31 things you didn't know about Prince Harry
Prince Harry during a visit in London in September 2017
Helena Kealey
18 MAY 2018 • 12:15PM
Prince Harry will marry Meghan Markle tomorrow at St George's Chapel, in one of the most anticipated events of the year.
Since the moment he was born, the Prince's life has been recorded, photographed and documented. The public seemingly know everything there is to know about him.
We were there for his parents' divorce and his mother’s death. We are all aware of his will-they-won't-they relationships, his job, that one time he wore a swastika and that other time he went to Las Vagas and got his kit off.
But there is plenty we don't know about the prince. Here are 31 facts about the groom for you to impress fellow revellers with at your wedding-watching party.
When he started nursery school in London aged three, Prince Harry didn't automatically get on well with the other children and was reportedly picked on by bullies.
His kind-heartedness started early. He owned a lop-eared rabbit that lived in a hutch in the stable yard at Highgrove. The young prince would also spend hours tending to the sheep on the country estate.
Harry met his ex-girlfriend Cressida Bonas through his cousin Princess Eugenie in May 2012.
Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas are actually related, albeit very distantly. She is rumoured to be Prince Harry’s ninth cousin through King Charles II.
Harry had the idea for, and spearheaded, the Invictus Games: a Paralympic-style multi sport event for wounded, injured or sick servicemen and women.
In 1997 he travelled to South Africa with his father where he met Nelson Mandela and watched the Spice Girls perform.
In the Army, he was known as "Captain Wales". As a British prince, he doesn’t have a fixed surname and so instead used the name of the area over which his father holds title, as a territorial suffix in place of a surname.
He’s a dab hand at the Fifa video game, which we know because he told the Press in an interview while out in Afghanistan, saying, "You can ask the guys, I thrash them at Fifa the whole time". Game on, Harry.
He will not be reading this article. Not only because obviously there’s not a lot about himself he doesn’t know, but because neither he nor William take any pleasure in reading articles about themselves and try to avoid it if they can.
He really hates Twitter. Poor man.
One of his middle names is David. The other two are Charles and Albert.
Aged 18, he spent his gap year in Australia and Lesotho. While in Australia, he spent time working, as his father had done, on a cattle station and participating in the Young England vs Young Australia Polo Test Match.
In 2007-2008 he served for 77 days in Helmand, Afghanistan. He was pulled out after the publication of the story in an Australian magazine. He returned to Afghanistan for a 20-week deployment in 2012-2013 with the Army Air Corps
He studied geography, art history and art at A-Level and left school with a B in art and a D in geography - enough to get him into Sandhurst.
He produced the documentary film The Forgotten Kingdom during his gap year in Lesotho, where he also visited Mants’ase Children’s Home near Mohale’s Hoek.
He was educated at Eton College, famous for having graduates from the world of politics and business.
He has his own coat of arms, granted to him on his 18th birthday.
On the 10th anniversary of his mother’s death, he gave a speech at the Thanksgiving Service in which he said: "What is far more important to us now is how she is remembered as she was: fun-loving, generous, down-to-earth, entirely genuine."
Prince Harry also has his own monogram. It’s a lovely curly "H" with a crown on the top.
When commenting on the Las Vegas naked picture scandal, Prince Harry said that "at the end of the day I probably let myself down, I let my family down, I let other people down," but also that "I was in a private area and there should have been a certain amount of privacy that should have been expected." Quite right, too.
In an interview with NBC News, Harry said he would never stop wondering about the night that his mother died and what happened in that tunnel.
There was an American TV show called I Wanna Marry Harry, in which 12 women were led to believe that they were competing for Prince Harry's affections. The Harry in question was an actor, so they weren't.
Apparently he can fix a broken cable TV – which would come in very handy for anyone struggling to watch I Wanna Marry Harry. While visiting a temporary home in Valparaiso in Chile, he noticed a family’s TV cable wasn’t working and fixed it.
He supports Arsenal Football Club.
When he was a child, Princess Diana took William and Harry around homeless projects and Aids wards in the hope that it would give them an understanding of people’s emotions, insecurities and of people's hopes and dreams.
As part of the Walking With The Wounded South Pole Allied Challenge of 2013, Harry became the first member of the royal family to reach the South Pole.
He has named himself "the Funcle" (that's "Fun" "Uncle", for those of you wondering) of Prince George.
When Prince Harry presented the rings at his brother’s wedding, he carried them in the cuff of his tunic as his military uniform didn’t have any pockets.
Prince Harry was a supporter rather than a best man during the wedding. Apparently royal weddings don’t have a best man.
Following training at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Blues and Royals of the Household Cavalry Regiment.
Harry has three medals to his name: an Operation Service Medal for Afghanistan, Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal and Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Friday, May 18, 2018
Did China make a $200 billion trade offer to the US? Beijing says no - CNN Money
Did China make a $200 billion trade offer to the US? Beijing says no
by Kevin Liptak and Daniel Shane @CNNMoney
May 18, 2018: 5:46 AM
US trade with China, explained
China and the United States are offering different accounts of what has been discussed in high-stakes talks this week to avoid a trade war.
US officials on Thursday told CNN that Beijing had proposed boosting Chinese purchases of American goods by around $200 billion in an attempt to reduce the massive trade imbalance between the two countries.
But at a regular news briefing in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang denied such an offer had been made.
"These rumors are not true," he said.
Top officials from the two countries held talks in Washington on Thursday aimed at finding a way out of their bitter trade dispute. The United States and China have threatened in recent months to slap tariffs on tens of billions of dollars of each other's products.
Lu declined to provide more details on the negotiations, which are set to continue Friday, other than to describe them as "constructive."
China also said Friday that it's removing a huge import tax it recently imposed on US exports of sorghum, a move likely to help ease trade tensions.
Related: Peter Navarro and Steven Mnuchin feuded at Beijing trade talks
The US officials had said the idea of increasing China's purchases of American goods by $200 billion increase was just a proposal by the Chinese side and no agreements had been reached.
The number reflected one of the US demands presented to the Chinese government during the first round of talks, which took place in Beijing earlier this month. The demand called for China to cut its trade surplus with the United States by $200 billion by the end of 2020.
china shipping containers qingdao
Shipping containers at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province on April 13, 2018.
Experts say China, which bought $130 billion of American goods last year, would struggle to significantly ramp up the amount in a short space of time -- and $200 billion would be a staggering increase.
"It's unclear how exactly China gets to this number," said Alex Wolf, an emerging markets economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments.
He pointed out that China could try to shift its purchases of industrial machinery and similar goods from countries like Germany and Japan to the United States. But that could cause disruptions to supply chains and create tensions with those countries. It's also not certain the US economy could easily supply the kind of machinery China needs.
American companies would need time to adjust to a huge jump in demand from China.
"They could redirect their Airbus (EADSF) purchases to Boeing (BA), but its unrealistic for Boeing to have to meet that order book, at least in the short term," Wolf said.
And whatever it offers the United States, the Chinese government is likely to want something in return.
That could include removing restrictions on the export to China of certain advanced American technologies, according to Larry Hu, an economist at investment bank Macquarie. But the US government "might not be willing to do that," he added.
Is the US trade deficit a bad thing?
China has also been pressing the United States to lift a crippling ban on the sale of American parts to ZTE, (ZTCOF) a big Chinese maker of smartphones and telecommunications equipment.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he was working on giving ZTE "a way to get back into business, fast," adding that he had instructed the US Commerce Department to "get it done."
Thursday's meetings included one in the Oval Office between Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, the top economic adviser to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The US government has also been pressuring China to change its industrial policies aimed at boosting Chinese high-tech industries.
Beijing has signaled it's not interested in changing a strategy it views as crucial for developing its economy. But US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has clearly linked the threat to impose heavy tariffs on at least $50 billion of Chinese products to Beijing's ambitious plans to become a global leader in industries like robotics and electric vehicles.
"China wants it to just be about the trade deficit. They want it to be a numbers issue," Wolf said.
Related: China wants its top tech firms to bring their shares home
The Chinese Commerce Ministry's announcement Friday that it is ending its measures against US sorghum exports is likely to come as a relief to American farmers. Beijing had previously accused them of dumping the crop, which is typically used to feed animals, on its markets.
The ministry said in statement the heavy import charges it placed on US sorghum last month "are not in line with the public interest."
Lu, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said observers shouldn't "over-interpret" the decision on sorghum as being directly related to the trade talks in Washington.
-- Steven Jiang, Jethro Mullen and Serenitie Wang contributed to this report.
by Kevin Liptak and Daniel Shane @CNNMoney
May 18, 2018: 5:46 AM
US trade with China, explained
China and the United States are offering different accounts of what has been discussed in high-stakes talks this week to avoid a trade war.
US officials on Thursday told CNN that Beijing had proposed boosting Chinese purchases of American goods by around $200 billion in an attempt to reduce the massive trade imbalance between the two countries.
But at a regular news briefing in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang denied such an offer had been made.
"These rumors are not true," he said.
Top officials from the two countries held talks in Washington on Thursday aimed at finding a way out of their bitter trade dispute. The United States and China have threatened in recent months to slap tariffs on tens of billions of dollars of each other's products.
Lu declined to provide more details on the negotiations, which are set to continue Friday, other than to describe them as "constructive."
China also said Friday that it's removing a huge import tax it recently imposed on US exports of sorghum, a move likely to help ease trade tensions.
Related: Peter Navarro and Steven Mnuchin feuded at Beijing trade talks
The US officials had said the idea of increasing China's purchases of American goods by $200 billion increase was just a proposal by the Chinese side and no agreements had been reached.
The number reflected one of the US demands presented to the Chinese government during the first round of talks, which took place in Beijing earlier this month. The demand called for China to cut its trade surplus with the United States by $200 billion by the end of 2020.
china shipping containers qingdao
Shipping containers at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province on April 13, 2018.
Experts say China, which bought $130 billion of American goods last year, would struggle to significantly ramp up the amount in a short space of time -- and $200 billion would be a staggering increase.
"It's unclear how exactly China gets to this number," said Alex Wolf, an emerging markets economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments.
He pointed out that China could try to shift its purchases of industrial machinery and similar goods from countries like Germany and Japan to the United States. But that could cause disruptions to supply chains and create tensions with those countries. It's also not certain the US economy could easily supply the kind of machinery China needs.
American companies would need time to adjust to a huge jump in demand from China.
"They could redirect their Airbus (EADSF) purchases to Boeing (BA), but its unrealistic for Boeing to have to meet that order book, at least in the short term," Wolf said.
And whatever it offers the United States, the Chinese government is likely to want something in return.
That could include removing restrictions on the export to China of certain advanced American technologies, according to Larry Hu, an economist at investment bank Macquarie. But the US government "might not be willing to do that," he added.
