Lucasfilm has reported a disturbance in the force, saying it has lost untitled Han Solo movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller over unspecified ‘creative differences.’ Though the movie will still be launching next year when planned, the company says that it was unable to reconcile its creative vision with that of the directors, forcing the company to seek a … Continue reading
WASHINGTON ― Democrats say President Donald Trump’s move last week giving the Pentagon authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan flies in the face of a longstanding tradition of civilian control over the military.
“It’s not what the Constitution provides for,” said Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “We still need civilian oversight of the military. I trust [Defense Secretary James] Mattis, but even the secretaries I trust and respect need oversight, and that’s his job.”
Trump’s move to step away from military decision-making mirrors his actions in April giving the military more control over war-making in Iraq and Syria. The Defense Department said the change would give commanders greater flexibility to deploy troops in the field as needed. But it also would insulate the president from criticism, particularly in Afghanistan, where America has been at war for 16 years and where it has spent trillions of dollars with no end in sight.
The U.S. is expected to add as many as 4,000 troops in Afghanistan, according to The Associated Press, despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric denouncing nation-building and foreign wars. The Trump administration has yet to release its long-promised military strategy for Afghanistan, drawing criticism it was plunging further into a conflict without a real plan.
“Troop strength is not an end. It’s a means to an end,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said Thursday on Capitol Hill. “We don’t know what the strategy is. They need to bring a strategy to us, and then we can have that conversation.”
The degree to which presidents assert control over their military commanders has varied over the years. Former President Barack Obama, for example, was repeatedly accused of micromanaging the military as he sought to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It was micromanagement that drove me crazy,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2014.
Trump, who has offered public adoration of generals, appears to be going in the opposite direction.
The change is being received well by Republican lawmakers.
“That’s not outsourcing,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “He’s the secretary of defense. The president of the U.S. should always listen to his commander, chief of staff of the armed forces and the secretary of defense. That’s what they’re all about.”
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said he had confidence in Mattis.
“I’m the son of a Marine myself,” Daines said. “I think having a four-star Marine as the secretary of defense is exactly the right person at the right time.”
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), however, expressed a more moderate tone. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman said he had confidence in the military’s ability to set appropriate troop levels, but added, “We also need to be careful to maintain civilian control over that.”
Mattis, the man who is now in charge of setting troop levels in the Middle East, only recently left the military. The retired general, whose nicknames include “Mad Dog” and “Warrior Monk,” was replaced as head of U.S. Central Command in 2013 by the Obama administration for his aggressive posture toward Iran. His nomination required a special exemption from a statute that prohibited commissioned officers from serving as secretary of defense until seven years after active duty. Many Democrats joined Republicans in supporting that waiver.
The question of who allocates troop deployment is one of great significance. Military commanders, for example, have historically recommended deployment of larger numbers of troops abroad.
The issue was briefly discussed at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday, where lawmakers debated drafting a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the so-called Islamic State. Kathleen Hicks, the senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, testified that that both the Pentagon and the White House had responsibility for use of force.
Mattis “should be held responsible for decisions on use of force, and so should the president, obviously,” Hicks said in response to questioning by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). “So there is a civilian that remains, but it’s just one.”
Other ways for Congress to maintain oversight over the military, Hicks added, included passing a new authorization of force, strictly enforcing the War Powers Act, and the power of the purse.
Trump’s decision to delegate troop levels “makes all the more of a compelling case for an AUMF to be passed,” Menendez said in agreement.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
A new report from a conservative think tank says as many as 5.7 million Americans voted illegally in the 2008 election, but experts say the survey extrapolates too broadly and there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of it.
The analysis by the think tank Just Facts is based on Harvard/YouGov data, the same source of data for a 2014 study used to support President Donald Trump’s claim that millions voted illegally in the most recent election. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helps manage the data source the 2014 analysis was based on, debunked that analysis in November, saying it extrapolated based on answers from respondents that were likely errors.
James Agresti, the president of Just Facts, told The Washington Times the details of his analysis were “technical” but his results were based on a more conservative analysis and were more accurate than those of the 2014 study.
In 2012, Schaffner and his colleagues went back and re-interviewed the 121 people from the earlier study who said they voted in 2010 but weren’t citizens. Of those 121 people, 36 changed their answer and said they were, in fact, citizens. Of the 85 people who maintained they were non-citizens, researchers could not match a single one to a valid voter record.
