Michelle Obama also says she was surprised that so many American women voted for the “misogynist” Trump over Hillary Clinton, “an exceptionally qualified female candidate,” in the 2016 election.
The book, “Becoming,” hits stores on Tuesday, and Obama does not mince words about her husband’s successor — and his involvement in promoting the idea that Barack Obama was born abroad.
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed,” she writes, in excerpts of the book published by ABC News and The Washington Post.
“But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she adds.
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls?
“Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
Things are not looking too well for ex- Gambian president Yahya Jammeh after the United States banned him and his family from setting foot in the country ever.
The U.S. Department of State, on December 10, announced that the former president was barred from the country because of his heavy involvement in corruption and human rights violations. According to thestatement:
The Department is publicly designating former president of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, under the terms of Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2018, due to his involvement in significant corruption. Section 7031(c) provides that, in cases where the Secretary of State has credible information that foreign government officials have been involved in significant corruption or a gross violation of human rights, those individuals and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States.
The ban affects his immediate family members, including spouse, Zineb Yahya Jammeh, his daughter, Mariam Jammeh, and his son, Muhammad Yahya Jammeh.
Jammeh is currently living in Equatorial Guinea since his ouster in 2016. It took negotiations, a military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), threats from the international community, visits by about half a dozen heads of state and an immunity deal for him and his family before he agreed to not only relinquish power but also leave the country after losing the December 2016 elections to current president Adama Barrow.
He has also been accused of stealing more than $50 million from the state, according to the country’s justice minister and of going away with more than $11 million and a number of luxury vehicles when he left the country in 2017.
Yaya Jammeh’s $ 3.5 million Potomac, Maryland mansion
According to a former employee, the ex-dictator and his wife considered the U.S. a favourite destination, usually accessed by private planes. Their daughter is a student in an expensive boarding school in Manhattan.
Questions abound as to why the U.S. waited two years before issuing such a designation to the ex-president.
Monday, 03 December 2018 00:17 Written by livescience
One of five known original copies of Stephen Hawking's thesis is put up for auction.
Credit: CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2018
Stephen Hawking's wheelchair has sold for more than $387,000 (£296,750) at auction in the U.K., according to Christie's.
The motorized, red leather chair — which Hawking used between the late 1980s and mid 1990s, several decades after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) but before he lost use of his hands — was part of a large collection of Hawking and other scientific memorabilia sold via an online auction running between Oct. 31 and today (Nov. 8).
The auction, titled "On the Shoulders of Giants," also included handwritten documents penned by Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. In total, the auction raised more than £1.8 million (more than $2.35 million) — however, it was Hawking's artifacts that drove the highest bids.
The big winner of the day was Hawking's hand-signed PhD thesis, "Properties of Expanding Universes," which sold for £584,750 ($763,819). Hawking submitted this thesis to the University of Cambridge in October 1965, following a period of depression when he was first diagnosed with ALS (known as motor neurone disease in the U.K.). In 1962, doctors predicted Hawking would live for only another two years (in fact, he lived for another five decades, dying at the age of 76 this March).
Other Hawking memorabilia sold at the auction included the script from an episode of "The Simpsons" in which Hawking appeared as a guest star (sale price: £6,250 / $8,164), a copy of Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" signed with the author's thumbprint (£68,750 / $89,803), a collection of awards and medals (£296,750 / $387,624), the black bomber jacket he wore in a 2016 documentary (£40,000 / $52,249) and an artist's proof of an invitation to Hawking's famous 2009 party where only time travelers were invited (£11,250 / $14,695).
Proceeds from the auction will be donated to the Stephen Hawking Foundation and the Motor Neurone Disease Association.
Saturday, 01 December 2018 09:21 Written by oasesnews
Former US President, George H.W. Bush is dead.
He died at the age of 94 in Houston on Friday, according to a statement issued by his spokesperson, Jim McGrath.
The statement reads: “George Herbert Walker Bush, World War II naval aviator, Texas oil pioneer, and 41st President of the United States of America, died on November 30, 2018.
“He was 94 and is survived by his five children and their spouses, 17 grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and two siblings.
“He was preceded in death by his wife of 73 years, Barbara; his second child Pauline “Robin” Bush; and his brothers Prescott and William or “Bucky” Bush.”
Bush’s death comes after his wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush, passed away on April 17 at the age of 92.
Bush, the 41st president of the United States, lived longer than any of his predecessors, CNN reports.
Bush is survived by his son, Jeb, the former Florida governor and 2016 presidential candidate; sons Neil and Marvin; daughter Dorothy; and 17 grandchildren.
He will be buried at his presidential library in College Station, Texas.