Is the US trade deficit a bad thing?
China has also been pressing the United States to lift a crippling ban on the sale of American parts to ZTE, (ZTCOF) a big Chinese maker of smartphones and telecommunications equipment.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he was working on giving ZTE "a way to get back into business, fast," adding that he had instructed the US Commerce Department to "get it done."
Thursday's meetings included one in the Oval Office between Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, the top economic adviser to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The US government has also been pressuring China to change its industrial policies aimed at boosting Chinese high-tech industries.
Beijing has signaled it's not interested in changing a strategy it views as crucial for developing its economy. But US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has clearly linked the threat to impose heavy tariffs on at least $50 billion of Chinese products to Beijing's ambitious plans to become a global leader in industries like robotics and electric vehicles.
"China wants it to just be about the trade deficit. They want it to be a numbers issue," Wolf said.
Related: China wants its top tech firms to bring their shares home
The Chinese Commerce Ministry's announcement Friday that it is ending its measures against US sorghum exports is likely to come as a relief to American farmers. Beijing had previously accused them of dumping the crop, which is typically used to feed animals, on its markets.
The ministry said in statement the heavy import charges it placed on US sorghum last month "are not in line with the public interest."
Lu, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said observers shouldn't "over-interpret" the decision on sorghum as being directly related to the trade talks in Washington.
-- Steven Jiang, Jethro Mullen and Serenitie Wang contributed to this report.
All Chilean bishops offer their resignation over sexual abuse cover-up It is not yet clear whether Pope Francis will accept resignations of 34 bishops - Guardian
All Chilean bishops offer their resignation over sexual abuse cover-up
It is not yet clear whether Pope Francis will accept resignations of 34 bishops
Harriet Sherwood Religious affairs correspondent
@harrietsherwood
Fri 18 May 2018 21.46 AEST Last modified on Sat 19 May 2018 00.26 AEST
The scandal has damaged the credibility of the church in Chile.
Chile’s bishops have offered to resign en masse over a sexual abuse and cover-up scandal that has embroiled Pope Francis and has been highly damaging to the Catholic church.
Thirty-one serving bishops and three retired bishops signed a letter of resignation on Friday. “We have put our positions in the hands of the Holy Father and will leave it to him to decide freely for each of us,” they said. “We want to ask forgiveness for the pain caused to the victims, to the pope, to God’s people and to our country for the serious errors and omissions we have committed.”
There was no immediate indication of whether the pope would accept their resignations.
The bishops’ move came after Francis said the Chilean church hierarchy was collectively responsible for “grave defects” in handling sexual abuse cases and the resulting loss of credibility suffered by the church.
He accused them of destroying evidence of sexual crimes, putting pressure on investigators to downplay abuse accusations and showing “grave negligence” in protecting children from paedophile priests.
“No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others,” Francis said in a letter to the bishops.
Francis summoned the bishops to a three-day emergency summit in Rome after he was forced to admit he had made “grave errors in judgment” in the case of Juan Barros, a bishop who had been accused of covering up alleged abuse by a Chilean priest, Fernando Karadima, in the 1980s and 90s.
The Chilean church has been rocked by the allegations of abuse by Karadima and others, and by claims that senior figures knew about or even witnessed what was going on.
Now 87 and living in a nursing home in Chile, Karadima has always denied the allegations. Barros has said he was unaware of any wrongdoing.
Francis strongly defended Barros during a visit to Chile in January, accusing Karadima’s accusers of slander, in remarks that shocked Chileans and others around the world. “There is not one piece of evidence against [Barros]. It is calumny,” he said.
Francis’s comments were seen as highly damaging to his reputation, compounding a widespread view that he has failed to take a robust stance on the issue of clerical sexual abuse since becoming pope.
The Vatican later sent two expert on sexual crimes to investigate claims of widespread abuse and cover-up in Chile. They delivered a 2,300-page report.
In a 10-page letter commenting on the report, which was handed to the Chilean bishops at the start of the summit, the pope said the church authorities had minimised “the absolute gravity of their [priests’] criminal acts, attributing to them mere weakness or moral lapses.”
Priests accused of abuse were moved but “were then welcomed into other dioceses, in an obviously imprudent way, and given … jobs that gave them daily contact with minors.”
Francis said he was “perplexed and ashamed” by the report’s evidence that pressure was put on church officials tasked with investigating sexual crimes, “including the destruction of compromising documents on the part of those in charge of ecclesiastic archives”.
He said: “The problems inside the church community can’t be solved just by dealing with individual cases and reducing them to the removal of people, though this – and I say so clearly – has to be done.
“But it’s not enough, we have to go beyond that. It would be irresponsible on our part to not look deeply into the roots and the structures that allowed these concrete events to occur and perpetuate.”
In an attempt to limit the damage caused by his comments in January defending Barros, the pope met and apologised to three Chilean abuse survivors at his Vatican residence, the Casa Santa Marta.
It is not yet clear whether Pope Francis will accept resignations of 34 bishops
Harriet Sherwood Religious affairs correspondent
@harrietsherwood
Fri 18 May 2018 21.46 AEST Last modified on Sat 19 May 2018 00.26 AEST
The scandal has damaged the credibility of the church in Chile.
Chile’s bishops have offered to resign en masse over a sexual abuse and cover-up scandal that has embroiled Pope Francis and has been highly damaging to the Catholic church.
Thirty-one serving bishops and three retired bishops signed a letter of resignation on Friday. “We have put our positions in the hands of the Holy Father and will leave it to him to decide freely for each of us,” they said. “We want to ask forgiveness for the pain caused to the victims, to the pope, to God’s people and to our country for the serious errors and omissions we have committed.”
There was no immediate indication of whether the pope would accept their resignations.
The bishops’ move came after Francis said the Chilean church hierarchy was collectively responsible for “grave defects” in handling sexual abuse cases and the resulting loss of credibility suffered by the church.
He accused them of destroying evidence of sexual crimes, putting pressure on investigators to downplay abuse accusations and showing “grave negligence” in protecting children from paedophile priests.
“No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others,” Francis said in a letter to the bishops.
Francis summoned the bishops to a three-day emergency summit in Rome after he was forced to admit he had made “grave errors in judgment” in the case of Juan Barros, a bishop who had been accused of covering up alleged abuse by a Chilean priest, Fernando Karadima, in the 1980s and 90s.
The Chilean church has been rocked by the allegations of abuse by Karadima and others, and by claims that senior figures knew about or even witnessed what was going on.
Now 87 and living in a nursing home in Chile, Karadima has always denied the allegations. Barros has said he was unaware of any wrongdoing.
Francis strongly defended Barros during a visit to Chile in January, accusing Karadima’s accusers of slander, in remarks that shocked Chileans and others around the world. “There is not one piece of evidence against [Barros]. It is calumny,” he said.
Francis’s comments were seen as highly damaging to his reputation, compounding a widespread view that he has failed to take a robust stance on the issue of clerical sexual abuse since becoming pope.
The Vatican later sent two expert on sexual crimes to investigate claims of widespread abuse and cover-up in Chile. They delivered a 2,300-page report.
In a 10-page letter commenting on the report, which was handed to the Chilean bishops at the start of the summit, the pope said the church authorities had minimised “the absolute gravity of their [priests’] criminal acts, attributing to them mere weakness or moral lapses.”
Priests accused of abuse were moved but “were then welcomed into other dioceses, in an obviously imprudent way, and given … jobs that gave them daily contact with minors.”
Francis said he was “perplexed and ashamed” by the report’s evidence that pressure was put on church officials tasked with investigating sexual crimes, “including the destruction of compromising documents on the part of those in charge of ecclesiastic archives”.
He said: “The problems inside the church community can’t be solved just by dealing with individual cases and reducing them to the removal of people, though this – and I say so clearly – has to be done.
“But it’s not enough, we have to go beyond that. It would be irresponsible on our part to not look deeply into the roots and the structures that allowed these concrete events to occur and perpetuate.”
In an attempt to limit the damage caused by his comments in January defending Barros, the pope met and apologised to three Chilean abuse survivors at his Vatican residence, the Casa Santa Marta.
Campbell Soup’s CEO Will Retire After a Three-Year Slump - TIME Business
Campbell Soup’s CEO Will Retire After a Three-Year Slump
Posted: 18 May 2018 06:18 AM PDT
Campbell Soup Co., struggling through a three-year sales slump, said Chief Executive Officer Denise Morrison is retiring and will be replaced on an interim basis by board member Keith McLoughlin.
Morrison, 64, who has been at the helm since 2011, is stepping down, effective Friday, Campbell said in a statement. She has been with the company for 15 years. McLoughlin, 61, has been a board member since 2016.
Campbell has been seeking other sources of growth as it grapples with a soup slowdown. In December, the company agreed to buy Snyder’s-Lance in a bid to push deeper into salty snacks — a bright spot in the struggling packaged-food industry. That deal gives Campbell, which makes Goldfish crackers, brands such as Cape Cod potato chips and Snyder’s pretzels.
Last month, the company named industry veteran Luca Mignini, 55, as its chief operating officer. Mignini, who joined Campbell in 2013, had been running the company’s snacks unit, putting him in line for the top job. Mignini is now overseeing Campbell’s soup business in addition to managing the expaned portfolio of snacks.
The soup company also provided a full-year forecast for adjusted earnings per share that fell short of analysts’ estimates.
Shares of Campbell dropped as much as 5 percent in early trading to $37.25. They had already slid 18 percent this year through Friday’s close.
Posted: 18 May 2018 06:18 AM PDT
Campbell Soup Co., struggling through a three-year sales slump, said Chief Executive Officer Denise Morrison is retiring and will be replaced on an interim basis by board member Keith McLoughlin.
Morrison, 64, who has been at the helm since 2011, is stepping down, effective Friday, Campbell said in a statement. She has been with the company for 15 years. McLoughlin, 61, has been a board member since 2016.
Campbell has been seeking other sources of growth as it grapples with a soup slowdown. In December, the company agreed to buy Snyder’s-Lance in a bid to push deeper into salty snacks — a bright spot in the struggling packaged-food industry. That deal gives Campbell, which makes Goldfish crackers, brands such as Cape Cod potato chips and Snyder’s pretzels.
Last month, the company named industry veteran Luca Mignini, 55, as its chief operating officer. Mignini, who joined Campbell in 2013, had been running the company’s snacks unit, putting him in line for the top job. Mignini is now overseeing Campbell’s soup business in addition to managing the expaned portfolio of snacks.
The soup company also provided a full-year forecast for adjusted earnings per share that fell short of analysts’ estimates.