In an email, Schaffner said the conclusion of Agresti’s study was highly doubtful and readers should be skeptical for the same reasons they should have doubted the study of the 2010 data.
“The most important is that the new study makes the same error as the old study in terms of ignoring measurement error on the question they use to identify supposed non-citizens when we have in fact demonstrated that many people answer that question incorrectly,” Schaffner wrote in an email.
A survey question asked respondents about their citizenship status in 2008 and whether they and their parents and grandparents were immigrants or were born in the USA. Separate survey questions asked whether respondents voted that year.
“In addition to ignoring the major issue with the original study, they also claim that we should take any supposed non-citizen at their word if they claim to have voted even if we can’t match them to a vote record because they probably used a fraudulent identity,” Schaffner continued. “However, the issue here is why would a non-citizen who is going through the trouble of using a fraudulent identity to vote then admit to voting in a survey and give us their actual name and address?”
Agresti defended his study in an email to HuffPost.
“As I’ve previously documented, claims that the samples are too small and based on response error are rooted in demonstrably false assumptions,” he said. “Likewise, the professors who authored the 2014 Electoral Studies paper thoroughly debunked those and other spurious critiques.”
Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Yale, said the survey was drawing overly large conclusions based on the answers of just a few people.
“The way that they’re doing this is kind of through a crazy extrapolation,” Hersh said in an interview. “If I do a survey of 1,000 people and on that survey five people say something crazy or non-truthful, that wouldn’t be something hard to imagine, that five people out of 1,000 people might lie, might not have actually read the text very carefully, might click on a button wrong.”
“It’s extrapolating off of a survey item of maybe a few people answering the wrong way,” he continued. “If five people said this instead of three, do they think that’s the difference between 400,000 people illegally voting? Is that how seriously they take each person in a survey answering this question? Even if you’re not a survey researcher, that kind of seems preposterous.”
Schaffner said he was skeptical of Agresti’s claim his analysis was more accurate than the 2014 study. His argument, Schaffner said, “just sounds like some kind of wishful thinking special sauce that would not really stand up to scientific scrutiny.”
Trump has stood by his claim that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election and has convened a probe to look into the issue. Numerous studies have shown that while non-citizens occasionally do vote, it is not a widespread problem.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
WASHINGTON ― Senate Republicans are speeding toward a vote next week on their Obamacare replacement bill, even as GOP lawmakers can’t answer simple questions about the legislation, express frustration with the brazenly secretive and closed process, and don’t appear to have the votes yet for passage.
Republicans expected to get more details on their Affordable Care Act rewrite during a closed-door meeting Tuesday with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Instead, they got more vague happy talk from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and a speech from Price on what HHS has been doing to rein in Obamacare.
With Senate Democrats badgering Republicans about how they’re ramming this bill through ― no hearings, no markups, hiding the bill from members ― some GOP lawmakers are now acknowledging that the process has been less than stellar.
When Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was asked whether this bill should be a template for lawmaking in the future, he sarcastically answered that “this is exactly the kind of legislative process our Founding Fathers had in mind,” going on to explain that he was obviously concerned the Senate may be voting on a health care bill next week that members won’t have seen.
But when reminded that he could withhold his support for the legislation until the process had improved, McCain said he couldn’t “say no to something I haven’t seen.”
It was a similar story with Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who told reporters that he’s advocated for an open process from day one. “But again,” Corker said, “when you’re dealing with things which are being done here in a totally partisan way ― which is understandable ― I mean, that’s the way reconciliation works.”
After all their complaints about the way in which Democrats passed a second part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 ― the first part of the legislation passed with 60 votes and was the product of more than 100 hearings ― Republicans have turned around and proceeded to use a legislative process that the Senate historian says has not been so secretive nor so partisan since World War I.
And if any Republican actually cared that the Senate GOP was acting in this manner, the senator could stand up and refuse to vote for the bill until the process improves.
Conversely, part of the reason the Senate is in this procedural position is because Democrats have been clear that none of them will vote for this bill, and even with the brazen GOP attempts to shut them out of the process, Democrats have struggled to mount an effective response to the legislative railroading, resorting to stunts and dilatory tactics in hopes of blocking a bill they have not seen.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Brian Schatz of Hawaii took a cab to the Congressional Budget Office to search for the legislation. They ended up, as they expected, empty-handed.
