gina Haspel secretly traveled to Ramallah last Thursday, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan was announced, public radio Kan reported on Sunday.
Haspel met with Palestinian officials, who told her of their intention to sever all ties, including security, with Israel and the United States.
The Al-Qaida branch in Yemen has claimed responsibility for last year’s deadly shooting at the Naval Air Station Pensacola by a Saudi aviation student
CAIRO — Al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen claimed responsibility Sunday for last year’s deadly shooting at the Naval Air Station Pensacola by an aviation student from Saudi Arabia.
The shooter, 2nd Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, was a member of the Saudi Air Force in training at the base. He opened fire inside a classroom at the base on Dec. 6, killing three people and wounding two sheriff’s deputies before one of the deputies killed him. Eight others were also hurt.
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, released a video claiming the attack. SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks messaging by militant groups, reported the claim.
AQAP has long been considered the global network’s most dangerous branch and has attempted to carry out attacks on the U.S. mainland.
The 18-minute video did not provide evidence of training the shooter, but did indicate that Alshamrani and AQAP were in communication, said Rita Katz, director of SITE. It was not clear when the video was recorded.
The video claimed that Alshamrani had been planning for years to attack a U.S. base, and had been training and “selecting” targets.
The video, which was viewed by The Associated Press, provided a will written by Alshamrani to his family in September 2019, three months prior to attack. He said he wanted to attack the U.S., citing religious reasons. However, he made no mention of al-Qaida.
Foreign nationals participating in U.S. training go through a vetting process. The Pentagon says it includes screening for any illicit drug activities, support for terrorist organizations, corruption and criminal conduct.
The video included audio from top AQAP leader Qassim al-Rimi claiming “full responsibility” for the attack by Alshamrani, calling him “the hero, the courageous knight.”
A suspected U.S. drone strike destroyed a building housing al-Qaida militants last week in eastern Yemen. President Donald Trump retweeted several tweets and media reports that seemed to offer confirmation the strike killed al-Rimi.
Katz also said that AQAP did not state “May Allah Protect Him” in regard to al-Rimi, as its releases usually do. “(This) adds yet more suggestion to him indeed being killed,” she tweeted.
Al-Rimi was one of AQAP’s founders and became the group’s leader after Nasser al-Wahishi was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2015.
TEHRAN – A cloud seeding project will be carried out within the next two weeks in some northern, central and southern provinces of the country, Farid Golkar, head of Iran’s National Cloud Seeding Research Center, has announced.
Cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, is a method to change the amount or even type of precipitation. Rainfall occurs when supercooled droplets of water – those that are still liquid but are at a temperature below the usual freezing point of zero centigrade – form ice crystals. Now too heavy to remain suspended in the air, these then fall, often melting on their way down to form rain.
Even in dry areas the air usually contains some water. This can be made to come together and form ice crystals by seeding the atmosphere with chemicals such as silver iodide or dry ice. They work to promote rainfall by inducing nucleation – what little water is in the air condenses around the newly introduced particles and crystallizes to form ice. The ‘seeds’ can be delivered by plane or simply by spraying from the ground.
Golkar explained that the operation will be carried out on the Zagros and Alborz Mountains in the north, Isfahan and Yazd provinces in the center, and Fars and Kerman provinces in the south.
The first cloud seeding project was launched in the Iranian calendar year 1395 (March 2016-March 2017), he stated, adding that, each operation can lead to a 10-15 percent increase in precipitation.
He went on to highlight that this year, a total budget of 70 billion rials (about $1.6 million) has been earmarked in this regard.
The latest statistics released by the Meteorological Organization show that the country received 136.9 millimeters of precipitations since the beginning of the current water year (September 23, 2019), which is 4.9 percent more than the same period a year before.
Moreover, the long term average rainfall was estimated at 109 mm, demonstrating a 25 percent raise in the rainfall this year. However, some provinces of the country are dealing with rainfall shortages and cloud seeding may be a way to ease precipitation scarcity.
Lindsey puts Adam on notice…
Lindsey Graham Vows To Investigate Adam Schiff and His Staff: Ill want to understand how all this crap started”
Lindsey Graham came out firing today on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures and made some of Trump’s enemies nervous.
He went after the Bidens, the FISA courts, Rod Rosenstein and Adam Schiff promising Senate investigations on the whole lot.
“The Senate Intel Committee under Richard Burr has told us that they will call the whistleblower,” the South Carolina Republican today.
“I want to understand how all this crap started,” he added before pointing at the Bidens and Adam Schiff.
“If the whistleblower is a former employee of or associate of Joe Biden, I think that would be important.”
“If the whistleblower was working with people on Schiff’s staff that wanted to take Trump down a year-and-a-half ago, I think that would be important.”
“If the Schiff staff people helped write the complaint that would be important.”
“We’re going to get to the bottom of all of this to make sure this never happens again,” Graham said.
Lindsey Graham says he’s not giving the Biden’s a pass. He intends to compel former Obama administration officials and Hunter Biden to testify before the Senate as part of an investigation into purported Obama administration misconduct in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/1KBF1KVaJm
— Red Nation Rising (@RedNationRising) February 2, 2020
“We’re going to turn the page on impeachment at 4 o’clock on Wednesday.” –@LindseyGrahamSC pic.twitter.com/0nULzVNl0O
— GOP (@GOP) February 2, 2020
Andrew Yang said he would pardon President Trump to unify the nation if he faces criminal charges after the 2020 election.
During an interview on ABC’s This Week, Yang warned against targeting Trump after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to create a task force to investigate the president if she replaces him in the White House.
“You have to see what the facts on the ground are, and certainly, I would listen to the guidance of my attorney general,” the entrepreneur said. “But if you look at history around the world, it’s a very, very nasty pattern that developing countries have fallen into where a new president ends up throwing the president before them in jail.”
He continued, “That pattern, unfortunately, makes it very hard for any party to govern sustainably moving forward with a sense of unity among their people. And so to me, America should try to avoid that pattern if at all possible.”
Warren made the pledge to take “aggressive steps to root out the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration and to hold that administration accountable” on day one of her presidency in a posting on her campaign website last month.
“Donald Trump has run the most corrupt administration in history. I will direct the Justice Department to establish a task force to investigate violations by Trump administration officials of federal bribery laws, insider trading laws, and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws, and give that task force independent authority to pursue any substantiated criminal and civil violations,” the plan said.
Yang, 45, has been one of the few Democratic candidates to pull support from those who voted for Trump in the past. The entrepreneur has argued that Trump won the 2016 election because he recognized that manufacturing workers were being replaced and ignored by much of the political movement. He has advocated for a $1,000 universal basic income to help workers replaced by automation.
In 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after he resigned and left the White House. Ford argued that the divisiveness from Nixon’s resignation would “go on and on and on” if he did not end all criminal investigations by pardoning his predecessor.
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