Shares of Campbell dropped as much as 5 percent in early trading to $37.25. They had already slid 18 percent this year through Friday’s close.
Harry and Meghan: Don't send gifts, buy sanitary pads for Indian women - MSNBC News
The Royal Wedding: Harry and Meghan
Harry and Meghan: Don't send gifts, buy sanitary pads for Indian women
by Ivana Kottasová and Sreoshi Mukherjee @ivanakottasova
May 17, 2018: 2:33 PM ET
Will Meghan Markle be a princess?
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have ditched the traditional wedding gift registry. Instead, they're suggesting people donate to a charity that makes affordable sanitary pads for women in India.
The couple has asked for donations to a handful of charities instead of presents for their wedding in Windsor on Saturday, and the Mumbai-based Myna Mahila Foundation is the only foreign organization they have picked.
The charity aims to improve access to sanitary protection for women living in Mumbai's slums, providing them with pads that are both affordable and hygienic.
"[Menstruation] is a very natural body process, but still remains a big taboo in India," said Sumati Joshi, a worker at the charity. Grocery stores are often staffed by men, meaning women are ashamed to buy sanitary products.
That's where Myna steps in. The charity employs 15 local women to make the pads, providing them with stable and safe work, while busting myths and taboos. Another 50 women distribute the pads in the slums.
"[We] go door to door educating women and also giving them access to the products at a very subsidized rate," she added.
Myna Mahila Foundation
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are promoting the work of the Indian charity Myna Mahila.
It's a big task: According to the India National Family Health Survey, more than 40% of Indian women aged 15 to 24 do not have access to sanitary products during their period.
Instead, they resort to using rags, old clothes, newspapers, hay, sand, or even ash, according to Unicef and other aid organizations.
Because of the stigma associated with menstruation, women are often ashamed to wash and dry the rags and clothes properly. Stored in damp, dark conditions, the materials become breeding grounds for bacteria, spreading diseases and infections.
Royal wedding: How much will it cost?
The taboos are persistent. Research sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that 71% of girls in India have no knowledge of menstruation before their first period, which leads to distress and shame.
Women are often not allowed to enter places of worship or touch food while on their periods.
Myna said it has manufactured 500,000 pads over the past two years, converting 3,000 women across 15 slums to using sanitary pads.
Myna founder Suhani Jalota will attend the royal wedding, along with one of the charity's volunteers and two local women from Mumbai. While in London, they will host a fundraiser for the charity.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Sumati Joshi as Myna's founder.
Harry and Meghan: Don't send gifts, buy sanitary pads for Indian women
by Ivana Kottasová and Sreoshi Mukherjee @ivanakottasova
May 17, 2018: 2:33 PM ET
Will Meghan Markle be a princess?
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have ditched the traditional wedding gift registry. Instead, they're suggesting people donate to a charity that makes affordable sanitary pads for women in India.
The couple has asked for donations to a handful of charities instead of presents for their wedding in Windsor on Saturday, and the Mumbai-based Myna Mahila Foundation is the only foreign organization they have picked.
The charity aims to improve access to sanitary protection for women living in Mumbai's slums, providing them with pads that are both affordable and hygienic.
"[Menstruation] is a very natural body process, but still remains a big taboo in India," said Sumati Joshi, a worker at the charity. Grocery stores are often staffed by men, meaning women are ashamed to buy sanitary products.
That's where Myna steps in. The charity employs 15 local women to make the pads, providing them with stable and safe work, while busting myths and taboos. Another 50 women distribute the pads in the slums.
"[We] go door to door educating women and also giving them access to the products at a very subsidized rate," she added.
Myna Mahila Foundation
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are promoting the work of the Indian charity Myna Mahila.
It's a big task: According to the India National Family Health Survey, more than 40% of Indian women aged 15 to 24 do not have access to sanitary products during their period.
Instead, they resort to using rags, old clothes, newspapers, hay, sand, or even ash, according to Unicef and other aid organizations.
Because of the stigma associated with menstruation, women are often ashamed to wash and dry the rags and clothes properly. Stored in damp, dark conditions, the materials become breeding grounds for bacteria, spreading diseases and infections.
Royal wedding: How much will it cost?
The taboos are persistent. Research sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that 71% of girls in India have no knowledge of menstruation before their first period, which leads to distress and shame.
Women are often not allowed to enter places of worship or touch food while on their periods.
Myna said it has manufactured 500,000 pads over the past two years, converting 3,000 women across 15 slums to using sanitary pads.
Myna founder Suhani Jalota will attend the royal wedding, along with one of the charity's volunteers and two local women from Mumbai. While in London, they will host a fundraiser for the charity.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Sumati Joshi as Myna's founder.
Ghostly 'Lightning' Waves Discovered Inside a Nuclear Reactor - Live Science
Ghostly 'Lightning' Waves Discovered Inside a Nuclear Reactor
By Marcus Woo, Live Science Contributor | May 18, 2018 10:18am ET
Ghostly 'Lightning' Waves Discovered Inside a Nuclear Reactor
A conceptual picture of fusion energy inside a tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine that produces plasma for fusion energy. A new paper has found whistler waves, normally found in the ionosphere, inside a nuclear fusion reactor.
Credit: Shutterstock
Mysterious, ghostlike "whistler waves" that are normally created by lightning could protect nuclear fusion reactors from runaway electrons, new research suggests.
These whistler waves are naturally found high above ground in the ionosphere — a layer of Earth's atmosphere about 50 to 600 miles (80 an1000 kilometers) above the planet's surface. These ghostly whistler waves form when lightning bolts generate pulses of electromagnetic waves that travel between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. These waves change in frequency as they cross the globe, and when the signals are converted from light to audio frequencies, they sound like whistles.
Now these whistler waves have been discovered in the hot plasma inside a tokamak — the doughnut-shaped machine where nuclear fusion reactions take place — according to a recent study published April 11 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Because whistlers can scatter and impede high-speed electrons, they could provide a new way to prevent runaway electrons from damaging the inside of a tokamak.
Fusion power
In nuclear fusion reactions, which power the sun and stars, atoms slam together, fusing into larger atoms while releasing energy. For decades, researchers have been trying to harness fusion energy on Earth, using powerful magnetic fields inside tokamaks to corral doughnut-shaped clouds of hot plasma — a weird phase of matter that consists of electrically charged gas.
Inside the tokamak, electric fields can propel electrons faster and faster. But as these high-speed electrons fly through the plasma, they can't slow down. Normally, objects moving through a gas or liquid feel a drag force that increases with speed. The faster you drive your car, for example, the more wind resistance you run into. But in plasma, drag force decreases with speed, allowing electrons to accelerate to near light speed, damaging the tokamak.
Researchers already have a few techniques to mitigate runaways, said Don Spong, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and a co-author of the new study. They can use artificial intelligence algorithms to monitor and adjust the density of the plasma to prevent electrons from accelerating too fast. If there are still runaways, they can inject pellets of frozen neon into the plasma, which increases the plasma density and slows runaway electrons.
But whistler waves could be yet another way to rein in runaway electrons. "We ideally want to avoid disruptions and runaways," Spong said. "But if they occur, we would like multiple tools available for dealing with them."
Stopping runaways
In the tokamak at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, Spong's research team detected, for the first time, whistler waves being produced by runaway electrons.
Plasma, he explained, is like a piece of Jell-O with many modes of vibration. If some runaway electrons have just the right velocity, they excite one of these modes and trigger whistler waves — similar to how driving an old car at just the right speed can cause the dashboard to vibrate.
"What we would like to do is reverse engineer that process and put those waves on the outside [of the plasma] to scatter the runaways," Spong said.
By better understanding how runaways create whistlers, the researchers hope they can reverse the process — using an external antenna to generate whistlers that can scatter the electrons and prevent them from getting too fast.
The researchers still need to further explore the relationship between runaways and whistlers, Spong said, for example, by identifying what frequencies and wavelengths work best to inhibit runaways and by studying what happens in the denser plasma needed for fusion reactors.
Of course, suppressing runaway electrons is just one hurdle to creating clean energy from nuclear fusion. Right now, fusion reactors require more energyto heat plasma than is produced by the fusion. To reach the breakeven point, researchers still have to figure out how to get plasma to stay hot without having to add heat.
But Spong is optimistic about fusion energy. "I'm a believer that it's achievable."
In 2025, the ITER project in southern France is slated to begin experiments. and scientists hope it will be the first fusion machine to produce more energy than is used to heat the plasma. Several groups have set their sights on achieving net positive fusion energy by 2050. And a new collaboration between MIT and a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced that the partners hope to put nuclear fusion on the grid in 15 years.
Originally published on Live Science.
By Marcus Woo, Live Science Contributor | May 18, 2018 10:18am ET
Ghostly 'Lightning' Waves Discovered Inside a Nuclear Reactor
A conceptual picture of fusion energy inside a tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine that produces plasma for fusion energy. A new paper has found whistler waves, normally found in the ionosphere, inside a nuclear fusion reactor.
Credit: Shutterstock
Mysterious, ghostlike "whistler waves" that are normally created by lightning could protect nuclear fusion reactors from runaway electrons, new research suggests.
These whistler waves are naturally found high above ground in the ionosphere — a layer of Earth's atmosphere about 50 to 600 miles (80 an1000 kilometers) above the planet's surface. These ghostly whistler waves form when lightning bolts generate pulses of electromagnetic waves that travel between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. These waves change in frequency as they cross the globe, and when the signals are converted from light to audio frequencies, they sound like whistles.
Now these whistler waves have been discovered in the hot plasma inside a tokamak — the doughnut-shaped machine where nuclear fusion reactions take place — according to a recent study published April 11 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Because whistlers can scatter and impede high-speed electrons, they could provide a new way to prevent runaway electrons from damaging the inside of a tokamak.
Fusion power
In nuclear fusion reactions, which power the sun and stars, atoms slam together, fusing into larger atoms while releasing energy. For decades, researchers have been trying to harness fusion energy on Earth, using powerful magnetic fields inside tokamaks to corral doughnut-shaped clouds of hot plasma — a weird phase of matter that consists of electrically charged gas.
Inside the tokamak, electric fields can propel electrons faster and faster. But as these high-speed electrons fly through the plasma, they can't slow down. Normally, objects moving through a gas or liquid feel a drag force that increases with speed. The faster you drive your car, for example, the more wind resistance you run into. But in plasma, drag force decreases with speed, allowing electrons to accelerate to near light speed, damaging the tokamak.
Researchers already have a few techniques to mitigate runaways, said Don Spong, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and a co-author of the new study. They can use artificial intelligence algorithms to monitor and adjust the density of the plasma to prevent electrons from accelerating too fast. If there are still runaways, they can inject pellets of frozen neon into the plasma, which increases the plasma density and slows runaway electrons.