At a late-night Senate session Monday, Democrats decried the process on C-SPAN2, but it seemed to do little to win over their Republican colleagues or whip up the kind of outrage Republicans managed in 2010. In fact, even as Senate Republicans acknowledged the poor process, they maintained that their process was still somehow better than the Democrats’ in 2010 ― a blatant mischaracterization of how Obamacare was actually passed.
But all the GOP congressional shenanigans will be for naught if McConnell can’t get the bill through his chamber. And if McConnell really is intent on a vote next week, he will have to work expeditiously to build a coalition of 50 votes ― a coalition he doesn’t appear to have at the moment among the Senate’s 52 Republicans.
McConnell faces vote problems from both conservatives and moderates. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have all expressed frustration with a number of provisions that they deem insufficient toward repealing Obamacare. They want a quick phaseout of the Medicaid expansion, the removal of certain regulations (like the protections for people with pre-existing conditions) to lower premiums and the abolishment of the taxes created under the Affordable Care Act. Paul has also resisted the creation of new tax subsidies to help pay for health insurance, a signal that his vote may not ever be gettable, though he and his staff have worked hard to not be written off in the negotiations.
If the three conservatives stick together, they alone have the votes to sink the Senate’s chances of an Obamacare repeal. But giving in to those demands would jeopardize many more votes from other parts of the GOP conference, and McConnell has basically said the pre-existing condition protections will not be dropped from the Senate bill as they were in the House version ― a condition for the support of many Senate moderates.
McConnell is basically gambling that he can get Paul, Cruz and Lee (or at least one of them) to accept a partial repeal as a step in the right direction, and he may, at least partially, be right. None of those conservatives has taken a hard line on what he needs at a minimum to support the bill.
Cruz repeatedly told HuffPost on Tuesday that “the most important issue” with the health care bill is that it lower premiums. “That’s my No. 1 priority on Obamacare, because it’s the biggest reason that people are unhappy with Obamacare,” Cruz said. But asked repeatedly whether he would vote against a bill that didn’t lower premiums and kept those so-called community rating provisions that ensure sick people are charged the same as healthy people, Cruz dodged the question, again and again, coming up with new ways to restate that his central focus was on lowering premiums.
That unwillingness to take a firm stance on any issue could be gamesmanship, as conservatives seek to avoid marginalizing themselves, but it also may be a recognition that they ultimately won’t be the ones who derail an Obamacare repeal.
Asked if he would really stand up to President Donald Trump on this health care bill, Cruz returned to his central focus: “From the beginning, I have been very clear with the president, the vice president and with members of both houses that our focus has to be on lowering premiums.”
Cruz’s refusal to be tied down may be a reflection of the political reality. He is up for reelection in 2018, and, despite his popularity in Texas, he faces stiff competition in Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), meaning he will need the Republican base’s support ― something that may have already been jeopardized with his up-and-down relationship with Trump.
Lee and Paul may have more latitude to vote against the president’s wishes, but they also may be withholding support just to force the legislation further to the right. As Cruz noted Tuesday, Senate GOP leadership hasn’t decided how much of the Obamacare taxes will be repealed, and it’s still in flux how fast the Medicaid expansion would be phased out. Senators desperately want a seat at the table as those questions are sorted out.
On the other side of the conference, some moderates may also be playing a similar game. From the beginning, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has looked like one of the toughest votes to win over, and yet she has seemed more amenable in recent weeks, narrowing some of her problems with the legislation to its cuts in Planned Parenthood funding and its quicker phaseout of the Medicaid expansion. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has also expressed similar reservations, along with some Alaska-specific issues, but she hasn’t ruled out voting for the bill.
“You don’t know until you see it, right?” Murkowski said Tuesday about specifics in the bill. “What we’re trying to do is get a health care system that’s not only good for Alaska, but it’s also good for the country.”
And then there are the concerns of other senators ― particularly the ones from states that greatly benefited from the Medicaid expansion. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) have both shown willingness to end that expansion, but they want to do it over seven years, not the three that McConnell and conservatives favor.
Just how long they would go for, and whether a shorter timeline might cost McConnell their votes, is unknown, but they, too, want a seat at the table.
Which is all to say there are many Republican senators who could potentially vote no, especially if it’s clear McConnell doesn’t have the votes. Would Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), perhaps the most vulnerable Republican up for reelection in 2018, really vote for the bill if it’s going down?
