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A week into President Donald Trump declaration that Republicans will be known as the “Party of Health Care,” few GOP lawmakers want ownership of an issue proven harmful to the party’s political futures, Politico reported on Monday.
This includes the four Senate Republicans that Trump named as the ones to work on a plan, with one of them, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, saying he had no advance warning he was to be part of the health policy group.
Republicans have been at an impasse on an Obamacare replacement since the party’s repeal effort fell apart in 2017, leaving the GOP paralyzed because it does want to contradict Trump but scared of getting into another campaign cycle without a comprehensive message on health care.
Although Republicans are not completely without ideas, they have not managed to reach agreements on the divisions between centrists and conservatives in their party that doomed the last repeal effort, according to Politico.
The “Health Care Choices” plan proposed by the right’s prominent think tanks would give states block grants to cover residents, but conservatives argue it doesn’t go far enough to repeal Obamacare, and more moderate Republicans are concerned the plan would contradict their promise to protect people with pre-existing conditions.
Democrats have mocked the Republicans on the issue, with House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth saying that “If you look at eight years of the Republican majority, they never came up with an alternative. We’re going to keep highlighting the fact that they don’t have a solution and never have.”
Republicans were further thrown for a loop when the party’s legislators thought they could attack Democrats’ “Medicare for All” plans as a reckless threat to private insurance, but Trump ruined that strategy with his renewed offensive against Obamacare.
Source: NewsMax Politics
Police move in on animal rights protesters who had blocked the intersections of Flinders and Swanston Street, in Melbourne, Australia, April 8, 2019. AAP Image/Ellen Smith via REUTERS
April 8, 2019
MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Australia police arrested 38 animal rights activists on Monday after they blocked peak hour traffic in Melbourne in protests to mark the first anniversary of a film, Dominion, about factory farming.
The protests were part of a wave of action in three states, where activists targeted abattoirs in the middle of the night to protest cruelty to animals.
The documentary Dominion, directed by Chris Delforce, used drones and undercover footage to film feedlots and saleyards to show how animals are treated in the production of meat, dairy, eggs and leather.
“The industry is telling people these animals are being killed ethically, that they are being killed humanely,” Delforce told Australian Associated Press. “It’s the furthest thing from humane.”
Protestors blocked a major Melbourne intersection for two hours, stopping trams bringing thousands of commuters into the city. Further down the road, activists blocked the entrance to Melbourne’s aquarium.
Police said they had not been told in advance about the protests.
“We respect the right for people to protest peacefully but we will not tolerate anti-social behavior that disrupts the broader community,” Victoria police superintendent David Clayton said in a statement.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in campaign mode ahead of an election in May where farmers’ votes will be key, called the vegan protestors’ plans to storm farms and abattoirs shameful, and that the government would tighten laws to curb such action.
“I mean this is just another form of activism that I think runs against the national interest. The national interest is people being able to farm their own land,” Morrison said in an interview on 2GB radio.
In Yangan in Queensland state, 18 activists chained themselves to fixtures inside an abattoir early morning on Monday and eventually left after management agreed to release three sheep, Queensland police acting inspector Jamie Deacon told a media conference.
No charges have been laid against anyone, he said.
(Reporting by Sonali Paul; Editing by Michael Perry)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., March 22, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
April 8, 2019
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) – A Chinese woman charged with bluffing her way into President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida resort last month, renewing concerns about security at the club, is due in court on Monday for a hearing to determine whether she will remain in custody.
The woman, Yujing Zhang, was arrested after giving conflicting reasons for being in the club during one of Trump’s routine weekend visits. According to prosecutors, she was carrying four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing what investigators described as “malicious malware.”
The FBI is examining whether Zhang has any links to Chinese intelligence or political influence operations, two U.S. government sources told Reuters last week.
She told one of the U.S. Secret Service agents who protect the property she was there to use the pool and later told a second agent that she had been invited to a U.N. Chinese American Association event, though club officials determined no such event was scheduled. She was arrested after agents determined she had no legitimate reason to be at the club, a for-profit business owned by Trump.
Zhang has been charged with making false statements to a federal officer and entering or remaining in a restricted area, charges that carry up to a five-year sentence in federal prison if she is convicted. She is 32 or 33 years old, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Congressional Democrats raised questions on Wednesday about security at the club, where Trump is in close and frequent contact with club members and guests. The president brushed off the concerns, calling the incident a “fluke” and praising the Secret Service.