But whistler waves could be yet another way to rein in runaway electrons. "We ideally want to avoid disruptions and runaways," Spong said. "But if they occur, we would like multiple tools available for dealing with them."
Stopping runaways
In the tokamak at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, Spong's research team detected, for the first time, whistler waves being produced by runaway electrons.
Plasma, he explained, is like a piece of Jell-O with many modes of vibration. If some runaway electrons have just the right velocity, they excite one of these modes and trigger whistler waves — similar to how driving an old car at just the right speed can cause the dashboard to vibrate.
"What we would like to do is reverse engineer that process and put those waves on the outside [of the plasma] to scatter the runaways," Spong said.
By better understanding how runaways create whistlers, the researchers hope they can reverse the process — using an external antenna to generate whistlers that can scatter the electrons and prevent them from getting too fast.
The researchers still need to further explore the relationship between runaways and whistlers, Spong said, for example, by identifying what frequencies and wavelengths work best to inhibit runaways and by studying what happens in the denser plasma needed for fusion reactors.
Of course, suppressing runaway electrons is just one hurdle to creating clean energy from nuclear fusion. Right now, fusion reactors require more energyto heat plasma than is produced by the fusion. To reach the breakeven point, researchers still have to figure out how to get plasma to stay hot without having to add heat.
But Spong is optimistic about fusion energy. "I'm a believer that it's achievable."
In 2025, the ITER project in southern France is slated to begin experiments. and scientists hope it will be the first fusion machine to produce more energy than is used to heat the plasma. Several groups have set their sights on achieving net positive fusion energy by 2050. And a new collaboration between MIT and a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced that the partners hope to put nuclear fusion on the grid in 15 years.
Originally published on Live Science.
Italian markets hammered by fears of govt spending binge - Reuters
BUSINESS NEWSMAY 18, 2018 / 9:46 PM / UPDATED 14 MINUTES AGO
Italian markets hammered by fears of govt spending binge
Dhara Ranasinghe, Helen Reid
LONDON (Reuters) - Italy’s long-term borrowing costs jumped to more than seven-month highs on Friday while stocks in Milan fell more than one percent after two anti-establishment parties pledged to increase spending in a deal to form a new coalition government.
After the League and the 5-Star Movement outlined their economic plans, the euro also fell, ceding early-session gains against the dollar EUR=EBS.
The agreement between the two parties that won the most parliamentary seats in an inconclusive March 4 election, watered down some of their most radical proposals.
But the deal still puts Italy, the euro zone’s third biggest economy and one of its most indebted states, on a collision course with the European Union and risks further increasing its debt.
Italy’s bond and stock markets were left nursing heavy losses at the end of a turbulent week.
Spreads between Italian and German 10-year debt IT10YT=RR DE10YT=RR widened to its highest since Jan. 3 at 162 basis points. On a weekly basis, spreads were wider by 30 basis points, its biggest weekly move since April 2015.
“We’ve had headlines left, right and centre from Italy this week and while the upshot is that the reality is not as scary as thought, the investment community is meeting and deliberating their next steps,” said Commerzbank’s head of rates Christoph Rieger.
“They see the true state of mind of the government and, while the measures don’t include debt writedowns, it’s clear that there will be no fiscal restraint and no structural reforms for a country that desperately needs it.”
Italy’s 10-year government bond yield climbed 10 basis points (bps) to 2.22 percent, its highest level since last October. It is up more than 30 bps this week, set for its biggest weekly jump since June 2015.
Earlier this week, two-year Italian bond yields pushed back into positive territory - making Italy the only euro zone country other than Greece to have two-year borrowing costs above zero.
To view a graphic on Turbulent week for Italian bonds, click: reut.rs/2Lab5vn
Based on the stated spending plans of a 5-Star/League coalition, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that Italy’s 2019 government deficit-to-GDP ratio could rise to around 3.5 percent - well above the 0.8 percent the Italian government projected in a Stability Pact recently submitted to the European Commission.
The Italian developments meanwhile increased investors’ bearishness on the euro, which fell 0.2 percent to $1.1778 to approach the five-month low reached on Wednesday of $1.1763.
Options markets show investors are more bearish on the euro over the next six and 12 months than at any time since November, though this is also partly because of a recent dollar rally.
While euro weakness boosted euro zone stocks .STOXXE, Italian stocks .FTMIB were down more than one percent with banks the biggest drag on the index. The sector .FTIT8300 sank 2.3 percent to a six-week low.
Italy’s main stock index was also headed for its worst weekly drop in more than two months, down 2.6 percent on the week.
“We have read the (5-Star/ League government) contract and the big question mark is where are they going to get the money?” Banor SIM head of equities Angelo Meda said.
To view a graphic on Italian stocks taking a tumble, click: reut.rs/2Lc6PLU
In a further sign that investors are ratcheting up Italy risk, the cost of insuring Italian debt against a sovereign default rose to its highest in more than four months ITGV5YUSAC=MG. Spanish and Portuguese bonds rose 3-5 bps each ES10YT=RR PT10YT=RR as the Italy selloff weighed.
Ratings agency DBRS warned on Thursday that economic proposals by Italy’s prospective new government could threaten Italy’s rating. DBRS has Italy on a BBB rating - an investment grade score - with a stable outlook.
Analysts said the prospect of increased short-term bond issuance was also causing some concern in bond markets.
The common government policy agenda of Italy’s government would include the issuance of short-term government bonds to pay companies owed money by the state, the League’s economics chief, Claudio Borghi, said on Friday.
Still, although the Italian/German bond yield spread has widened substantially this week, the gap remains below levels seen early last year when euro-break up fears gripped markets ahead of French elections. It’s also well below the plus 500 bps level seen during that 2010-2012 euro zone debt crisis.
To view a graphic on Italy's 10-year bond spread verses Germany, click: reut.rs/2LeCVGu
Reporting by Dhara Ranasinghe, Sujata Rao, Helen Reid, Tom Finn, Karin Strohecker in London; Danilo Masoni in Milan; Editing by Louise Ireland/Jon Boyle
Italian markets hammered by fears of govt spending binge
Dhara Ranasinghe, Helen Reid
LONDON (Reuters) - Italy’s long-term borrowing costs jumped to more than seven-month highs on Friday while stocks in Milan fell more than one percent after two anti-establishment parties pledged to increase spending in a deal to form a new coalition government.
After the League and the 5-Star Movement outlined their economic plans, the euro also fell, ceding early-session gains against the dollar EUR=EBS.
The agreement between the two parties that won the most parliamentary seats in an inconclusive March 4 election, watered down some of their most radical proposals.
But the deal still puts Italy, the euro zone’s third biggest economy and one of its most indebted states, on a collision course with the European Union and risks further increasing its debt.
Italy’s bond and stock markets were left nursing heavy losses at the end of a turbulent week.
Spreads between Italian and German 10-year debt IT10YT=RR DE10YT=RR widened to its highest since Jan. 3 at 162 basis points. On a weekly basis, spreads were wider by 30 basis points, its biggest weekly move since April 2015.
“We’ve had headlines left, right and centre from Italy this week and while the upshot is that the reality is not as scary as thought, the investment community is meeting and deliberating their next steps,” said Commerzbank’s head of rates Christoph Rieger.
“They see the true state of mind of the government and, while the measures don’t include debt writedowns, it’s clear that there will be no fiscal restraint and no structural reforms for a country that desperately needs it.”
Italy’s 10-year government bond yield climbed 10 basis points (bps) to 2.22 percent, its highest level since last October. It is up more than 30 bps this week, set for its biggest weekly jump since June 2015.
Earlier this week, two-year Italian bond yields pushed back into positive territory - making Italy the only euro zone country other than Greece to have two-year borrowing costs above zero.
To view a graphic on Turbulent week for Italian bonds, click: reut.rs/2Lab5vn
Based on the stated spending plans of a 5-Star/League coalition, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimated that Italy’s 2019 government deficit-to-GDP ratio could rise to around 3.5 percent - well above the 0.8 percent the Italian government projected in a Stability Pact recently submitted to the European Commission.
The Italian developments meanwhile increased investors’ bearishness on the euro, which fell 0.2 percent to $1.1778 to approach the five-month low reached on Wednesday of $1.1763.
Options markets show investors are more bearish on the euro over the next six and 12 months than at any time since November, though this is also partly because of a recent dollar rally.
While euro weakness boosted euro zone stocks .STOXXE, Italian stocks .FTMIB were down more than one percent with banks the biggest drag on the index. The sector .FTIT8300 sank 2.3 percent to a six-week low.
Italy’s main stock index was also headed for its worst weekly drop in more than two months, down 2.6 percent on the week.
“We have read the (5-Star/ League government) contract and the big question mark is where are they going to get the money?” Banor SIM head of equities Angelo Meda said.
To view a graphic on Italian stocks taking a tumble, click: reut.rs/2Lc6PLU
In a further sign that investors are ratcheting up Italy risk, the cost of insuring Italian debt against a sovereign default rose to its highest in more than four months ITGV5YUSAC=MG. Spanish and Portuguese bonds rose 3-5 bps each ES10YT=RR PT10YT=RR as the Italy selloff weighed.
Ratings agency DBRS warned on Thursday that economic proposals by Italy’s prospective new government could threaten Italy’s rating. DBRS has Italy on a BBB rating - an investment grade score - with a stable outlook.
Analysts said the prospect of increased short-term bond issuance was also causing some concern in bond markets.
The common government policy agenda of Italy’s government would include the issuance of short-term government bonds to pay companies owed money by the state, the League’s economics chief, Claudio Borghi, said on Friday.
Still, although the Italian/German bond yield spread has widened substantially this week, the gap remains below levels seen early last year when euro-break up fears gripped markets ahead of French elections. It’s also well below the plus 500 bps level seen during that 2010-2012 euro zone debt crisis.
To view a graphic on Italy's 10-year bond spread verses Germany, click: reut.rs/2LeCVGu
Reporting by Dhara Ranasinghe, Sujata Rao, Helen Reid, Tom Finn, Karin Strohecker in London; Danilo Masoni in Milan; Editing by Louise Ireland/Jon Boyle
Refugee bonds could help in Venezuela’s humanitarian catastrophe Regional markets offer possibility for private sector initiatives - Financial Times
May 18, 2018
Refugee bonds could help in Venezuela’s humanitarian catastrophe
Regional markets offer possibility for private sector initiatives
GARY KLEIMAN Add to myFT
Venezuelan refugees arrive at Boa Vista airport in northern Brazil. About 50,000 have arrived in the country recently © AFP
Gary Kleiman 8 MINUTES AGO Print this page0
Emerging market fund managers still invested in Venezuela are no longer just focused on debt restructuring.
