African American history, as it is often told, includes two monumental migration stories: the forced exodus of Africans to the Americas during the brutal Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the voluntary migration of Black residents who moved from southern farms and towns to northern cities in the early 1900s in search of “the warmth of other suns.” A third African-American migration story–just as epic, just as grave–hovers outside the familiar frame of our historical consciousness. The iconic tragedy of Indian Removal: the Cherokee Trail of Tears that relocated thousands of Cherokees to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), was also a Black migration. Slaves of Cherokees walked this trail along with their Indian owners.

State lawmakers are looking to expand in-state tuition.

If it's voted into law, SB 859 would allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition for public Oregon graduate programs if they:

Qualified for undergraduate tuition equity

Attended Oregon K-12 schools for at least three years, or went to a U.S. school for a minimum of five years

Demonstrate intent to become a U.S. citizen

According to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, this would currently affect about 250 students.

Israeli occupation authorities refused to issue travel permits for hundreds of Palestinian Christians from Gaza who planned to visit holy sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem during Passover, Safa news agency reported yesterday.

Reporting Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Safa said that Israel allowed only 200 Christians from Gaza, who are over 55 years old, to travel to Jordan only and did not issue permits for those wishing to visit the Church of Nativity in occupied Bethlehem or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in occupied Jerusalem.

Israeli rights group Gisha reported complaints against the Israeli occupation regarding the restrictions imposed on people who want to travel during the Jewish Passover holiday which coincides with Easter.

“This is a flagrant violation of the freedom of movement, freedom of worship and freedom of enjoying family life for the Christians in Gaza,” Gisha said, noting that Gaza is an example of a “wider Israeli racist policy”.

Soon, this blog will be illegal.

No, I’m not selling drugs or peddling child pornography. I write about America’s wars and the primary objective of those illegal and immoral wars—to make Israel the hegemon of the Middle East along with Saudi Arabia. All US foreign policy in that region centers on those two nations.

The following may soon be classified as hate speech and antisemitism (as increasingly criticism of the Jewish state and its Zionist political ideology are considered crimes).

Trump took the baton from Obama after he told us he wasn’t into “nation-building” and was a populist “America First” noninterventionist. The American people were lied to again, but then this is now normal behavior.

Such criticism of Israel will soon be illegal. Democrats and Republicans are working together to make criticism of Israel a criminal offense. .

One of the figures involved in the Obama administration's "Russiagate" scandal who has largely avoided scrutiny is former MI6 spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove, who is intimately linked to several key players in what many now believe was a high-level Set-up against the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election.

Dearlove, who served as chief of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, had contact during the 2016 campaign with dossier author Christopher Steele. He is also a close colleague of Stefan Halper, the alleged FBI and CIA informant who established contact with several Trump campaign advisers. Dearlove and Halper attended a Cambridge political event in July 2016 where Halper had his first contact with Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. -Daily Caller

Of note, Dearlove is best known for peddling a report alleging that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, which then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair used to justify launching a war against Iraq.

Notre-Dame belongs to the French state, which had been paying little to no attention to a gothic jewel that traversed eight centuries.

Fragments of arcades, chimeras, reliefs, gargoyles were always falling to the ground and kept in an improvised deposit in the back of the cathedral.

Only last year Notre-Dame got a check for 2 million euros to restore the spire – which burned to the ground yesterday.

To restore the whole cathedral would have cost 150 million euros, according to the top world expert on Notre-Dame, who happens to be an American, Andrew Tallon.

Recently, the custodians of the cathedral and the French state were actually at war.

The French state was making at least 4 million euros a year, charging tourists to enter the Twin (Bell) Towers but putting back only 2 million euros for the maintenance of Notre-Dame.

The rector of Notre-Dame refused to charge for a ticket to enter the cathedral – as it happens, for example, at the Duomo in Milan.

US Attorney Richard Donoghue asked a federal judge last month for permission to present a mountain of new evidence in the NXIVM sex-cult trial - including evidence of an "illegal scheme to exceed contribution limits to a presidential primary campaign," in the "hopes of obtaining political influence to advance their own agenda," according to a March court filing.