(Reporting by Zachary Fagenson; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Source: OANN
The medical community knew that a day of reckoning was coming.
For years, they were repeatedly warned that the rampant overuse of certain types of medications would result in the development of “super diseases” that we would not be able to stop, and now that day has arrived. Just like many types of bacteria, fungi have also been developing defenses against our most effective modern medicines. One in particular, a fungus known as Candida auris, is now a massive public health threat. An expert quoted by the New York Times has admitted that it is “pretty much unbeatable”, it spreads very easily, and it kills close to 50 percent of the people that it infects. In other words, we are in the early chapters of a medical horror show of our own making, and there is no way out.
Candida auris (or C. auris for short) spreads most easily among those with weakened immune systems. Infants, seniors, smokers and diabetics are among the most vulnerable.
About a year ago, a senior was admitted to a hospital in Brooklyn, and what doctors discovered after running a blood test absolutely stunned them…
Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious.
Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit. The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe.
Like so many others that get infected, the elderly man died, but before he did C. auris had literally spread to every surface in his entire room…
The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.
“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
But unlike other major potential health threats, C. auris is not confined to a particular geographic region.
According to a top official from the CDC, the fungus has quickly spread all over the globe, and “now it is everywhere”. The following comes from Zero Hedge…
“It is a creature from the black lagoon,” said the CDC’s Dr. Tom Chiller, who heads the fungal branch. “It bubbled up and now it is everywhere.”
In the last five years alone, it it has swept through a hospital in Spain, hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, spread throughout India, Pakistan and South Africa, and forced a prestigious British medical center to close its ICU for nearly two weeks.
We do not currently have any way to defeat C. auris.
Perhaps some day we will, but for now it will always be with us. We just need to hope that the number of people that it kills is minimized.
The following are three reasons why the CDC is so concerned with this fungus…
- It is often multidrug-resistant, meaning that it is resistant to multiple antifungal drugs commonly used to treat Candida infections.
- It is difficult to identify with standard laboratory methods, and it can be misidentified in labs without specific technology. Misidentification may lead to inappropriate management.
- It has caused outbreaks in healthcare settings. For this reason, it is important to quickly identify C. auris in a hospitalized patient so that healthcare facilities can take special precautions to stop its spread.
If you become infected, there is a really good chance that you are going to die.
Among one group of clinical case patients in New York, 45 percent of them died within 90 days…
The Centers for Disease Control said it “identified 51 clinical case-patients and 61 screening case-patients” in New York alone. The CDC reported 45% of the clinical case-patients died within 90 days.
But until this latest New York Times report, the general public had not been allowed to hear much about C. auris, and that was by design. Apparently the authorities felt that “there is no point in scaring patients”…
This hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients — or prospective ones.
Dr. Silke Schelenz, Royal Brompton’s infectious disease specialist, found the lack of urgency from the government and hospital in the early stages of the outbreak “very, very frustrating.”
So we have been left totally in the dark about a “super fungus” that could potentially kill millions of us.
This is yet another example that shows that we are not going to be able to rely on the authorities when things really hit the fan. If it suits their purposes, they will keep things quiet even when people are dropping dead all around us.
And there isn’t just one version of C. auris that the medical community has to contend with. Apparently there are four distinct versions, and they are all incredibly deadly.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know if you have been infected. The main symptoms are a fever, aches and fatigue, and those symptoms are common to a whole host of different illnesses.
Of course those that do not know that they have been infected also don’t know that they are spreading it either.
The experts assure us that C. auris spreads very easily, and in heavily congested cities there is the potential for it to start spreading like wildfire.
The stage is set for a public health crisis unlike anything we have ever seen before, and unlike other diseases, the medical community has no way to stop it.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: Australian Labor Party opposition leader Bill Shorten arrives at his election night party with his wife Chloe in Melbourne, July 2, 2016 on Australia’s federal election day. REUTERS/Jason Reed/File Photo
April 7, 2019
MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Australia’s opposition Labor is the favorite to win a national election expected in May, two polls showed on Monday, but its lead has narrowed over the conservative coalition government which announced income tax cuts in its budget last week.