When the CIA announced that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman likely ordered the brutal killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, my colleagues and I published an opinion piece in a Canadian newspaper. We were critical of our government’s response, which doubles down on its rhetoric of “human rights” while failing to take any concrete action.
“We will continue to stand up for Canadian values and indeed for universal values and human rights at any occasion,” Prime Minister Trudeau said in August.
“Continue”? And “at any occasion?” But why not now, and on this occasion?
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has offered an explanation that she framed as morally virtuous: “When it comes to existing contracts, our government believes strongly that Canada’s word has to matter.”
Trudeau and Freeland are seen at a news conference on the new North American free-trade deal in Oct. 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Canada’s $14.8 billion contract to sell armoured combat vehicles to Saudi Arabia could not be jeopardized. Cancelling it would carry penalties somewhere in the range of “billions of dollars,” the prime minister tells us. And besides, this deal will reportedly create 3,000 jobsover 14 years in southwestern Ontario. This too is significant. But the trade-off is stark: the death of some in exchange for the livelihood of others. This can be none other than what we called a “sacrificial economy.”
‘Everybody knows’
If I could choose a soundtrack for the Jamal Khashoggi affair, it would be the ghostly voice of Leonard Cohen singing “
.” The refrain is familiar. Everybody knows about Canada’s lucrative armoured vehicle contract with the Saudi regime. Everybody knows the deal is rotten.
Everybody knows that these are weapons and do not serve the same humanitarian purposes as books or pharmaceuticals or grain. Everybody knows that they deliver death and destitution and that they have helped to produce what the United Nations has called the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time in Yemen.
Everybody knows that a Washington Post journalist is not the only victim of these economies — there are countless dead who have no voice, and it is especially tragic that someone positioned to speak on their behalf was himself assassinated.
Everybody knows — or should know — that in 2017 alone, Canada sold just under $500 million worth of guns, training gear, imaging and countermeasure equipment, bombs, rockets, drones and unspecified chemical or biological agents to Saudi Arabia. We have also sold guided missiles to Bahrain, and different weapons to the United Arab Emirates — both of which support Saudi military action in Yemen.
We have also sold military helicopters to Rodrigo Duterte’s regime in the Philippines. The list goes on. So even if one Saudi contract is cancelled, not much is likely to change.
Dice are loaded
But even without these details, everybody knows that the dice are loaded. In my research, I examine the ethical relationship between the modern state’s power to “make live” and “let die” — which also means indirect killing. This is what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” a deadly and differential politics where life itself is both the means and the end of political power.
Sacrificial deaths go by many euphemisms: collateral damages (in war), opportunity costs or negative externalities (in economics). But negative “externality” is misleading here. The negation of life, or “letting die,” is internal to this general economy, a moral economy that silently underpins the rules of international law, diplomacy and trade. Everybody knows, but nobody knows what to do with this knowledge.
It is, then, as if Khashoggi’s murder — along with innumerable others less spectacular or publicized — are factored in as a tolerable threshold of death in the name of life and livelihood. This is not new, but the scale of mass destruction and its technological automation should give us pause as we contemplate the roboticization of weapons and algorithmic warfare.
The sacrificial economy has its own sinister principles of accounting. As British intellectual and forensic architect Eyal Weizman has documented in The Least of All Possible Evils, the U.S. military has tolerable thresholds of civilian deaths for each military death; Israeli blockades in Gaza have counted the calories of food entering Gaza, based on average per-person consumption (2,100 calories per male and 1,700 per female).
Violence as virtue
Violence is framed as a moral virtue, obeying “proportionality” or the “humanitarian minimum.” Outside the theatres of war, and in the Canadian context, what is the tolerable threshold of carbon emissions and climate change to sell our oil, or the tolerable threshold of First Nations communities without access to clean drinking water? More sacrifice.
It would be unjust to blame Trudeau or Freeland entirely for our sacrificial economy. As Cohen writes, “That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.”
But there is, still, the matter of Canada’s word, our collective values and the willingness of each Canadian to remain complicit or to knowingly resist. Khashoggi’s death is significant not just for its attack on the freedom of the press, but because it occasions a grave conversation on the relationship between our livelihood as Canadians and the countless deaths that this livelihood calls for and quietly condones.
Author: Stuart J. Murray: Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics, Carleton University
President Donald Trump’s reaction to the disappearance and death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul reveals important details about the declining influence of U.S. in the Middle East.
As a scholar who follows the links between international and domestic politics in the Middle East, it is not hard to see that what President Trump has said so far about the Khashoggi affair will accelerate the diminishing power of the U.S. in the Middle East.
New dynamic for an old alliance
American influence in the Middle East – especially over Saudi Arabia – was already waningbefore Trump’s election.