As the country approaches elections on May 20 in the wake of self-inflicted economic collapse, more than 1m migrants and refugees have already fled to neighbouring countries to roil their financial markets with the prospects of millions more to come, according to a study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Over 500,000 Venezuelans are in Colombia in advance of the presidential race there, Ecuador and Panama have 250,000 each, Chile and Peru have 150,000 each and there are 50,000 in Brazil.
Latin American stock markets outperformed rival regions on the MSCI index through the first quarter, but the influx’s humanitarian and fiscal costs have yet to fully register.
The UN refugee agency declared a crisis and called on regional governments and international development lenders to exercise individual protection and share the funding load. The Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank are gearing up for infrastructure and social support.
Established public-private sector arrangements such as the cross-border Latin America Integrated Market (MILA) stock exchange between Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru could also create capital market instruments to foster refugee employment and business creation upon arrival.
With the integration of Mexico’s bolsa several years ago, the combined exchange is now Latin America’s largest, with capitalisation around $1tn and hundreds of infrastructure and financial services listings able to more easily place debt and equity with both socially-conscious and traditional investors.
Separately or through a pooled vehicle such as a Venezuela Emergency Fund, they could offer instruments for specific migrant and refugee purposes, to be tracked in detailed management reporting, to boost their bottom line and corporate responsibility, providing collective, private sector solutions to Venezuela’s dual humanitarian and hyperinflationary catastrophe.
Colombia has an estimated 500,000 Venezuelans pouring every day into border towns like Cucuta to meet their daily food and health needs, or to stay indefinitely. The country also has an unresolved legacy of internal displacement as the peace accord negotiated by outgoing President Santos with the FARC guerrillas goes into effect, under the general principle of exchanging army demobilisation for peaceful civilian return with the promise of job training.
However, the fiscal rule in place limits Colombia’s budget deficit to 3 per cent of GDP this year, and the frontrunner in the end-May presidential contest, Ivan Duque from former President Uribe’s party, has signalled a harsher stance towards former rebels. The current account gap is at a similar level, putting pressure on the sovereign rating, despite higher foreign direct investment in the oil industry.
Growth and inflation are in the 3 per cent range, as central bank easing is set to continue. A second-round runoff is predicted with more centrist opponents who have tried to co-opt Duque’s business-friendly platform, and forced migration will probably be sidetracked as a priority during the leadership transition as headline movements demand action.
Chile is host also to Haitians who fled the poorest nation in the hemisphere after its 2010 earthquake and subsequent hurricanes, and moved further south after facing deportation in Brazil in particular.
Chile has traditionally attracted seasonal low-wage workers from neighbouring countries, but a permanent presence has posed cultural and labour market challenges. President Piñera, in his second term, promises to revamp the economic model in a free-market and socially-responsible balance, in part to salvage his popularity which previously suffered under an image of wealthy elitism.
Refugees outside Santiago seek employment in the copper mines with keen competition and few protections and, like the middle-class students protesting under the previous administration, seek wider university access for advanced education and skills. With 3.5 per cent predicted GDP growth and negligible inflation, the solid investment-grade credit rating is intact, but Chile will be a test case for a future “melting pot” demographic and productivity engine.
Peru was the Andean stock market champion with a 10 per cent first-quarter gain as President Kucyzynski, implicated in the continent-wide Odebrecht scandal, resigned and was replaced by a technocrat successor and cabinet.
Amid the political jockeying before his departure, plans to deepen MILA exchange ties, originally presented to MSCI when it threatened frontier index demotion, were shelved. Now, asset managers expect new President Vizcarra and his team to restore momentum.
Ecuador intends to re-enter the MSCI frontier gauge and consider new local and global financing sources as President Moreno breaks with his socialist predecessor on fiscal discipline and investor compatibility. He plans to again tap global bond markets and renegotiate Chinese debt terms, and may even consider an IMF programme to smooth fundamental and structural shifts including on refugee absorption.
As the international aid and diplomatic communities mobilise to address the systemic Venezuelan exodus, financial markets looking for fresh impetus could act with the same urgency to adapt solutions.
On the MILA, listed companies could readily issue securities aimed at local and overseas buyers to expand refugee-related capital, hiring and supplier relationships benefiting host economies. Unlike governments and development lenders, this platform could generate longer-term commercial flows so far absent in the “burden-sharing” mix, and offer a more optimistic prosperity prescription to shape the regional debate.
Gary Kleiman is co-founder and senior partner at Kleiman International
Shooter reported at Texas high school - CNN Breaking News
Shooter reported at Texas high school
By Brian Ries and Meg Wagner, CNN
Updated 6 min ago10:25 a.m. ET, May 18, 2018
What we're covering here
Police responded to reports of shots fired at Santa Fe High School near Houston, Texas.
There are confirmed injuries.
The situation is now contained.
There is a person in custody, according to the assistant principal.
11 min ago
There are confirmed injuries. The situation is contained.
A Facebook post by the Santa Fe School District states that "the situation is active, but has been contained."
It adds that "there have been confirmed injuries."
Here's the post:
This morning an incident occurred at the high school involving an active shooter. The situation is active, but has been contained. There have been confirmed injuries. Details will be released as we receive updated information. Law enforcement will continue to secure the building and initiate all emergency management protocols to release and move students to another location. All other campuses are operating under their regular schedules....The district will continue to keep you updated as information is available. Safety and communication are our top priorities.
12 min ago
First, she heard a fire alarm. Then her principal told her to run.
MaKenna Evans, a 16-year-old sophomore at Santa Fe High School, told CNN she was in geometry class when the shooting started.
First, she heard the fire alarm, she said. When the students got outside, her principal told them all to run.
Evans said students hid behind a building across the street from the school. Her aunt called and told her there was a shooting. (Her aunt's husband is a police officer and he'd told her what had happened.)
Evans' brother picked her up, and she is now safe at home.
20 min ago
Assistant principal says a person has been arrested
Dr. Cris Richardson, assistant principal of Santa Fe High School tells reporters that there was an active shooting at the school, and "that person has been arrested."
"We have done an amazing job to get the students out of the building safely and to reunited them with parents as we are able to and that's about all I can tell you right now," Richardson said.
Richardson could not comment on injuries.
28 min ago
At least 3 helicopters seen waiting in school parking lot
At least three helicopters have landed in the school's parking lot, video from CNN affiliate KTRK just shows. Officials were just seen wheeling a stretcher toward one of them. It isn't clear if an injured person is on the stretcher.
Patients from Santa Fe High School are currently en route to University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, according to Raul Reyes Director of Media Relations for University of Texas Medical Branch.
The total number of patients is unknown at this time.
36 min ago
Student: We assembled outside for a fire drill, then we heard gunshots
A Santa Fe High School student described the moment they all heard gunshots.
"So, it was just a normal-like class day. We all were doing our work in first period. And then all of a sudden like it's a fire drill," 14-year-old junior Angelica Martinez said.
"So we followed the fire drill procedures. And then we went outside. Like we were all standing there, but not even five minutes later, we all start hearing gunshots."
That's when everybody starts running, she said, despite teachers telling them to "stay put."
"But we're all just running away."
Listen:
Brian Ries
✔
@moneyries
Santa Fe High School student tells CNN shooting happened after what seemed like a fire drill: "It was just a normal like class day.... then we all start hearing gunshots. And then everybody starts running."
11:49 PM - May 18, 2018
167
211 people are talking about this
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41 min ago
Football coach's son says his dad is safe and helping kids get out of the school
From CNN's Marlena Baldacci
Myles Kanipes, son of Sante Fe High School athletic director and football team head coach Mark Kanipes, confirms to CNN that his dad is on lockdown on campus, outside of the building, but is safe.
Kanipes told CNN that his dad is currently escorting kids across the street to the Shell station to get them safe.
"He is fine but he said it’s crazy (right now) but would call me once he finds out more. All I know is someone pulled the fire alarm and once everyone got out the classes someone started shooting. His secretary is the one who first heard the shooting, the shooter was in the art class."
Kanipes told CNN that other football coaches at the school were already inside the building when the shooting began, and he is waiting to hear from them.
42 min ago
Students seen emptying backpacks on school field
A group of students were just directed by police to a nearby field and told to empty their backpacks, video from CNN affiliate KTRK shows.
Brian Ries
✔
@moneyries
A group of students outside Santa Fe High School were just directed by police to a nearby field and told to empty their backpacks, video from CNN affiliate KTRK shows.
11:48 PM - May 18, 2018
8
19 people are talking about this
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27 min ago
Mother says 17-year-old daughter ran to nearby gas station to escape
Kim Sullivan is the parent of a 17-year-old senior at Santa Fe High School. She says her daughter called her and said there was a shooting at school.
Her daughter said they were told to run, so they ran to the Shell gas station across the street from the school.
Sullivan says there are a lot of kids and confused parents trying to find their kids.
1 hr ago
Witness says girl was shot
According to an eyewitness account given to a CNN affiliate, a gunman at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, entered a classroom and began shooting with what appeared to be a shotgun.
The witness says they saw a girl shot in the leg.
1 hr ago
The ATF says it is responding to the reported shooting
The agency just announced on Twitter:
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
ATF HQ
✔
@ATFHQ
BREAKING: ATF is responding to a school shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.
11:28 PM - May 18, 2018
288
498 people are talking about this
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1 hr 7 min ago
Where the school is located
Santa Fe High School is located about 40 miles south of Houston in Santa Fe, a city in Galveston County of about 12,000 people.
1 hr 12 min ago
Santa Fe School District warns of "active shooter" at high school
The Santa Fe Independent School District acknowledged an active shooter incident at Santa Fe High School Friday morning according to a statement on its website.
Here's what it says:
This morning an incident occurred at the high school involving an active shooter. The district has initiated a lockdown. We will send out additional information as soon as it is available.
By Brian Ries and Meg Wagner, CNN
Updated 6 min ago10:25 a.m. ET, May 18, 2018
What we're covering here
Police responded to reports of shots fired at Santa Fe High School near Houston, Texas.
There are confirmed injuries.
The situation is now contained.
There is a person in custody, according to the assistant principal.
11 min ago
There are confirmed injuries. The situation is contained.
A Facebook post by the Santa Fe School District states that "the situation is active, but has been contained."
It adds that "there have been confirmed injuries."
Here's the post:
This morning an incident occurred at the high school involving an active shooter. The situation is active, but has been contained. There have been confirmed injuries. Details will be released as we receive updated information. Law enforcement will continue to secure the building and initiate all emergency management protocols to release and move students to another location. All other campuses are operating under their regular schedules....The district will continue to keep you updated as information is available. Safety and communication are our top priorities.