A closely watched Newspoll done for The Australian newspaper showed Labor ahead of the Coalition 52-48 on a two-party preferred basis, but that was down from 54-46 in the last poll in March.
A separate Ipsos poll, published by the Sydney Morning Herald, showed Labor ahead 53-47.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is expected to call an election this week, most likely for May 11 or May 18.
“The election will be called in April and the election will be held in May. We’re not doing this with any haste and we’re not doing it with any delay,” Morrison told reporters on Sunday, amid speculation he was delaying to give the government more time to promote its budget.
“I noticed Bill Shorten’s frustration yesterday, but you know, that impatience is born of arrogance,” Morrison said.
Despite Labor’s consistent lead in the polls over the past year, Morrison remains the preferred prime minister over Labor leader Shorten.
Newspoll surveyed 1,799 voters across the country from April 4 to 6, following the release of the government’s budget on April 2 and Labor’s reply two days later.
The Ipsos poll surveyed 1,200 voters from April 3 to 6, and has a margin of error of 2.9 percent.
(Reporting by Sonali Paul; Editing by Sonya Hepisntall)
Source: OANN
Thanks to the overprescription of antimicrobial drugs and use of antifungicides in crop production, a relatively new germ that preys on people with weakened immune systems is rapidly spreading across the globe, according to the New York Times.
The infection – a fungus known as Candida auris, kills almost half of all patients who contract it within 90 days, according to the CDC – as it’s impervious to most major antifungal medications. First described in 2009 after a 70-year-old Japanese woman showed up at a Tokyo hospital with C. auris in her ear canal, the aggressive yeast infection has spread across Asia and Europe – arriving in the US by 2016.
The earliest known case in the United States involved a woman who arrived at a New York hospital on May 6, 2013, seeking care for respiratory failure. She was 61 and from the United Arab Emirates, and she died a week later, after testing positive for the fungus. At the time, the hospital hadn’t thought much of it, but three years later, it sent the case to the C.D.C. after reading the agency’s June 2016 advisory. –NYT
In the last five years alone, it it has swept through a hospital in Spain, hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, spread throughout India, Pakistan and South Africa, and forced a prestigious British medical center to close its ICU for nearly two weeks.
By the end of June 2016, a scientific paper reported “an ongoing outbreak of 50 C. auris cases” at Royal Brompton, and the hospital took an extraordinary step: It shut down its I.C.U. for 11 days, moving intensive care patients to another floor, again with no announcement.
Days later the hospital finally acknowledged to a newspaper that it had a problem. A headline in The Daily Telegraph warned, “Intensive Care Unit Closed After Deadly New Superbug Emerges in the U.K.” (Later research said there were eventually 72 total cases, though some patients were only carriers and were not infected by the fungus.) –NYT
After C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois, the CDC added it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”
Last May, an elderly man who was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery was found to be infected with the drug-resistant candida. He died after 90 days in the hospital, however C. auris did not according to the Times. According to tests, the germ was everywhere in his room – to such a degree that the hospital required special cleaning equipment and had to rip out ceiling and floor tiles to get rid of it.
“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Hospital president Dr. Scott Lorin. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
Why is this happening?
Simply put, fungi are evolving defenses to resist and survive modern medications.
“It’s an enormous problem,” said Imperial College of London fungal epidemiology professor Matthew Fisher, who co-authored a recent scientific review on the rise of resistant fungi. “We depend on being able to treat those patients with antifungals.”
The C.D.C. investigators theorized that C. auris started in Asia and spread across the globe. But when the agency compared the entire genome of auris samples from India and Pakistan, Venezuela, South Africa and Japan, it found that its origin was not a single place, and there was not a single auris strain.
…
The genome sequencing showed that there were four distinctive versions of the fungus, with differences so profound that they suggested that these strains had diverged thousands of years ago and emerged as resistant pathogens from harmless environmental strains in four different places at the same time. –NYT
“Somehow, it made a jump almost seemingly simultaneously, and seemed to spread and it is drug resistant, which is really mind-boggling,” said CDC fungal expert Dr. Snigdha Vallabhaneni.
While various theories exist as to why C. auris has made a grand entrance, Dutch microbiologist Jacques Meis believes the drug-resistant fungi are developing thanks to the heavy use of fungicides on crops.