"At the suggestion of a political operative, who has since pleaded guilty to an unrelated New York state bribery charge also involving campaign contributions, the contributions were “bundled” and presented to the candidate at a fundraising event attended by conspirators," the filing continues.

A Russian businessman with knowledge of the infamous “pee tapes” was told the tapes were fake, but chose not to tell Michael Cohen, the Mueller Report revealed Thursday.

Giorgi Rtskhiladze texted former personal attorney to the president Michael Cohen on October 30, 2016, saying, “Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else. Just so you know…” according to the report released Thursday morning after Attorney General William Barr’s press conference.

A footnote in the report reads, “Rtskhiladze said he was told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen.”

But though Rtskhiladze was told that the tapes were fake, he did not tell Cohen.

The San Diego County District Attorney has a new tactic aimed at locking in prison terms in plea-bargained cases, by requiring defendants to give up any rights they may have in the future to seek a lower sentence if the Legislature or the courts change the law under which they were sent to prison.

The move comes after years of criminal justice reform measures, passed both by voters through statewide propositions and by lawmakers in Sacramento, that have lessened potential sentences for some crimes, downgraded other crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and opened a way for people in prison to go to court and get lower sentences based on newly-adopted changes to the law.

Now, in some cases, prosecutors in San Diego will require defendants to agree that a sentence imposed as part of a plea bargain will remain forever. Under the terms of the waiver, defendants will be barred from pursuing any new benefits that may be available to them in the future.

SOURCE: BUSINESSINSIDER.COM
Facebook harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened their accounts.

Since May 2016, the social-networking company has collected the contact lists of 1.5 million users new to the social network, Business Insider can reveal. The Silicon Valley company said the contact data was "unintentionally uploaded to Facebook," and it is now deleting them.

The revelation comes after pseudononymous security researcher e-sushi noticed that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts to verify their identities, a move widely condemned by security experts. Business Insider then discovered that if you entered your email password, a message popped up saying it was "importing" your contacts without asking for permission first.

Hours after the ejection of Julian Assange from the London Ecuadorean embassy last week, police officers in Ecuador detained the Swedish citizen and open source developer Ola Bini. They seized him as he prepared to travel from his home in Quito to Japan, claiming that he was attempting to flee the country in the wake of Assange’s arrest. Bini had, in fact, booked the vacation long ago, and had publicly mentioned it on his Twitter account before Assange was arrested.

Ola’s detention was full of irregularities, as documented by his lawyers. His warrant was for a “Russian hacker” (Bini is neither); he was not read his rights, allowed to contact his lawyer nor offered a translator.

Sears Holdings Corp sued longtime former chairman Eddie Lampert, his hedge fund ESL Investments and others like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, claiming they illegally siphoned billions of dollars of assets from the retailer before it went bankrupt.

North Korea is flexing its muscles. On Thursday, the nation announced that it had test-launched a new “tactical guided weapon” — but kept the details vague.

The weapon is unlikely to be a long-range ballistic missile that could jeopardize peace talks, according to the Associated Press. Rather, given the fact that the announcement came with new demands for ongoing negotiations with the U.S., the tests were likely intended as a display of military strength.

Guessing Game
South Korean experts suspect that the new weapon was some sort of cruise missile, per the AP‘s attempt to learn more. Had the weapon been a longer-range missile that could pose a threat to the U.S. or other nations, then North Korea may have put at risk its ongoing effort to lift sanctions that other countries have imposed on it.

The US may not stand a chance against Russia and China should World War III break out, advanced warfare analysts have warned.

Nonprofit global policy think tank RAND has been performing simulated war scenarios, often sponsored by the Pentagon, to test how American forces would fare against the world’s other leading military superpowers.

Last week, RAND analysts revealed that in scenario after scenario, the US has suffered severe losses despite spending nearly $1trillion annually on the military, exceeding the spending of any other country by more than double.

‘In our games, when we fight Russia and China, “blue” gets its ass handed to it,’ researcher David Ochmanek explained at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Breaking Defense first reported. American forces are generally color-coded in blue in the simulations.

