The man who may soon be king of Saudi Arabia is charting a new, more modern course for a country so conservative that for decades there were no concerts or film screenings and women who attempted to drive were arrested.Since catapulting to power with the support of his father, the king, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has pushed forth changes that could usher in a new era for one of the United States' most important allies and swing the kingdom away from decades of ultraconservative dogma and restrictions. He's introduced musical concerts and movies again and is seen as the force behind the king's decision to grant women the right to drive as of next year.Opposition to the changes has so far been muted, but some critics of the prince have been detained. When social openings in the kingdom were taking place four decades ago, Sunni extremists opposed to the monarchy laid siege to Islam's holiest site in Mecca.Prince Mohammed's agenda is upending the ruling Al Saud's longstanding alliance with the kingdom's clerical establishment in favor of synchronizing with a more cosmopolitan, global capitalism that appeals to international investors and maybe even non-Muslim tourists.
Former President Barack Obama has been called for Cook County jury duty -- and plans to serve next month, the county's chief judge said Friday.Chief Judge Tim Evans told county commissioners during a budget hearing that Obama, who owns homes in Washington, D.C., and Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, will serve next month.
When it comes to fall, nowhere does it better than New England pic.twitter.com/wPHT1mLqqE
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Harrell opened with a venerable standard, Jerome Kern's "The Song Is You," producing a pure, golden timbre on fluegelhorn. If this was a bit of nostalgia from a soloist who more typically spotlights original compositions, it was beautifully wrought. For Harrell began by playing the tune in fairly straightforward fashion before inventing alternate melodies on its famous chord changes.Here was the essence of Harrell's art: melodic strands that sounded at once surprising and inevitable. Danny Grissett's shimmering pianism, bassist Ugonna Okegwo's soft-and-buoyant lines and drummer Adam Cruz's hushed-but-driving accompaniment added ambience without disturbing the delicacy of Harrell's sound. A sure indication of the regard in which these musicians hold the bandleader. [...]The centerpiece of the set changed the evening's tonal vocabulary once again, as Harrell played trumpet and fluegelhorn in a duet with pianist Grissett in "Vibrer." Also drawn from "Moving Picture," "Vibrer" suggested a classical sonata, complete with multiple themes and sections, plus carefully scripted interchange between the two players.In some moments, Harrell's steeped-in-blues lines were accompanied by Grissett's streaked-in-dissonance riffs. At other times, Harrell and Grissett rode the same rhythm while going their own ways melodically. In still other passages, they played cat-and-mouse, one chasing the other. Through it all, Harrell achieved profundity through economy, saying a great deal with a few well-chosen notes.
Ten minutes to midnight on Tuesday, Jeremy J. Van Ert stepped into a walk-in beer cooler at a Kwik Trip convenience store in Marshfield, Wis.When the doors locked behind him at midnight, he decided that rather than shout for help, he would just camp out, police say.[Marshfield Police Chief Rick Gramza said:] "He just decided to run it out for the night. It had everything that he needed."
The speed of poverty alleviation in the last 25 years has been historically unprecedented. Not only is the proportion of people in poverty at a record low, but, in spite of adding 2 billion to the planet's population, the overall number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen too.If it takes you five minutes to read this, another 480 people will have escaped the shackles of extreme of poverty by the time you finish.As Johan Norberg writes in his book Progress, "If you had to choose a society to live in but did not know what your social or economic position would be, you would probably choose the society with the lowest proportion (not the lowest numbers) of poor, because this is the best judgement of the life of an average citizen." Well, in 1820, 94 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 per day adjusted for purchasing power). In 1990 this figure was 34.8 percent, and in 2015, just 9.6 percent.In the last quarter century, more than 1.25 billion people escaped extreme poverty - that equates to over 138,000 people (i.e., 38,000 more than the Parisian crowd that greeted Father Wresinski in 1987) being lifted out of poverty every day. If it takes you five minutes to read this article, another 480 people will have escaped the shackles of extreme of poverty by the time you finish. Progress is awesome. In 1820, only 60 million people didn't live in extreme poverty. In 2015, 6.6 billion did not.
By marching into the White House press room last week and assailing Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida for listening in on the call and criticizing Trump for it, Mr. Kelly risked his reputation as an honest broker in curbing the president's excesses.Now, wittingly or not, he has signed on as part of Trump's war on the American press. He has been eagerly joined by the latest White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who later insisted it was "highly inappropriate" for a duly accredited reporter "to get into debate with a four-star Marine general" over Wilson's version of the story.Mr. Kelly, in his understandable desire not to have the slain soldier's sacrifice lost in the whole affair, has inserted himself into unfamiliar terrain. He said twice that he would take questions only from reporters who were Gold Star parents or siblings of the deceased or who knew a Gold Star family. Such a caveat clearly is outside the bounds of a functioning free press.Mr. Kelly up to now has been seen and admired as a self-disciplined military man who by his own demeanor and career training knew to leave politics to the politicians. His public life has been marked by acceptance if not reverence toward civilian leadership in the realm of national governance.But in this instance, he not only attacked an elected legislator but was also guilty of the worst offense in press relations, by being demonstrably wrong on the facts. He accused Rep. Wilson of grandstanding by claiming credit for the funding of a new FBI building in Miami that Congress authorized before she was a House member.
Hamas officials in Gaza believe the Islamic State jihadist group is behind the attempted assassination of their security chief on Friday, said reports Saturday in Hebrew-language media.
There's nothing wrong with not caring about the budget, but Americans would prefer to blow a hole in it to provide health care for everyone than tax cuts.The Tax Policy Center's initial September analysis of the plan drew fire from some conservatives for not including the effects of economic growth on revenues.The updated report found almost no difference with growth effects, called dynamic scoring."The outline would reduce federal tax revenue by roughly $2.4 [trillion] over the next decade, nearly the same as under conventional scoring," the Tax Policy Center's Howard Gleckman wrote in a blog post on the matter.In the second decade, the center added, revenues would fall by $3.4 trillion.
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin's behest that day is anti-Russia "hysteria."But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia's most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika's office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya's account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman.It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact -- not mere "puffery," as the president's son later said.
Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev has signed a decree to switch the country's official alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin. [...]A number of other ex-Soviet, Turkic nations have also made the switch to Latin alphabets in recent years.
The conservative news website The Washington Free Beacon says during the 2016 campaign it first hired the firm that later produced a dossier of unsubstantiated information about Donald Trump's Russia ties.The political research firm, Fusion GPS, commissioned former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who went on to produce what's been called the "Steele dossier."The dossier "describes a concerted effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to cultivate a relationship with Trump and his camp," NPR's Philip Ewing explained. "The document, which describes information provided by Russian government and other sources, details behavior by Trump that could leave him open to blackmail, as well as alleged secret meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials called to discuss the campaign against Clinton and potential new business relationships."
A federal grand jury in Washington on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.