Dr. Meis visited the C.D.C. last summer to share research and theorize that the same thing is happening with C. auris, which is also found in the soil: Azoles have created an environment so hostile that the fungi are evolving, with resistant strains surviving.
This is similar to concerns that resistant bacteria are growing because of excessive use of antibiotics in livestock for health and growth promotion. As with antibiotics in farm animals, azoles are used widely on crops. –NYT
“On everything — potatoes, beans, wheat, anything you can think of, tomatoes, onions,” said Dr. Johanna Rodes, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London. “We are driving this with the use of antifungicides on crops.”
Keeping it quiet
In 2015, Dr. Rhodes received a panicked call from the Royal Brompton Hospital medical research center outside of London, where C. auris had taken root months earlier. The hospital had no idea how to get rid of it.
“We have no idea where it’s coming from. We’ve never heard of it. It’s just spread like wildfire,” Rhodes was told, before she helped them clean it up. Under her direction, hospital workers used a special aerosol devices to spray hydrogen peroxide around a room which housed a patient with the germ – with the theory being that the vapor would permeate the entire room.
After one week of saturating the room, they put a “settle plate” in the middle of it with a gel at the bottom that would allow any remaining microbes to grow.
Only one grew back; C. auris. And officials were scrambling to keep a lid on it.
It was spreading, but word of it was not. The hospital, a specialty lung and heart center that draws wealthy patients from the Middle East and around Europe, alerted the British government and told infected patients, but made no public announcement.
“There was no need to put out a news release during the outbreak,” said Oliver Wilkinson, a spokesman for the hospital.
This hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients — or prospective ones. –NYT
And while the Brompton Hospital case did make headlines, the issue remaied largely out of the spotlight internationally – despite an even larger outbreak in Valencia, Spain occurring at virtually the same time at the 992-bed Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe. Unknown to the public or unaffected patients, 372 people had become “colonized” with the germ – meaning it was on their bodies but they had not yet contracted it. Of those, 85 patients developed bloodstream infections, and 41% of those died within 30 days.
And while other prominent strains of Candida have not developed significant resistance to drugs, over 90% of C. auris infections are resistant to at least one drug, while 30% are resistant to two or more drugs.
According to Connecticut’s deputy state epidemiologist Dr. Lynn Sosa, C. auris is now “the top” threat among resident infections.
“It’s pretty much unbeatable and difficult to identity.
Thanks to the overprescription of antimicrobial drugs and use of antifungicides in crop production, a relatively new germ that preys on people with weakened immune systems is rapidly spreading across the globe, according to the New York Times.
The infection – a fungus known as Candida auris, kills almost half of all patients who contract it within 90 days, according to the CDC – as it’s impervious to most major antifungal medications. First described in 2009 after a 70-year-old Japanese woman showed up at a Tokyo hospital with C. auris in her ear canal, the aggressive yeast infection has spread across Asia and Europe – arriving in the US by 2016.
The earliest known case in the United States involved a woman who arrived at a New York hospital on May 6, 2013, seeking care for respiratory failure. She was 61 and from the United Arab Emirates, and she died a week later, after testing positive for the fungus. At the time, the hospital hadn’t thought much of it, but three years later, it sent the case to the C.D.C. after reading the agency’s June 2016 advisory. –NYT
In the last five years alone, it it has swept through a hospital in Spain, hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, spread throughout India, Pakistan and South Africa, and forced a prestigious British medical center to close its ICU for nearly two weeks.
By the end of June 2016, a scientific paper reported “an ongoing outbreak of 50 C. auris cases” at Royal Brompton, and the hospital took an extraordinary step: It shut down its I.C.U. for 11 days, moving intensive care patients to another floor, again with no announcement.
Days later the hospital finally acknowledged to a newspaper that it had a problem. A headline in The Daily Telegraph warned, “Intensive Care Unit Closed After Deadly New Superbug Emerges in the U.K.” (Later research said there were eventually 72 total cases, though some patients were only carriers and were not infected by the fungus.) –NYT
After C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois, the CDC added it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”
Last May, an elderly man who was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery was found to be infected with the drug-resistant candida. He died after 90 days in the hospital, however C. auris did not according to the Times. According to tests, the germ was everywhere in his room – to such a degree that the hospital required special cleaning equipment and had to rip out ceiling and floor tiles to get rid of it.