After the Bush administration’s failure to turn post-invasion Iraq into a model of pro-American democracy in the Middle East, the Obama administration attempted to avoid Middle East military quagmires.
The recent rise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman pushed Saudi Arabia from a country that preferred to work in the background in international affairs into a nation that stepped up its activity as the U.S. stepped back.
The Saudis took Trump’s election as an opportunity to push the U.S. for a harder line on Iran. They wanted the U.S. to reverse the nuclear deal and do more to block Iran’s clients in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Bahrain. The Saudis also wanted to arm themselves with more modern weapons systems.
Trump and the art of the arms deal
Trump’s vision of Saudi-U.S. relations has arms sales by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia at its center, which is an example of how his “America First” foreign policy works.
In Trump’s first foreign visit as president, he flew to Saudi Arabia and signed a deal to sell US$110 billion worth of arms to the Saudis. Trump emerged from that trip with a close relationship to Crown Prince Salman, who drives much of Saudi government policy for his aged father, King Salman.
Since then, the prince has developed a strong relationship with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who serves as a regular liaison between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
Recently, Trump rejected the idea of Congress imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia if the Saudis were found responsible for killing Khashoggi.
Trump said, “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country on – I know they’re talking about different kinds of sanctions, but they’re spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs, like jobs and others, for this country.”
In another interview, Trump said that he told the King of Saudi Arabia “King, you’ve gotta pay” for American protection.
Arms or influence?
Trump’s transactional foreign policy is primarily concerned with money and American jobs. Previous bipartisan cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy have fallen to the wayside, including promoting human rights and democracy or seeking a strategic balance of power favorable to American interests.
This policy risks pushing U.S. influence in the Middle East further to the margins. In Trump’s calculations, the U.S. cannot sanction or chastise Riyadh because it would hurt the U.S. more than it would Saudi Arabia. American jobs would be lost if the Saudis turned to purchasing arms from Russia or China.
The Saudis have threatened “that if it receives any action, it will respond with greater action, and that the Kingdom’s economy has an influential and vital role in the global economy.” The exact nature of these actions remains unclear. These threats, however, play on fears that the Saudis would cancel the arms purchase or raise the price of oil. And late on Monday, reports emerged that Saudi Arabia was going to admit accidentally killing Khashoggi in an interrogation.
President Trump has emboldened Saudi Arabia by relying on his personal diplomacy and focusing on jobs rather than broader American interests or ideals. If the Saudis are able to keep the United States out of the Khashoggi affair, then Trump has opened the door to further limits on U.S. influence in the Middle East.
Author:Russell E. Lucas: Director of Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities; Associate Professor of International Relations, Michigan State University
The public prosecutor had earlier said he was seeking the death penalty for five out of 11 suspects charged with the murder of Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor said on Thursday the person who had ordered the killing of prominent journalist Jamal Khashoggi was the head of the negotiating team sent to repatriate him.
The prosecutor, Shaalan al-Shaalan, also said that the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s body remained unknown.
The prosecutor told reporters in Riyadh that investigations were still ongoing to locate the remains of the slain journalist.
The public prosecutor had earlier said he was seeking the death penalty for five out of 11 suspects charged with the murder of Khashoggi.
He said 11 out of 21 suspects had been indicted and that their cases would be referred to court, while the investigation with the remaining suspects would continue in order to determine their role in the crime.
Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi policy, was killed in the country’s Istanbul consulate on October 2. He was killed after a struggle by a lethal injection dose and his body was dismembered and taken out of the building, Shaalan told reporters in Riyadh.
Riyadh had offered numerous contradictory explanations for Khashoggi’s disappearance before saying he was killed in a rogue operation.
The case sparked global outcry, opened the kingdom to possible international sanctions and tarnished the image of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Turkish officials had accused Prince Mohammed of ordering the murder while President Erdogan said the killing was ordered at the “highest levels” of the Saudi government.
U.S. President Donald Trump had suggested ultimate responsibility lay with the prince as de facto ruler.
A travel ban had been imposed on a top aide to the crown prince, Saud al-Qahtani, while investigations continued over his role, Shaalan said.
He said Qahtani had met the team ordered to repatriate Kashoggi ahead of their journey to Istanbul to brief them on the journalist’s activities.
Qahtani has already been fired from the royal court.
Turkey says it has a recording related to the killing which it has shared with Western allies.
President Tayyip Erdogan said the recordings are “appalling” and shocked a Saudi intelligence officer who listened to them.
In developed nations such as Canada, citizens might assume that governing authorities legitimately and competently act to provide them with economic and social security.
Citizens provide information to government officials on the adverse effects of the inequitable distribution of income and services with the expectation that they will respond. To name just one example, poverty researchers and food security advocates detail the extent of poverty and hunger respectively in Canada and its adverse health effects, hoping for positive policy responses from governing authorities.
