Thursday, September 6, 2018
Jobless Claims Unexpectedly Plunge to New Post-1969 Record
This is the lowest level for initial claims for state unemployment benefits since December 6, 1969 when it was 202,000.
The 4-week moving average, considered a better gauge of the labor market because it smooths out week-to-week volatility, fell to 209,500 from 212,250. This is the lowest level for this average since December 6, 1969 when it was 204,500.
Jobless claims have been closely watched in recent weeks for signs that trade disputes might weigh on the jobs market. To the surprise of many economists and critics of the Trump administration, jobless claims show no signs of stress from tariffs that U.S. has put in place or retaliation from...
Illegal Alien Charged With Killing Mollie Tibbetts Worked Under The Name 'John Budd'
The Mexican man charged with abducting and killing an Iowa college student was known for years on the dairy farm where he worked by another name: John Budd.
The alias has emerged as Cristhian Bahena Rivera’s employer, a dairy farm operation owned by a prominent Republican family, faces questions over whether its managers were aware of any warning signs that he may have been in the country illegally.
The name under which Rivera was hired and paid for the last four years was confirmed by three people with knowledge of his employment history, according to the Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information during an ongoing criminal investigation. One of the people said Rivera’s work identity as John Budd appears in official government records.
The Des Moines Register could not independently confirm the information reported Wednesday by the AP. Law enforcement officials, including ones with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and Bahena Rivera's lawyers, Chad and Jennifer Frese, would not say whether he used the name.
Bahena Rivera's employer, Yarrabee Farms, also declined to confirm or deny Rivera’s work identity. Lori Chesser, an immigration employment lawyer advising the farm, said that companies cannot discriminate against workers based on how they look or how their names sound.
Questioning whether Mexican illegal alien Cristhian Bahena Rivera's actual name was John Budd would have been "pretty racist," retired federal prosecutor Bob Teig told The Des Moines Register:
Employers typically do not face legal consequences for hiring a worker under false documents as long as they were not involved in obtaining them and had no other obvious reason to suspect they are fraudulent, said Bob Teig, a retired federal prosecutor in Iowa.
“Absent unusual circumstances, it would be difficult to show they knew any more than what they were told,” Teig said, adding that it would be “pretty racist” to assume a John Budd could not be Hispanic.
Whether anyone else knew Bahena Rivera as John Budd is unclear. The 24-year-old had a Facebook page under his real name, and his account listed many friends from the central Iowa area. He has a...
Hit piece on Trump in NYT is ‘total hoax’
Conservative filmmaker and author Dinesh D’Souza says the opinion piece in a New York newspaper allegedly authored by an anti-Trump “senior official” within the Trump administration is a total hoax.
American as well as international media have been speculating about the The New York Times op-ed, but conservative pundits believe it is fake news published to try and embarrass President Donald Trump.
“Just read the anonymous @nytimes article and it’s blindingly obvious it’s an in-house product written not by any Trump official but by a professional writer at the newspaper itself. This is the very definition of #FakeNews,” D’Souza tweeted on Wednesday.
President Trump on Twitter called the op-ed a “gutless editorial” from a newspaper which was forced to apologise to its readers because they had been delivering so much anti-Trump fake news during the presidential race.
“We have somebody in what I call the failing New York Times talking about he’s part of the resistance within the Trump administration,” Trump told a group of county sheriffs during a meeting.
“This is what we have to deal with. And you know, the dishonest media … it’s really a disgrace. I will say this: Nobody has done what this administration has done in terms of getting things passed, in terms of getting things through.”
Trump tweeted that the newspaper should hand over the anonymous official for national security reasons.
The official described a cabal of administration officials actively circumventing the president’s orders.
The op-ed strangely coincides with excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book on the administration that have been leaked to the press.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders released a statement saying Trump won with 306 Electoral College votes — versus 232 for his opponent. “None of them voted for a gutless, anonymous source to the failing New York Times.”
The press secretary ended her statement calling for the official to resign. “The individual behind this piece has chosen to deceive, rather than support, the duly elected President of the United States. He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people. This coward should do the right thing and resign.”
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Wednesday dismissed the anonymous White House official who authored the piece critical of Trump, calling him a “delusional, egomaniacal, self-aggrandizing jackass”. Dobbs said such a betrayal was...
The Glock Handgun the Army Rejected Can Now Be Yours
The Glock 19X may or may not have been the best pistol for the U.S. Army. Its unique features—a compact slide on a full-sized frame—don’t have directly practical application in the civilian world, except for perhaps police use. Most civilians would be just as well served buying a full-sized Glock 17 or the Glock 19. But if a private citizen wants the gun that could have become a U.S. military-issued weapon, or a Glock in any other color than coyote, there’s always the G19X.
Austrian Gunmaker Glock’s latest handgun is actually two existing handguns in one. The Glock 19X, meant to capture the U.S. Army’s Modular Handgun System contract, is actually a melding of the original Glock 17 and the compact Glock 19 resulting in a unique handgun configuration that very well could have become the next service weapon of the U.S. Armed Forces. Although the G19X lost out that distinction to the Sig Sauer P320 the pistol is available on the commercial market.
The U.S. Army’s XM17 Modular Handgun System competition was meant to field a replacement for 1980s-era Beretta M9 nine-millimeter handgun. The Beretta had one of the lowest rates in soldier confidence in the field. It was characterized as the least accurate and worst handling by combat troops in a government-sponsored Army small arms survey. Also, it was unable to take advantage in advances in handgun technology over the past thirty years. The Army refused to even consider an updated version of the pistol, the M9A3, for the MHS competition.
The Army wanted a handgun that was reliable, with a requirement that the winner be capable of firing five thousand mean rounds between failures , for a “98 percent probability of completing a 96-hour mission without a failure.” It wanted new features, including a threaded barrel for screwing on a suppressor, an under barrel Picatinny rail for aiming lights and lasers, and a modular ergonomic system to accommodate a wide variety of hand sizes.
After a competition that lasted several years, the Army settled on the Sig Sauer P320, with the Marines and likely the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces falling behind.
Glock officials complained that the Army’s selection of Sig Sauer over Glock was driven by cost over effectiveness and asked that testing continue. An official complaint filed by the Austrian gun company was rejected by the General Accounting Office. According to Glock , the GAO’s own report admitted that the Glock entry was actually more reliable but the Sig weapon was cheaper.
The Glock G19X is a familiar looking pistol to Glock fans; it takes the full-sized frame of the Glock 17 and mates it with the compact slide of the Glock 19. The result is a handgun with a shorter barrel for use inside the cramped confines of a military vehicle while still retaining a large magazine capacity. The company calls the resulting weapon a “crossover pistol,” similar to efforts by Colt in...
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #371
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)