“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Hospital president Dr. Scott Lorin. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
Why is this happening?
Simply put, fungi are evolving defenses to resist and survive modern medications.
“It’s an enormous problem,” said Imperial College of London fungal epidemiology professor Matthew Fisher, who co-authored a recent scientific review on the rise of resistant fungi. “We depend on being able to treat those patients with antifungals.”
The C.D.C. investigators theorized that C. auris started in Asia and spread across the globe. But when the agency compared the entire genome of auris samples from India and Pakistan, Venezuela, South Africa and Japan, it found that its origin was not a single place, and there was not a single auris strain.
…
The genome sequencing showed that there were four distinctive versions of the fungus, with differences so profound that they suggested that these strains had diverged thousands of years ago and emerged as resistant pathogens from harmless environmental strains in four different places at the same time. –NYT
“Somehow, it made a jump almost seemingly simultaneously, and seemed to spread and it is drug resistant, which is really mind-boggling,” said CDC fungal expert Dr. Snigdha Vallabhaneni.
While various theories exist as to why C. auris has made a grand entrance, Dutch microbiologist Jacques Meis believes the drug-resistant fungi are developing thanks to the heavy use of fungicides on crops.
Dr. Meis visited the C.D.C. last summer to share research and theorize that the same thing is happening with C. auris, which is also found in the soil: Azoles have created an environment so hostile that the fungi are evolving, with resistant strains surviving.
This is similar to concerns that resistant bacteria are growing because of excessive use of antibiotics in livestock for health and growth promotion. As with antibiotics in farm animals, azoles are used widely on crops. –NYT
“On everything — potatoes, beans, wheat, anything you can think of, tomatoes, onions,” said Dr. Johanna Rodes, an infectious disease expert at Imperial College London. “We are driving this with the use of antifungicides on crops.”
Keeping it quiet
In 2015, Dr. Rhodes received a panicked call from the Royal Brompton Hospital medical research center outside of London, where C. auris had taken root months earlier. The hospital had no idea how to get rid of it.
“We have no idea where it’s coming from. We’ve never heard of it. It’s just spread like wildfire,” Rhodes was told, before she helped them clean it up. Under her direction, hospital workers used a special aerosol devices to spray hydrogen peroxide around a room which housed a patient with the germ – with the theory being that the vapor would permeate the entire room.
After one week of saturating the room, they put a “settle plate” in the middle of it with a gel at the bottom that would allow any remaining microbes to grow.
Only one grew back; C. auris. And officials were scrambling to keep a lid on it.
It was spreading, but word of it was not. The hospital, a specialty lung and heart center that draws wealthy patients from the Middle East and around Europe, alerted the British government and told infected patients, but made no public announcement.
“There was no need to put out a news release during the outbreak,” said Oliver Wilkinson, a spokesman for the hospital.
This hushed panic is playing out in hospitals around the world. Individual institutions and national, state and local governments have been reluctant to publicize outbreaks of resistant infections, arguing there is no point in scaring patients — or prospective ones. –NYT
And while the Brompton Hospital case did make headlines, the issue remaied largely out of the spotlight internationally – despite an even larger outbreak in Valencia, Spain occurring at virtually the same time at the 992-bed Hospital Universitari i Politècnic La Fe. Unknown to the public or unaffected patients, 372 people had become “colonized” with the germ – meaning it was on their bodies but they had not yet contracted it. Of those, 85 patients developed bloodstream infections, and 41% of those died within 30 days.
And while other prominent strains of Candida have not developed significant resistance to drugs, over 90% of C. auris infections are resistant to at least one drug, while 30% are resistant to two or more drugs.
According to Connecticut’s deputy state epidemiologist Dr. Lynn Sosa, C. auris is now “the top” threat among resident infections.
“It’s pretty much unbeatable and difficult to identity.“
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: Actor and comedian Bill Cosby leaves the Montgomery County Courthouse after his first day of sentencing hearings in his sexual assault trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Jessica Kourkounis
April 5, 2019
By Barbara Goldberg
(Reuters) – Convicted sex offender Bill Cosby on Friday settled a federal defamation lawsuit brought by seven women who said the former actor and comedian sexually assaulted them and wrongly called them liars when they went public with their charges years later.