The Air Force has a new science and technology strategy, and it’s built around the idea that the service needs to generate leap-ahead capabilities like the 1950s-era Century Series that spawned six new fighter jets in five years.

To do that, the service wants to restructure about 20 percent of its S&T efforts into “vanguard programs” that will tie together different developmental efforts across the Air Force’s research institutions and experiment with them to see whether it shows promise.

“If you’re playing hockey, you shouldn’t be shooting where the goalie is. You should be shooting where the goalie isn’t,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said Wednesday. “So the idea with part of this strategy is to assess where our adversaries can’t easily go and get there first and fastest. That’s a winning strategy.”

Why is a nation with no polar shoreline building nuclear icebreakers? Hydrocarbons and trade routes.

An international research team have discovered kin relationships among stone-age individuals buried in megalithic tombs in Ireland and Sweden, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America scientific journal.

The kin relations can be traced for more than 10 generations and suggest that megaliths were graves for kindred groups in stone age north-western Europe.

According to the paper, agriculture spread through migrants from the Fertile Crescent into Europe around 9,000 BCE, reaching north-western Europe by 4,000 BC. Starting around 4,500 BC, a new phenomenon of constructing megalithic monuments, particularly for funerary practices, emerged along the Atlantic façade.

These constructions have been enigmatic to the scientific community and the origin and social structure of the groups that erected them has remained largely unknown.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will hold a meeting in Russia before the end of the month, the Kremlin said on Thursday. Kim will visit to Russia at Putin’s invitation, according to the statement.

Throughout most of southern Ohio, residents who watch cable news are predominantly glued to one channel: Fox News.

People there don’t watch Fox News to know what to think; they already know what they think, and they avoid news channels that insult their intelligence and core beliefs. Yes, Fox News is an echo chamber for the right, but no more than CNN and MSNBC are for the left, as far as conservatives are concerned. To be fair, when a Democrat is in the White House, the networks switch places, with Fox News criticizing every move, and MSNBC and CNN defending the Oval Office fortress.

German prosecutors have charged a 92-year-old former concentration camp guard with being an accessory to murder, in what will be one of the last ever cases against Nazi-era war crimes.

Hamburg prosecutors accused the man, identified only as Bruno D., of aiding and abetting 5,230 cases of murder during the almost nine months he spent on duty at a concentration camp watch-tower at the end of World War Two.

According to Die Welt newspaper, which first reported the charges, the man admitted to prosecutors during a voluntary interrogation last year that he had seen people being taken to gas chambers to be murdered.

The NXIVM sex cult is facing allegations that it illegally bundled campaign donations to gain political favor with an unnamed US presidential election candidate and reports suggest that the politician is Hillary Clinton.
United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Richard Donoghue asked a federal judge to introduce evidence showing that the defendants in the sex cult case had an “illegal scheme to exceed contribution limits to a presidential primary campaign.”

The court documents claim that witness testimony and documentary evidence will show that at least 14 NXIVM members, including five defendants, made the maximum campaign donation to a candidate, with the “understanding that they would be reimbursed by [Claire] Bronfman or Nancy Salzman,” who were involved in the cult. Salzman is the co-founder along with Keith Raniere.

Sears Holdings Corp sued longtime Chairman Eddie Lampert, his hedge fund ESL Investments, and former directors including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, accusing them of allowing the retailer to be looted of billions of dollars before its October 2018 bankruptcy.

The lawsuit, made public on Thursday, was filed by the restructuring team winding down what remains of the pre-bankruptcy Sears following Lampert’s $5.2 billion purchase in February of most of its assets.

Sears accused Lampert of ordering the creation of bogus financial plans showing the retailer would turn itself around even as it racked up huge losses, enabling the transfer of five major assets including Land’s End and Sears Hometown Outlet for his benefit.

The participants at the Forum of Russian-Arab Cooperation agreed to continue developing efforts to contribute to the normalization in Libya, declared the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, at the closing of negotiations held with the Secretary General of the League of Arab States, Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

“We have agreed to continue working on the normalization of Libya,” said Lavrov.

The Russian foreign minister said that those gathered expressed their support for the efforts of the UN special representative, Ghassan Salame, on the implementation of the Road Map, prepared by him, to contribute to the normalization in Libya.