McConnell has said he will put the bill on the floor with or without the votes. But a failed vote would almost certainly make it more difficult for senators to change their votes later ― a fact that may cause McConnell to pull the bill at the last minute next week.
Part of the reason the House was successful in passing its health care bill was that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) didn’t force members to go on the record until leaders were sure they had the votes. In fact, the bill may have gotten through the House because Democratic opposition let up after Republicans didn’t seem to have the votes, with leaders then able to speed the bill through the chamber once they had an agreement between conservatives and moderates.
In the end, that may be the real legislative template McConnell is using.
Jonathan Cohn contributed to this report.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
A Brussels start-up is hoping to stir a culinary revolution in Belgium by pushing crunchy crickets as a protein alternative to meat.
Eco-friendly ‘Little Food’ said its crickets, which can be eaten dried, in different flavors such as garlic or tomato, or turned into flour, were also friendlier on the environment compared to some cattle farming.
“For the same amount of protein as a cow for instance, they (crickets) need 25 times less food, they need 300 times less water, and they produce 60 times less greenhouse gases,” Little Food cricket breeder Nikolaas Viaene said.
While eating insects is common practice in a number of countries, such as China, Ghana, Mexico and Thailand, Brussels residents seemed unsure about putting crickets on the menu.
Strolling in downtown Brussels, Efthimia Lelecas declined the offer of a cricket snack: “No, I’m not eating that,” she said. “No, no, that looks awful, no, no…no.”
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
WASHINGTON ― Iran has fired ballistic missiles into Syria, Russia is warning U.S. forces not to fly its planes there, North Korea is testing its own missiles regularly and Western European leaders are telling their citizens they might be on their own.
Welcome to the Trump doctrine ― or, perhaps more accurately, the Trump non-doctrine.
“There is no Trump doctrine,” said Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analyses, adding that with no real clarity from the top, Trump’s subordinates will scramble to create their own, at least for their own fiefdoms. “Others are trying to define this space via leaks, quotes to the media and public statements that are probably ahead of the president.”
Five months into Donald Trump’s presidency, the U.S. is escalating military engagements in the Middle East and creating conflicts with traditional allies ― all of it punctuated by sometimes-inflammatory presidential Twitter statements.
On Tuesday afternoon, for example, Trump tweeted: “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!”
Neither the White House nor the National Security Council responded to queries regarding that statement. But it is precisely the sort of off-the-cuff remark that foreign policy professionals fear can have lasting and unpredictable consequences.
In April, after images from the Syrian regime’s nerve gas attack on civilians appeared on TV, Trump launched cruise missiles at a Syrian air base ― despite earlier administration suggestions that it was not interested in a quarrel with Syrian President Bashar Assad, and only wanted to destroy the ISIS terror group.
“The Al-Shayrat cruise missile strike was demonstrative of shooting from the hip, then trying to turn impulse into policy,” Kofman said. “This sort of brinkmanship is disconcerting.”
Similarly, Trump’s tweet on Tuesday followed the death of American college student Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned in North Korea 17 months ago for a minor theft and was returned to the U.S. comatose. Trump expressed his outrage on Tuesday morning during a visit by the Ukrainian president, saying, “It’s a total disgrace what happened to Otto. That should never, ever be allowed to happen.”
The president has meanwhile expressed admiration for autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Philippines and Russia.
“The rather positive take on Russia, and a negative view of NATO have remained constants,” Kofman said.
Trump’s repeated praise and apparent green light for a recent Saudi-led campaign to isolate Qatar, a small Arab nation that hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East, has worried lawmakers and Middle East experts.
And the simultaneous alienation of traditional friends means that if the U.S. gets into a jam, it’s not clear which traditional ally will be eager to take America’s side.
During his first foreign trip, Trump damaged relationships with Western European nations by failing to state his commitment to the NATO mutual defense clause and by announcing his intention to withdraw from an international agreement to fight climate change.
NATO members had been awaiting Trump’s affirmation of Article 5 of the alliance charter, which states that an attack on one nation in the group is considered an attack on all. That language was reportedly removed at the last minute from a speech Trump delivered in Brussels last month. (Trump did state his commitment to Article 5 earlier this month, however, during a White House visit by the Romanian president.)
In Sicily days later, Trump declined to abide by the Paris Agreement ― in which most nations in the world agreed to start cutting carbon dioxide emissions ― despite requests from the leaders of the other six members of the G-7 group of industrialized democracies. Upon his return to the U.S., Trump announced that he would withdraw from the accord.