The settlement ends a court fight that predates the 81-year-old’s conviction a year ago for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University administrator, in 2004. Cosby is currently serving a 3- to 10-year sentence for that crime, though his lawyers plan an appeal.
He was the first celebrity convicted of sexual misconduct since the rise of the #MeToo movement, which cast a harsh light on widespread patterns of sexual harassment or abuse in multiple spheres of American life and ended the careers of dozens of powerful men in American media, politics and business.
The settlement covers seven of some 50 women who emerged over the past decade to level sex abuse charges against the once-beloved star of “The Cosby Show,” who built a decades-long career on a family-friendly style of comedy.
All the allegations but Constand’s were too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution, which prompted the seven women to sue for defamation when Cosby accused them of lying.
“Each Plaintiff is satisfied with the settlement,” attorneys for Cosby said in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Springfield, Massachusetts, near one of Cosby’s homes. They did not disclose the terms of the agreement.
The defamation suit was filed in December 2014. One of the seven, Louisa Moritz, an actress best known for appearing in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died in January at age 72.
The other plaintiffs were Barbara Bowman, who said she was a 17-year-old aspiring actress when she was assaulted in 1985; Tamara Green, who said she was a young model in the early 1970s when she was attacked; actress Angela Leslie, who said her attack took place in 1992; Therese Serignese, now a registered nurse who said she was 19 when she was attacked in 1976; Joan Tarshis, who said she was 19 at the time of her attack in 1969; and Linda Traitz, who said she was an 18-year-old waitress when she became a victim in 1969.
Cosby has denied the accusations and maintained his innocence.
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and David Gregorio)
Source: OANN
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
As the Russia collusion hoax hurtles toward its demise, it’s important to consider how this destructive information operation rampaged through vital American institutions for more than two years, and what can be done to stop such a damaging episode from recurring.
FILE PHOTO: Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks to the media during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, March 20, 2019. AAP Image/Andrew Taylor/via REUTERS
April 4, 2019
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in one of the government’s last moves before an imminent election, said on Friday a powerful public inquiry into the country’s disability care would run for three years and address abuse, neglect and exploitation problems in the sector.
The inquiry, known as a Royal Commission, will cost A$528 million ($375 million) and follows reports of poor treatment, as well as pressure from disability advocates after a similar inquiry was launched into the aged care sector.
It is expected to be similar to a probe that exposed widespread wrongdoing in Australia’s financial sector last year and the aged care inquiry which has uncovered neglect, abuse and mistreatment of patients.
Both inquiries have hurt share prices in the respective sectors, although by contrast, the roughly A$15.5 billion disability sector is highly fragmented, dominated by non-profit operators and mostly government-funded.
“We have to establish a culture of respect for people living with disabilities and the families who support, love and care for them,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra.
“The Royal Commission will inquire into all forms of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation,” he said, becoming emotional when speaking about his brother-in-law, Gary Warren, who suffers from multiple sclerosis.
“To all those Australians with a disability, their families, to Gary, this is for you,” he said. It will publish an interim report by the end of October 2020 and a final report by April 2022.
The announcement of the details of the inquiry comes with a federal election due within weeks, making the move likely the last substantive decision from Morrison’s center-right coalition – which is trailing heavily in opinion polls – before the vote.
($1 = 1.4065 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Tom Westbrook, editing by G Crosse)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: A 3D plastic representation of the Facebook logo is seen in front of displayed cables in this illustration in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina May 13, 2015. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo
April 4, 2019
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Social media giant Facebook Inc said on Friday it would block electoral advertisements purchased outside Australia from being displayed there ahead of a national election due in May.
“Combating foreign interference is a key pillar of our approach to safeguarding elections on our platform,” Facebook Director of Policy for Australia and New Zealand, Mia Garlick, said in a statement. “We’re temporarily not allowing electoral ads purchased from outside Australia ahead of the election in May.”
Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google have been facing political and regulatory scrutiny in Australia and around the world as lawmakers wrestle with the large and growing influence of the powerful online platforms in public life.
Australia on Thursday passed new laws allowing big fines for social media firms if violent content is not removed quickly, a move in response to a lone gunman live streaming his attack on two mosques in Christchurch last month.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison is expected to imminently call a general election due by the end of next month.
(Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by David Gregorio)
Source: OANN
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