“The common task of the interested parties is to help the Libyans overcome the existing discord and reach agreements that lead to national reconciliation,” said Lavrov.

There’s only been one person – so far – who suffered for the sins of the world and either saved us a lot of trouble or else caused us a lot of unnecessary grief. All I know is that a lot of people are hoping for His return – and for a better outcome.

As for myself, I fully expect a repeat of the previous scenario: the message, the betrayal, the persecution, and a torturous death.

They isolated Julian in the days before they hauled him out for the public display of his martyrdom. No crucifix this time. No crown of thorns. Just a penumbra of the deepest silence, which grips the very air: yet still he remains unbowed, his head held high.

The mix-up was reportedly spotted by many keen-eyed viewers, with one of them joking about how "for us Americans every cathedral looks the same".

As news of the terrible tragedy which befell the famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris spread across the world, The New York Times newspaper apparently ended up making a blunder related to the building’s appearance, according to German radio station Deutschlandfunk.

According to the media outlet, the opening sequence of a video released by the newspaper clearly shows the Cologne Cathedral instead of the Notre-Dame de Paris, with many keen-eyed viewers – especially residents of Cologne – quickly noticing the gaffe, with one of them jokingly remarking that "for us Americans every cathedral looks the same".

The phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ must be too many syllables for her to understand.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked during an interview on Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast this past weekend if she supports impeaching President Trump.

As with most thoughts, the Democrat socialist struggled to convey any rational reasons for supporting such a bold and significant move.

“I think you could reach in a bag and pull so many things out that are impeachable of this president,” she claimed. “I support impeaching this president.”

So many things …

That’s when the interviewers asked her to cite three specific ‘things.’

Investigators believe an 'electrical short circuit' was responsible for starting the blaze which devastated Notre Dame cathedral this week.

A French judicial police official said investigators brought in to work out the cause of the inferno made the claims - despite them not having been given access to the church yet for safety reasons.

The official, who spoke anonymously about the ongoing investigation, said the monument is still being consolidated with wooden planks to support some fragile parts of the walls.

Only after it is fully made safe will investigators will be allowed a closer look in order to accurately determine the cause of the fire.

Natural foods grocery chain Whole Foods introduced its new brand of bottled water at a 2015 investor event, where company executives heralded the product’s purity and healthfulness.

"It naturally flows out of the ground," chief operating officer A.C. Gallo said about the company’s spring in Council, Idaho, according to a published transcript on its website. "We built, actually, a spring house over it so we can let the water go down to the bottling plant. It’s amazingly pristine water."

IMAGINE you are floating along in space. It is quiet and cold, serene but slightly terrifying. Suddenly, you feel a tug, faint at first, but getting ever stronger as it pulls you towards an empty region of the sky. Before you know it, you have entered a black hole. “That’s when the universe starts to go bizarre on you,” says Priyamvada Natarajan at Yale University.

With the publication of the first ever picture of a black hole this week, any residual doubt that these monsters of space-time exist is banished. But as to what happens inside one – well, there physicists are still mightily in dispute. So what are your possible fates, should you ever be so unlucky as to have a close encounter of the black hole kind?

This week, in a stunning turn of events, U.S. congressman Dana Rohrabacher became the first congressman to meet with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

During the private three-hour meeting Assange told Rohrabacher that he will prove that leaked DNC documents, published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election, did not come from Russia. Then on Thursday, Rohrabacher made a promise to pardon him.

On Thursday, Rohrabacher gave an interview with the Daily Caller in which he noted that Assange couldn’t come to Washington given his current status as a wanted criminal. So, he brought up the notion of pardoning the political prisoner.

Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview Thursday that Assange is hoping to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he is currently in asylum, and that during the meeting they explored "what might be necessary to get him out."

A new air-breathing rocket engine is ready for a major round of testing in the next 18 months after having passed a preliminary design review by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), which is being developed by the U.K. company Reaction Engines, can switch between two modes. In aircraft-engine mode, it uses oxygen from the atmosphere, and in rocket-engine mode, it burns an oxidizer carried onboard together with the fuel liquid hydrogen.