Danielle Stella, a Republican seeking to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat, was suspended from Twitter after her account posted Tuesday about killing the congresswoman.Ms. Stella's campaign account on Twitter, @2020MNCongress, was punted from the platform after posting at least twice about hanging Ms. Omar, a progressive freshman frequently the target of right-wing attacks.
The White House appears to be unable to locate any record of the phone call that President Donald Trump has claimed vindicates him in the Ukraine scandal.Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified to Congress that acting Ukraine Ambassador Bill Taylor confronted him in a text message exchange about the alleged campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden while blocking military aid appropriated by Congress to the country. Taylor told Sondland that it would be "crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign."
Mortality rates seldom rise unless a society is subjected to something disastrous, like a major economic crisis, an infectious disease epidemic or war. But there has been an increase in working-age mortality rates for just one group in the United States since 1999, and that's non-Hispanic whites."This is a startling finding," said Arjumand Siddiqi, lead author of the study.Siddiqi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, went on to say this could be the first time that a widespread population health phenomenon cannot be explained by social or economic status disadvantage, and instead has been driven by "a perceived threat to status.""The anxiety of whites is coming from a misperception that their dominant status in society is being threatened, which is manifesting in multiple forms of psychological and physiological stress," said Siddiqi.This stress has resulted in what researchers call "deaths of despair." While mortality rates trend higher for whites, the increased causes of death have been due to alcohol consumption, opioid use, opioid overdose and suicides. According to the study, rising chronic diseases--which includes hypertension and obesity--also contributed to this trend.
Forty years ago, John King Fairbank, doyen of modern Chinese studies, called the opium trade "the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times."If this were so, one wonders why the production, trade, and use of opium were entirely legal in such places as Turkey, Egypt, Persia, and India for decades both before and after the Opium War. One wonders why the drug's cultivation spread in the second half of the nineteenth century to the Netherlands, France, Italy, and the Balkans. One also wonders why, as Virginia Berridge revealed in her pioneering 1981 book Opium for the People, up to 100 tons of the substance was imported every year into England, where it was readily available until the end of the 19th century, commonly administered even to children in the form of laudanum.The author claims that opium was recreational in China but medicinal elsewhere. But this is a dubious distinction, one not even made in Britain--a country where, before 1900, alcohol, tobacco, and opium were all viewed as both palliatives and stimulants. In the absence of modern medicine, all too often pleasure meant absence of pain, especially in a poor and largely agrarian country such as China. Opium allowed ordinary people to relieve the symptoms of such endemic diseases as dysentery, cholera, and malaria and to cope with pain, fatigue, hunger, and cold.And the vast majority of opium users in China were not the desperate addicts portrayed by proponents of prohibition. They were occasional, intermittent, light, and moderate users--a far cry from Thomas De Quincey, an English writer who famously ingested truly gargantuan quantities of the substance.
The owner of Mercedes-Benz plans to cut thousands of jobs to deal with the shift to electric cars https://t.co/Xg2JZqgcbu
— Bloomberg (@business) November 29, 2019
Nearly ten conservative groups or officials have been accused of inflating sales of Donald Trump Jr.'s new book by purchasing it in bulk.The New York Times reported on Thursday that conservative student group Turning Point U.S.A. is "stocking piling" roughly 2,000 copies of Trump's book "Triggered."According to the Times, at least nine organizations or conservative personalities have participated in the bulk purchases.
Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Polish president who is on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, said Thursday that Hunter Biden was indeed chosen to join its advisory board because of his name. He said that is simply how the world of business works. [...]"I understand that if someone asks me to be part of some project it's not only because I'm so good, it's also because I am Kwasniewski and I am a former president of Poland," he said. "And this is all inter-connected. No-names are a nobody. Being Biden is not bad. It's a good name."Kwasniewski also said Burisma members never tried to use Hunter Biden to curry favor with the administration of Barack Obama when Joe Biden was vice president."He was a normal member of this group," he said. "We didn't ask him -- and he never said anything -- about his father."