Both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have publicly said that Western Europe cannot depend on the United States and needs to be prepared to take the lead on global issues, including standing up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“The times in which we could rely fully on others ― they are somewhat over,” Merkel said following her return to Germany from Sicily. “This is what I experienced in the last few days.”
While Trump appears to be disengaging from Europe, he has ramped up U.S. troop levels and involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, apparently without a clear policy ― which means U.S. interests are subject to other governments’ decisions.
The most visible consequence recently has been in Syria, where pro-Assad forces have repeatedly challenged the United States and associated rebel groups in recent weeks.
In what the Pentagon described as necessary self-defense, the U.S. targeted a regime-aligned drone on Tuesday. Two days earlier, a U.S. Navy pilot shot down a Syrian jet. The incident was the first time a piloted aircraft has been downed by a U.S. warplane in nearly two decades.
Iran’s increasing involvement in the region is also going somewhat under the radar thus far.
Following ISIS attacks in Tehran earlier this month, Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles into an ISIS stronghold in Syria this weekend. Trump has not publicly responded to that strike ― but observers fear that a confrontation there is inevitable, given Iran’s strategic goals for the region.
“I’m not sure if President Trump has a strategy towards Iran, but the United States may soon find itself in a serious conflict with the Islamic Republic,” said Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council think tank. “Tehran constantly tests Washington’s willingness to engage in another war in the Middle East.”
Russia, Assad’s other key backer, made its own move, threatening U.S. planes that fly west of Syria’s Euphrates River.
The U.S. Department of Defense says it retains the right to fly where it wishes to defeat ISIS and to defend its allies in that fight. But the apparent lack of a larger plan remains an important signal for both enemies and friends: Australia, which had been flying anti-ISIS air missions, announced on Monday that it was suspending them.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
A hotel in Canada’s Yukon Territory wants to conduct a manhunt for a person who stole a human toe.
Not just any toe, mind you. This is a toe that the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City uses in its signature drink, the Sourtoe Cocktail.
People come from all over the world to try the drink, which is basically a shot of whisky with a dehydrated toe in it.
A brief history can be seen in the video above.
There’s a rule about drinking this concoction: You can drink it fast or you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe.
The mummified toe went missing Saturday night, and hotel executives are stamping their feet.
“We are furious,” Terry Lee, the hotel’s “toe captain,” said, according to HuffPost Canada.
Lee suspects a man from Quebec in the toe theft. Earlier in the evening, the man allegedly bragged about possibly stealing the toe.
“This guy asked to do the toe after the 9-to-11 p.m. toe time hours, and one of the new staff served it to him to be nice,” Lee told The Vancouver Sun. “And this is how he pays her back. What a lowlife.”
That customer left behind the Sourtoe Cocktail certificate awarded by the hotel, so the police have his name.
The hotel plans to fine the thief $2,500 unless the toe is returned. It’s also offering a reward for anyone with information about the theft.
Lee said the hotel still has a couple of backup toes, but hotel manager Geri Coulbourne really liked the one that was stolen.
Coulbourne told the CBC that it was donated by a man who had to have it surgically removed, then it was cured in salt for six months.
“This was our new toe, and it was a really good one. We just started using it this weekend,” she said.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) clashed with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Tuesday on the subject of climate change, calling out the Trump Cabinet member for downplaying melting glaciers in Glacier National Park.
Zinke said during a June 8 budget hearing that the park’s namesake features started melting “right after the end of the Ice Age.”
“It’s been a consistent melt,” he told the House Appropriations Interior and Environment Subcommittee, adding that he’s watched glaciers thaw while “eating lunch.”
At a Tuesday budget hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Franken pointed to data released last month by the U.S. Geological Survey — a bureau Zinke oversees — and Portland State University showing that the park’s glaciers have shrunk an average of 39 percent since 1966. (Dan Fagre, a USGS research ecologist, told HuffPost at the time that the glaciers “are already at the point of no return,” and will all but disappear “within 20 years.”)
“We are not seeing a consistent melt. The melting is dramatically increasing,” Franken told Zinke. “I’m concerned about whether you are clear about the magnitude of warming that is occurring.”
With limited time, Franken moved on to the larger climate crisis, asking Zinke if he knows how much warming government scientists are predicting by 2100 under a business-as-usual scenario.