Yet growing income inequality among Canadians and the scaling-back of programs that benefit many of them challenge this assumption. Instead, governments are enacting public policies that primarily benefit economic elites. Our research raises serious questions about government legitimacy and competency due to these issues, and how the dereliction has significant impacts on the health and well-being of Canadians.
The legitimacy of governments is based on processes of democracy and participation and the acceptance of public policy outcomes.
Our first-past-the-post electoral system means most Canadians aren’t represented by the party they voted for. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
No one doubts that Canada holds “free and open” elections. However, the political process is dominated by economic elites whose calls for reduced taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and for scaling back social programs, are enacted by the dominant political parties.
In addition, the “first-past-the-post” electoral systemdisenfranchises the political preferences of a significant number of Canadians — usually the majority of voters — while maintaining control of federal and provincial parliaments by business-oriented political parties.
What’s the outcome of this domination? Growing corporate power affects labour markets, social spending and tax and transfer policy, all to the detriment of most Canadians.
Indeed, almost 50 per cent of Canadians have indicated they couldn’t meet their financial obligations if their paycheque was a week late.
Poverty rates are revealing
The poverty rate is a good measure of legitimacy. It indicates whether the distribution of resources is so skewed that it creates material deprivation that threatens well-being.
Statistics Canada reports that in 2015 that 14.2 per cent of Canadians — or 4,979,000 people — were living in poverty. Among children 17 years of age and younger, the rate was 15.2 per cent, or 1,032,000 Canadian children. Statistics Canada also reports people in poverty fall a full 30.5 per cent below the poverty line.
This shows that poverty is not only widespread, but deep. Comparatively, Canada ranks 25th of 34 developed wealthy nations in controlling poverty rates.
Another indicator of legitimacy is the extent to which the benefits of an expanding economy are distributed equitably. Over the past 20 years, the incomes of the bottom 60 per cent of Canadians have stagnated, while growing sharply for the highest 20 per cent. Canada ranks 20th among 34 wealthy developed nations in managing income inequality.
A simple definition of competence — “the ability to do something successfully or efficiently” from the Oxford dictionary — can help assess Canada’s governing authorities’ abilities to meet the economic and social needs of citizens.
Indigenous Rights: The 2014 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples identified extreme inequity in socio-economic conditions and well-being between Indigenous and other Canadians. Of the bottom 100 communities in Canada on the Community Well-being Index, 96 are First Nations.
Employment and Working Conditions: Canada has one of the highest rates of low-paid employment among developed nations. Related to this is growing precariousness of work that’s associated with very limited employment benefits, and in particular, job insecurity.
A homeless person is seen in downtown Toronto in January 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov
Food Insecurity:Statistics Canada’s Community Health Surveys find that 12.4 per cent of Canadians or 1.1 million households, or more than four million individuals — including 1.15 million children — experience food insecurity. Canada has been scolded by the UN for failing to meet its international obligations to provide Canadians with food.
In addition, Statistics Canada reports that 12.7 per cent of Canadian households were in what’s known as “core housing need” in 2016.
Core housing need refers to three criteria: Affordability (households spend 30 per cent or more of their incomes on their housing); suitability (the housing is appropriate for household composition and size); and adequacy (the household does not require major repairs, such as plumbing).
The most common reason for core housing need is housing affordability. Canada has been chastised by the United Nations for not meeting its international obligations.
Delores Daniels holds a photo of her daughter Serena McKay, who was murdered in 2017. Canada’s treatment of Indigenous women is particularly absymal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods
Women’s rights:The United Nations 2016 review found Canada lacked a comprehensive national strategy, policy or action plan to address the structural factors that cause gender inequalities.
It noted the continued high prevalence of gender-based violence against women, in particular against Indigenous women and girls who suffer multiple forms of discrimination in access to employment, housing, education and health care.
What to do?
Canadian governing authorities wear the veneer of legitimacy and competency despite their pandering to economic elites and their unwillingness to fairly distribute resources.
The failure of Canadian governments to respond to these problems requires mobilization of the public to literally force them to act.
Canadian public policy may be creating order, and, currently, peace. It is certainly not good government by any stretch of the imagination.
Author: Dennis Raphael: Professor of Health Policy and Management, York University, Canada, Morris Komakech:PhD Student, York University, Canada, Ryan Torrence: Masters student, York University, Canada and Toba Bryant:Associate Professor of Health Sciences, University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Subscribe our Email News Letter to get Instant Update at anytime
About Oases News
OASES News is a News Agency with the central idea of diseminating credible, evidence-based, impeccable news and activities without stripping all technicalities involved in news reporting.