12 min ago
First, she heard a fire alarm. Then her principal told her to run.
MaKenna Evans, a 16-year-old sophomore at Santa Fe High School, told CNN she was in geometry class when the shooting started.
First, she heard the fire alarm, she said. When the students got outside, her principal told them all to run.
Evans said students hid behind a building across the street from the school. Her aunt called and told her there was a shooting. (Her aunt's husband is a police officer and he'd told her what had happened.)
Evans' brother picked her up, and she is now safe at home.
20 min ago
Assistant principal says a person has been arrested
Dr. Cris Richardson, assistant principal of Santa Fe High School tells reporters that there was an active shooting at the school, and "that person has been arrested."
"We have done an amazing job to get the students out of the building safely and to reunited them with parents as we are able to and that's about all I can tell you right now," Richardson said.
Richardson could not comment on injuries.
28 min ago
At least 3 helicopters seen waiting in school parking lot
At least three helicopters have landed in the school's parking lot, video from CNN affiliate KTRK just shows. Officials were just seen wheeling a stretcher toward one of them. It isn't clear if an injured person is on the stretcher.
Patients from Santa Fe High School are currently en route to University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, according to Raul Reyes Director of Media Relations for University of Texas Medical Branch.
The total number of patients is unknown at this time.
36 min ago
Student: We assembled outside for a fire drill, then we heard gunshots
A Santa Fe High School student described the moment they all heard gunshots.
"So, it was just a normal-like class day. We all were doing our work in first period. And then all of a sudden like it's a fire drill," 14-year-old junior Angelica Martinez said.
"So we followed the fire drill procedures. And then we went outside. Like we were all standing there, but not even five minutes later, we all start hearing gunshots."
That's when everybody starts running, she said, despite teachers telling them to "stay put."
"But we're all just running away."
Listen:
Brian Ries
✔
@moneyries
Santa Fe High School student tells CNN shooting happened after what seemed like a fire drill: "It was just a normal like class day.... then we all start hearing gunshots. And then everybody starts running."
11:49 PM - May 18, 2018
167
211 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
41 min ago
Football coach's son says his dad is safe and helping kids get out of the school
From CNN's Marlena Baldacci
Myles Kanipes, son of Sante Fe High School athletic director and football team head coach Mark Kanipes, confirms to CNN that his dad is on lockdown on campus, outside of the building, but is safe.
Kanipes told CNN that his dad is currently escorting kids across the street to the Shell station to get them safe.
"He is fine but he said it’s crazy (right now) but would call me once he finds out more. All I know is someone pulled the fire alarm and once everyone got out the classes someone started shooting. His secretary is the one who first heard the shooting, the shooter was in the art class."
Kanipes told CNN that other football coaches at the school were already inside the building when the shooting began, and he is waiting to hear from them.
42 min ago
Students seen emptying backpacks on school field
A group of students were just directed by police to a nearby field and told to empty their backpacks, video from CNN affiliate KTRK shows.
Brian Ries
✔
@moneyries
A group of students outside Santa Fe High School were just directed by police to a nearby field and told to empty their backpacks, video from CNN affiliate KTRK shows.
11:48 PM - May 18, 2018
8
19 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
27 min ago
Mother says 17-year-old daughter ran to nearby gas station to escape
Kim Sullivan is the parent of a 17-year-old senior at Santa Fe High School. She says her daughter called her and said there was a shooting at school.
Her daughter said they were told to run, so they ran to the Shell gas station across the street from the school.
Sullivan says there are a lot of kids and confused parents trying to find their kids.
1 hr ago
Witness says girl was shot
According to an eyewitness account given to a CNN affiliate, a gunman at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, entered a classroom and began shooting with what appeared to be a shotgun.
The witness says they saw a girl shot in the leg.
1 hr ago
The ATF says it is responding to the reported shooting
The agency just announced on Twitter:
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
ATF HQ
✔
@ATFHQ
BREAKING: ATF is responding to a school shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.
11:28 PM - May 18, 2018
288
498 people are talking about this
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1 hr 7 min ago
Where the school is located
Santa Fe High School is located about 40 miles south of Houston in Santa Fe, a city in Galveston County of about 12,000 people.
1 hr 12 min ago
Santa Fe School District warns of "active shooter" at high school
The Santa Fe Independent School District acknowledged an active shooter incident at Santa Fe High School Friday morning according to a statement on its website.
Here's what it says:
This morning an incident occurred at the high school involving an active shooter. The district has initiated a lockdown. We will send out additional information as soon as it is available.
Trump seeks to placate Kim Kong Un over uncertain summit - NBC News
Trump seeks to placate Kim Kong Un over uncertain summit
The president said he was looking at a deal in which North Korea's leader would remain in power and "his country would be very rich."
by Reuters / May.18.2018 / 8:03 PM ET / Updated May.18.2018 / 8:05 PM ET
Is Trump's North Korea summit still happening?
President Donald Trump sought to placate North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un on Thursday after Pyongyang threatened to scrap an unprecedented summit between the two leaders.
He said Kim's security would be guaranteed in any deal and his country would not suffer the fate of Moammar Gadhafi's Libya — unless a deal could not be reached.
In rambling remarks in the White House's Oval Office in which he also sharply criticized China over trade, Trump said that as far as he knew the meeting with Kim was still on track, but that the North Korean leader was possibly being influenced by Beijing after two recent visits he made there.
Trump distanced himself from comments by John Bolton, his national security adviser, that North Korea angrily denounced when casting doubt on the summit, which is planned for June 12 in Singapore.
"North Korea is actually talking to us about times and everything else as though nothing happened," Trump told reporters.
Trump said he was not pursuing the "Libya model" in getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Bolton has repeatedly suggested the Libya model of unilateral disarmament for North Korea, most recently on Sunday.
North Korea threatens to cancel Trump talks over drills, nuclear demand
Gadhafi was deposed and killed after Libyans joined the 2011 Arab Spring protests, aided by NATO allies who had encouraged him to give up his banned weapons of mass destruction under a 2003 deal.
In a statement on Wednesday that threatened withdrawal from the summit, North Korea's first vice minister of foreign affairs, Kim Kye Gwan, derided as "absurd" Bolton's suggestion of a deal similar to that under which components of Libya's nuclear program were shipped to the United States.
"[The] world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate," he said in apparent reference to the demises of Gadhafi and Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussein.
The North Korean reaction marked a dramatic reversal in tone after months of easing tensions.
North Korea is pulling a 'classic bait-and-switch,' analyst says
In response, Trump said the deal he was looking at would give Kim Jong Un "protections that will be very strong."
"He would be there, he would be running his country, his country would be very rich," Trump said.
"The Libya model was a much different model. We decimated that country," he said, adding that it would only come into play "most likely" if a deal could not be reached with North Korea.
Trump stressed that North Korea would have to abandon its nuclear weapons.
"We cannot let that country have nukes. We just can't do it," he said of North Korea, which has been working on missiles capable of hitting the United States.
Ahead of Trump-Kim talks, South Koreans fear their prisoners will be forgotten
The United States has demanded the "complete, verifiable, and irreversible" dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Pyongyang has rejected unilateral disarmament and given no indication that it is willing to go beyond statements of broad support for the concept of universal denuclearization.
It has said in previous, failed talks that it could consider giving up its arsenal if the United States provided security guarantees by removing its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.
The president said he was looking at a deal in which North Korea's leader would remain in power and "his country would be very rich."
by Reuters / May.18.2018 / 8:03 PM ET / Updated May.18.2018 / 8:05 PM ET
Is Trump's North Korea summit still happening?
President Donald Trump sought to placate North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un on Thursday after Pyongyang threatened to scrap an unprecedented summit between the two leaders.
He said Kim's security would be guaranteed in any deal and his country would not suffer the fate of Moammar Gadhafi's Libya — unless a deal could not be reached.
In rambling remarks in the White House's Oval Office in which he also sharply criticized China over trade, Trump said that as far as he knew the meeting with Kim was still on track, but that the North Korean leader was possibly being influenced by Beijing after two recent visits he made there.
Trump distanced himself from comments by John Bolton, his national security adviser, that North Korea angrily denounced when casting doubt on the summit, which is planned for June 12 in Singapore.
"North Korea is actually talking to us about times and everything else as though nothing happened," Trump told reporters.
Trump said he was not pursuing the "Libya model" in getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Bolton has repeatedly suggested the Libya model of unilateral disarmament for North Korea, most recently on Sunday.
North Korea threatens to cancel Trump talks over drills, nuclear demand
Gadhafi was deposed and killed after Libyans joined the 2011 Arab Spring protests, aided by NATO allies who had encouraged him to give up his banned weapons of mass destruction under a 2003 deal.
In a statement on Wednesday that threatened withdrawal from the summit, North Korea's first vice minister of foreign affairs, Kim Kye Gwan, derided as "absurd" Bolton's suggestion of a deal similar to that under which components of Libya's nuclear program were shipped to the United States.
"[The] world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate," he said in apparent reference to the demises of Gadhafi and Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussein.
The North Korean reaction marked a dramatic reversal in tone after months of easing tensions.
North Korea is pulling a 'classic bait-and-switch,' analyst says
In response, Trump said the deal he was looking at would give Kim Jong Un "protections that will be very strong."
"He would be there, he would be running his country, his country would be very rich," Trump said.
"The Libya model was a much different model. We decimated that country," he said, adding that it would only come into play "most likely" if a deal could not be reached with North Korea.
Trump stressed that North Korea would have to abandon its nuclear weapons.
"We cannot let that country have nukes. We just can't do it," he said of North Korea, which has been working on missiles capable of hitting the United States.
Ahead of Trump-Kim talks, South Koreans fear their prisoners will be forgotten
The United States has demanded the "complete, verifiable, and irreversible" dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Pyongyang has rejected unilateral disarmament and given no indication that it is willing to go beyond statements of broad support for the concept of universal denuclearization.
It has said in previous, failed talks that it could consider giving up its arsenal if the United States provided security guarantees by removing its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.
Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed - Intelligencer ( New York Magazine )
May 18, 2018
9:49 am
Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed
By
Andrew Sullivan
Hope is fading. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
In one respect, it seems to me, the presidency of Donald Trump has been remarkably successful. In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama’s two-term legacy.
I don’t want to say or face this. I still want to believe my colleague, Jonathan Chait, whose thesis is that the changes Obama made in his difficult but tenacious eight years in office are too great to reverse. And there are a couple of shifts that do indeed seem to be as permanent as anything is in politics: marriage equality and legal cannabis. But neither, one recalls, was a signature goal of Obama. He began as an alleged opponent of marriage equality, even though, of course, he was bullshitting. He wouldn’t touch the marijuana issue in his entire term and even at one point dismissed it as trivial. As for the rest, in specific policy terms, Trump and the Republican Congress have succeeded in undoing Obama’s work to an extent I barely anticipated.