“I don’t think the government scientists can predict with certainty,” Zinke said. “There isn’t a model that exists today that can predict today’s weather, given all the data —”
“They predict the range,” Franked interrupted, pointing out that Zinke has stressed the importance of relying on science.
Asked again about the range of warming government scientists are predicting by 2100, Zinke referenced a study by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That study, he said, showed that if all countries met the goals agreed to under the Paris Agreement on climate change, it would result in an “insignificant” 0.2-degree Celsius reduction in global temperature by 2100 — a claim President Donald Trump rolled out to announce plans to withdraw the U.S. from the historic Paris accord.
In fact, the MIT study concluded that if the Paris targets were met, global warming would slow by between 0.6 degree and 1.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. MIT researchers have said the Trump administration’s statements about the study are “misleading.”
“The whole statement seemed to suggest a complete misunderstanding of the climate problem,” John Reilly, the co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, told CNN.
Franken said Zinke was “mixing apples and oranges,” and posed the question for a third time. Again, Zinke dodged, instead directing a question at Franken.
“Can you tell me, Sir, whether or not China increased its CO2 between now and [2030] under the agreement? And by what?” Zinke asked, appearing agitated. “But I will be glad to give you that answer.”
“And that answer is?” Franken prodded.
″I will be glad to give you that answer,” Zinke said again.
“So you will give it in writing then,” Franken responded, as his time for questions expired.
Zinke, a Montana congressman before Trump tapped him to lead the Interior Department, didn’t speak Tuesday about his previous statements about melting glaciers in his home state.
Portland State University geologist Andrew G. Fountain, who partnered with USGS on the Glacier National Park project, described Zinke’s statement on glacier melt as “vague.” He told HuffPost that while glaciers have generally retreated since about 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age, the rate of retreat has increased in recent decades — a result of warming global air temperatures.
“During the 1960s, the 1970s, [the retreat] was very slow, and since that time, particularly in the ’90s, it has accelerated,” Fountain said.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
When Grant Tribbett proposed to his girlfriend Cassandra Reschar, he didn’t just make a commitment to her. He made one to her daughter too.
On May 27, Grant took Cassandra, a single mom, and her five-year-old daughter Adrianna to Cracker Barrel for breakfast followed by an outing to Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve in Fishers, Indiana. The three of them walked together a mile into the woods until they reached a wooden bridge. That’s where Grant got down on one knee and asked Cassandra to marry him ― and made a very special promise to Adrianna too.
The couple’s friend and photographer Mandi Gilliland was there to capture the beautiful moment:
“After proposing to me, Grant got back down to propose to my daughter. He said, ‘Adrianna can I be your daddy, to promise to love and protect you for the rest of your life?’” Cassandra wrote on HowHeAsked.
Cassandra was so touched by the gesture, she immediately began bawling.
“He didn’t have to propose to her or involve her since typically proposals are between just two people,” Cassandra told HuffPost. “But he knew that my daughter was my world and that this wasn’t just a commitment between us but a commitment to our family.”
Then to make it official, Grant gave Adrianna a piece of jewelry too ― a heart-shaped necklace in her favorite colors.
“Adrianna’s reaction was priceless!” Cassandra told HuffPost. “When he presented her with the heart necklace her immediate response was ‘thank you!’ because she’s always been very good about using her manners.”
Cassandra continued: “So he had to re-ask her, ‘Is that a yes or no, sweetheart?’ Adrianna replied, ‘YES!’ And then screaming with pure joy, she said, ‘I finally get a daddy, Mommy! I finally get a daddy!’”
Since the proposal, Adrianna has been proudly sporting the necklace.
“Everywhere we go now she shows everyone,” Cassandra said. “It’s so sweet!”
Cassandra said she hopes this inspires other single moms and dads who are looking for love.
“I truly hope our story gives hope to other single parents out there who struggle with dating and feelings that they can never find someone that they love that will also love their children and accept them as their own,” she told HuffPost. “Because I’ve been there and it can be so discouraging when dating as a full-time single parent.”
For the full story, head over to HowHeAsked.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
There’s a lot of porn on Tumblr. Over a fifth of content on the site (disclaimer: it’s a sister brand through Verizon’s Yahoo purchase) is adults-only, if you ask the analytics firm SimilarWeb. And that’s a problem if you’re surfing from work or gi…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