In economic policy, Obama’s slow winnowing of the deficit even in times of sluggish growth has been completely reversed. We too easily forget that the biggest accomplishment of Trump’s term in office so far — a massive increase in debt in a time of robust economic growth — is the inverse of Obama’s studied sense of fiscal responsibility. Nothing in modern fiscal history can match Trump’s recklessness — neither Reagan’s leap of faith nor George W. Bush’s profligacy — and it’s telling that the Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia have accommodated so swiftly to it. Nothing is so unfashionable right now as worrying about debt.
The fiscal vandalism is also a massive U-turn in terms of redistribution. If Obama managed to shift resources, ever so incrementally, toward the middle class and the poor (by allowing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, by bringing millions of the working poor into health insurance), Trump has done the opposite, by doubling down on unprecedented economic inequality, and borrowing unimaginable sums to disproportionately benefit the unimaginably wealthy. On trade, Trump ended Obama’s central initiative in Asia, the TPP.
On the environment, the issue I suspect that will loom far, far larger in retrospect, Obama used his executive regulatory powers in an attempt to nudge and coax the economy away from carbon. Almost all of that regulation has now gone out the window, thanks to Scott Pruitt’s diligent fanaticism. Yes, there is no undoing of the deeper market and technological trends that are making renewable energy more affordable; but if you take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seriously, even Obama’s energy legacy was insufficient to the scale of the task. The window for keeping the planet from ecological catastrophe was only barely ajar in 2016; the Paris Agreement was the most minimal of gestures toward keeping it open; now, it’s all but sealed shut. Trump’s championing of environmental destruction, his active reveling in it, his plan to open up the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling, his near-religious fealty to fossil fuels: Unless some technological miracle occurs, the odds of restraining, let alone reversing, climate catastrophe are vanishingly low.
In foreign policy, Trump has been even more effective. In less than two years, he has wrecked an Atlantic alliance that every president has defended and advanced since the Second World War, and that Obama nurtured. No European government can or should trust America from now on: They know they’re on their own. And then there is the volte-face in the Middle East. Obama’s core achievement in foreign policy was to shift America from embattled enmeshment in the region to a more offshore balancing role. By getting out of Iraq, and reaching out to Tehran, as well as maintaining our links to Jerusalem and the Saudi theocracy, the U.S. increased its options and leverage, while bringing Europe into the mix through the Iran deal. There was even, believe it or not, an attempt at first to restrain the Greater Israel lobby, to use what leverage the American president has to restrain the settlements project.
Now look where we are: a U.S. policy clearly committed de facto to the Israeli goal of annexation of the entire West Bank, and of intensified apartheid. The “peace plan” is essentially a way to force Palestinians into ever tighter Bantustans in an ever-more theocratic and authoritarian Jewish state. And the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has more deeply entangled the U.S. in the Muslim religious war, by throwing in our lot completely with the Sunnis. We are now committed to a permanent presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, if only to resist Iran’s proxies and the Taliban. Yes, our forces are smaller. But if an avowedly isolationist president has accepted an unending presence in the countries we invaded in 2001 and 2003, we are there forever. Torture? With Gina Haspel as CIA director and Mike Pompeo at the State Department, we have again placed it very much on the table. Obama believed he could draw a line under torture, leave the CIA alone and somehow quarantine the barbarism. Haspel’s ascent — enabled by key Democrats no less — reveals just how blurry that line has become.
Health care? Again, we’d like to believe that the Republican failure to repeal Obamacare means that Obama wins in the end. In fact, he loses. The GOP would have had to face electoral calamity if they were clearly seen as the party gleefully throwing tens of millions off their insurance. They somehow ducked this form of accountability (despite themselves), and were yet able to so cripple the ACA afterwards that it is now headed toward a death spiral they will escape the blame for. By ending the individual mandate, by allowing for more bare-bones insurance policies, and by narrowing the time window to apply for Obamacare policies, Trump has rendered the ACA unstable and unaffordable.
More profoundly, Trump has managed to shift our cultural politics. He has baited the left to occupying new territory, thereby cementing his triumph. What drives Trump is racial essentialism, a rage at the post-racial, integrative center that the mixed-race Obama represented. Nils Gilman has an insightful piece on this in The American Interest. He sees — rightly, I think — the 2008 Jeremiah Wright speech, “A More Perfect Union,” as the high-water mark of racial liberalism after the civil-rights era:
Obama began his speech by noting the “nation’s original sin of slavery,” but declared that the aim of his campaign was to continue “the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.” Although “we may have different stories, we hold common hopes,” Obama averred. “We may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place,” he continued, “but we all want to move in the same direction.” That there might exist people in this country who desire very different things from a racial perspective was out of the question; instead, Obama observed everywhere “how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.”
Nothing could be further from the left’s current vision, which is that the very concept of post-racial integration is an illusion designed to mask the reality of an eternal “white supremacy.” Today’s left-liberal consensus is that Obama, however revered he may still be as president, was and is absurdly naïve in this respect: that there is no recovery from the original sin, no possible redemption, and certainly no space for the concept of an individual citizenship that transcends race and can unite Americans. There is no freedom here. There is just oppression. The question is merely about who oppresses whom.
The idea that African-Americans have some responsibility for their own advancement, that absent fatherhood and a cultural association of studying with “acting white” are part of the problem — themes Obama touched upon throughout his presidency — is now almost a definition of racism itself. And the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.
There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat. When you read the Jeremiah Wright speech today, it seems as if it is coming from a different era altogether.
If Trump has destroyed Obama’s substantive legacy at home and abroad, the left has gutted Obama’s post-racial cultural vision. And those of us who saw him as an integrative bridge to the future, who still cling to the bare bones of a gradually more inclusive liberal order, find ourselves on a fast-eroding peninsula, as cultural and political climate change erases the very environment we once called hope.
Twin Tyrants
I have to say that before I read Stephen Greenblatt’s new book on Shakespeare’s megalomaniacs, Tyrant, I’d never thought of Trump and Richard III as analogues. The comparison doesn’t work in every respect, of course. Richard is a much more sympathetic figure, because the core of his tyrannical soul is shaped from his very birth by physical deformity and social rejection. Born prematurely, his back hunched in a coil, his arm withered, he sees himself, from the very beginning of his life, as alone, unloved, unlovable, spurned even by his mother. There is a self-awareness about this that Trump lacks:
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.
Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time.
He seeks power, domination, and control as a way to salve this fathomless void of self-hatred and natural injustice. Trump has no such introspection or excuse. Perhaps, Greenblatt ponders, Trump’s somewhat distant mother had the same emotional impact as Richard’s did on him — “He is my son, ay, and therein my shame” — but it is also clear that in his very childhood, Trump was a sociopath, bully, and coward. He pelted a neighborhood boy with stones at the age of 5; he vowed to break any cadet who transgressed him at military school. He always sought out the weak in order to stomp on them. And there is a pathos to Richard — along with a strategic cunning and wit — I cannot see in Trump. There is even a dark humor, a sophistication beyond the president’s grasp.
What they have in common, however, is striking. They both emerged in a political culture deeply and equally divided into two camps: York and Lancaster, red and blue. Shrewdly navigating this divide, they were both also profoundly underestimated. For Richard’s contemporaries, it was unthinkable that such a creature might actually want the crown, let alone believe that he deserved it. And those in the elite around him in Shakespeare’s play keep being shocked by what Richard is prepared to do, by his shamelessness in his violations of norms and decency. This combination of collective incredulity and individual ruthlessness effectively destroys England in five acts.
Richard cannot obviously obliterate any standards of justice and decency, have an esteemed contemporary and brother, Clarence, drowned to death, and get away with it, can he? He surely cannot intend to murder two innocent, imprisoned children, and successfully place the blame on others, can he? He cannot kill Lady Anne’s husband and son and then try to seduce her, can he? And succeed? And then kill her too? And yet he does all of these things, quite openly, as everyone around him enables him or denies what is in front of their eyes or is, in the end, destroyed by him. And we, the audience, are oddly transfixed by the spectacle.
Richard invades the dreams of others, just as Trump insinuates his sickness into our unconscious. There is no escaping him, no force as powerful as his will to lonely power. And as it slowly dawns on people that there is nothing Richard won’t do in his attempt to fill the void within, their psyches buckle. Richard never apologizes, always lies, and thereby almost paralyzes those who could, if they ever took a real stand, oppose him. He makes them accept his reality. When he accuses a rival of deploying magic to wither his arm — an arm everyone knows was bequeathed him at birth — and proposes to execute him for it, his advisers somehow assent to the logic. Some think they can benefit by siding with Richard; others simply keep their heads down — “I will not reason what is meant hereby / Because I will be guiltless from the meaning”; others still are scared they’ll be next on the chopping block. And so the murders mount, and Richard’s power grows.
Once this dynamic unfolds, Shakespeare seems to say, there is no undoing it from within. The tyrant is not in full control of himself, and has no real idea of what to do with power when he gets it — except purge his ranks and dispatch his rivals in an endless cycle of insecurity. No one lasts for long in Richard’s orbit, or Trump’s. He rages forward blindly, and his only constancy is his paranoia, loneliness, and willingness to cause collateral damage to anything around him. The only way to defeat him, Shakespeare implies, is from outside the system itself: via an invading army, led by an exile. Even then, the damage is deep and lasting. Richard’s reign is just two years long; but the scar is indelible.
And this is indeed the kernel of what I fear: that if Mueller at any point presents a real conflict between the rule of law and Trump’s ego, the ego will win. If Trump has to fire his attorney general, and anyone else, he will. If he has to initiate a catastrophic conflict to save face, he will. If he has to delegitimize the Department of Justice, empty the State Department, and turn law enforcement against itself, he will. If he has to unleash unspeakable racial demons to save himself from political oblivion, he will not hesitate to do so. If he has to separate children from parents, describe humans as animals, and turn Christians into pagans, he will not blink. This is what a tyrant does.
What we have, of course, unlike early modern England, is a constitutional system designed to prevent such a person from coming to power, and, if that fails, to restrain him when he does. We have a tyranny currently wrapped in a democracy. But what Shakespeare shows us is that the will of the tyrant can be more powerful than any collective resistance, can leverage the masses to assent and even empower his will, can violate every single norm, and will never rest, and never, ever concede. There is an irresistible logic to this — driven by a particular form of psyche.
Trump, it seems to me, has established this tyrannical dynamic with remarkable speed. And what we are about to find out is whether the Founders who saw such a character as an eternal threat to their republic have constructed institutions capable of checking him without the impact of an external intervention, of a disaster so complete it finally breaks the tyrant’s spell. Watching what has transpired these past two years, seeing how truly weak the system is, and how unwilling so many have been to recognize our new disorder, I see no reason to be optimistic. The play is a tragedy, after all.
‘The Weight of This Sad Time’
If you think of the movies as a form of escapism, I urge you not to see Paul Schrader’s new movie, First Reformed. I saw it at a screening with the director last Wednesday night, and found myself shocked by its unflinching refusal to look away from our current reality. I’m still absorbing it.
It’s about a minister in a remote but historic church in upstate New York, with merely a handful of congregants, who is desperately trying to sustain some kind of faith. God cannot reach him, as he staggers through a desert of isolation and doubt. The words of Scripture are ashen in his mouth, his marriage is over after the death of a child, and his journal marks a slow and painstaking drift into despair. In all this, he becomes involved in the life of a young woman, pregnant, whose husband, an environmental radical, wants an abortion. The husband cannot in good conscience bring a new child into being when the Earth is headed toward climatic disaster and political strife. And it is the faithless minister who is asked to persuade him to have hope. [Spoilers ahead.]
He fails. And the father-to-be decides to kill himself instead, and the priest is lured to the body, lying in a snowy woodland, the head blasted to a bloody pulp by a rifle. This suicide awakens the minister to a deeper realization of the sincerity of the man’s environmental conscience, and radicalizes him to do what he can to save an unsavable Earth, even as desperation envelops his soul. The Christian in me kept wishing for some kind of peace for the man, some element of divine grace to descend and point the way forward. But nothing comes. And so you watch as the priest begins to wander sideways into madness and self-destruction, diagnosed with cancer, and longing in some way for his own extinction, quietly drinking himself into oblivion, kept alive solely by the resilient figure of the pregnant young woman, her refusal to give up on the life within her, and the remote possibility of love as a form of salvation in the here and now.
As I watched this mercilessly bleak story, two friends either side of me decided to get up and leave. In fact, there was a steady pace of exits in the crowd — in front of the director himself. “I can’t take this anymore,” my friend whispered as she ducked out. And it was indeed hard to endure. Schrader gives the audience no signals to interpret what we’re seeing. There is no music. There is no comic relief. There is instead a picture of an etiolated Christianity, a ghost of faith, kept alive only through the lies of the Prosperity Gospel or the cheap techniques of entertainment disguised as spirituality. And behind it all, the menace of environmental death, the warming of the planet, the wiping out of so many species, the eradication of a future which looks anything like the past.
“Are you in despair?” I asked Schrader in the conversation after. Not quite, he explained. He posited that there is a distinction between optimism and hope. He cited Camus in evoking the choice to believe, the act of will to see a future worth living, even when all the evidence around us, and the withdrawal of God from our lives, renders that choice seemingly quixotic. And I understood what he was saying. I have read Camus. I have also clung to the words of Thomas Merton, as the priest does. It is just that I could not summon the will, as I listened to Schrader, to make that choice myself.
“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
9:49 am
Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed
By
Andrew Sullivan
Hope is fading. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
In one respect, it seems to me, the presidency of Donald Trump has been remarkably successful. In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama’s two-term legacy.
I don’t want to say or face this. I still want to believe my colleague, Jonathan Chait, whose thesis is that the changes Obama made in his difficult but tenacious eight years in office are too great to reverse. And there are a couple of shifts that do indeed seem to be as permanent as anything is in politics: marriage equality and legal cannabis. But neither, one recalls, was a signature goal of Obama. He began as an alleged opponent of marriage equality, even though, of course, he was bullshitting. He wouldn’t touch the marijuana issue in his entire term and even at one point dismissed it as trivial. As for the rest, in specific policy terms, Trump and the Republican Congress have succeeded in undoing Obama’s work to an extent I barely anticipated.
In economic policy, Obama’s slow winnowing of the deficit even in times of sluggish growth has been completely reversed. We too easily forget that the biggest accomplishment of Trump’s term in office so far — a massive increase in debt in a time of robust economic growth — is the inverse of Obama’s studied sense of fiscal responsibility. Nothing in modern fiscal history can match Trump’s recklessness — neither Reagan’s leap of faith nor George W. Bush’s profligacy — and it’s telling that the Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia have accommodated so swiftly to it. Nothing is so unfashionable right now as worrying about debt.
The fiscal vandalism is also a massive U-turn in terms of redistribution. If Obama managed to shift resources, ever so incrementally, toward the middle class and the poor (by allowing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, by bringing millions of the working poor into health insurance), Trump has done the opposite, by doubling down on unprecedented economic inequality, and borrowing unimaginable sums to disproportionately benefit the unimaginably wealthy. On trade, Trump ended Obama’s central initiative in Asia, the TPP.
On the environment, the issue I suspect that will loom far, far larger in retrospect, Obama used his executive regulatory powers in an attempt to nudge and coax the economy away from carbon. Almost all of that regulation has now gone out the window, thanks to Scott Pruitt’s diligent fanaticism. Yes, there is no undoing of the deeper market and technological trends that are making renewable energy more affordable; but if you take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seriously, even Obama’s energy legacy was insufficient to the scale of the task. The window for keeping the planet from ecological catastrophe was only barely ajar in 2016; the Paris Agreement was the most minimal of gestures toward keeping it open; now, it’s all but sealed shut. Trump’s championing of environmental destruction, his active reveling in it, his plan to open up the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling, his near-religious fealty to fossil fuels: Unless some technological miracle occurs, the odds of restraining, let alone reversing, climate catastrophe are vanishingly low.
In foreign policy, Trump has been even more effective. In less than two years, he has wrecked an Atlantic alliance that every president has defended and advanced since the Second World War, and that Obama nurtured. No European government can or should trust America from now on: They know they’re on their own. And then there is the volte-face in the Middle East. Obama’s core achievement in foreign policy was to shift America from embattled enmeshment in the region to a more offshore balancing role. By getting out of Iraq, and reaching out to Tehran, as well as maintaining our links to Jerusalem and the Saudi theocracy, the U.S. increased its options and leverage, while bringing Europe into the mix through the Iran deal. There was even, believe it or not, an attempt at first to restrain the Greater Israel lobby, to use what leverage the American president has to restrain the settlements project.
Now look where we are: a U.S. policy clearly committed de facto to the Israeli goal of annexation of the entire West Bank, and of intensified apartheid. The “peace plan” is essentially a way to force Palestinians into ever tighter Bantustans in an ever-more theocratic and authoritarian Jewish state. And the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has more deeply entangled the U.S. in the Muslim religious war, by throwing in our lot completely with the Sunnis. We are now committed to a permanent presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, if only to resist Iran’s proxies and the Taliban. Yes, our forces are smaller. But if an avowedly isolationist president has accepted an unending presence in the countries we invaded in 2001 and 2003, we are there forever. Torture? With Gina Haspel as CIA director and Mike Pompeo at the State Department, we have again placed it very much on the table. Obama believed he could draw a line under torture, leave the CIA alone and somehow quarantine the barbarism. Haspel’s ascent — enabled by key Democrats no less — reveals just how blurry that line has become.
Health care? Again, we’d like to believe that the Republican failure to repeal Obamacare means that Obama wins in the end. In fact, he loses. The GOP would have had to face electoral calamity if they were clearly seen as the party gleefully throwing tens of millions off their insurance. They somehow ducked this form of accountability (despite themselves), and were yet able to so cripple the ACA afterwards that it is now headed toward a death spiral they will escape the blame for. By ending the individual mandate, by allowing for more bare-bones insurance policies, and by narrowing the time window to apply for Obamacare policies, Trump has rendered the ACA unstable and unaffordable.
More profoundly, Trump has managed to shift our cultural politics. He has baited the left to occupying new territory, thereby cementing his triumph. What drives Trump is racial essentialism, a rage at the post-racial, integrative center that the mixed-race Obama represented. Nils Gilman has an insightful piece on this in The American Interest. He sees — rightly, I think — the 2008 Jeremiah Wright speech, “A More Perfect Union,” as the high-water mark of racial liberalism after the civil-rights era:
Obama began his speech by noting the “nation’s original sin of slavery,” but declared that the aim of his campaign was to continue “the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.” Although “we may have different stories, we hold common hopes,” Obama averred. “We may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place,” he continued, “but we all want to move in the same direction.” That there might exist people in this country who desire very different things from a racial perspective was out of the question; instead, Obama observed everywhere “how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.”
Nothing could be further from the left’s current vision, which is that the very concept of post-racial integration is an illusion designed to mask the reality of an eternal “white supremacy.” Today’s left-liberal consensus is that Obama, however revered he may still be as president, was and is absurdly naïve in this respect: that there is no recovery from the original sin, no possible redemption, and certainly no space for the concept of an individual citizenship that transcends race and can unite Americans. There is no freedom here. There is just oppression. The question is merely about who oppresses whom.
The idea that African-Americans have some responsibility for their own advancement, that absent fatherhood and a cultural association of studying with “acting white” are part of the problem — themes Obama touched upon throughout his presidency — is now almost a definition of racism itself. And the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.
There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat. When you read the Jeremiah Wright speech today, it seems as if it is coming from a different era altogether.
If Trump has destroyed Obama’s substantive legacy at home and abroad, the left has gutted Obama’s post-racial cultural vision. And those of us who saw him as an integrative bridge to the future, who still cling to the bare bones of a gradually more inclusive liberal order, find ourselves on a fast-eroding peninsula, as cultural and political climate change erases the very environment we once called hope.
Twin Tyrants
I have to say that before I read Stephen Greenblatt’s new book on Shakespeare’s megalomaniacs, Tyrant, I’d never thought of Trump and Richard III as analogues. The comparison doesn’t work in every respect, of course. Richard is a much more sympathetic figure, because the core of his tyrannical soul is shaped from his very birth by physical deformity and social rejection. Born prematurely, his back hunched in a coil, his arm withered, he sees himself, from the very beginning of his life, as alone, unloved, unlovable, spurned even by his mother. There is a self-awareness about this that Trump lacks:
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.
Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time.
He seeks power, domination, and control as a way to salve this fathomless void of self-hatred and natural injustice. Trump has no such introspection or excuse. Perhaps, Greenblatt ponders, Trump’s somewhat distant mother had the same emotional impact as Richard’s did on him — “He is my son, ay, and therein my shame” — but it is also clear that in his very childhood, Trump was a sociopath, bully, and coward. He pelted a neighborhood boy with stones at the age of 5; he vowed to break any cadet who transgressed him at military school. He always sought out the weak in order to stomp on them. And there is a pathos to Richard — along with a strategic cunning and wit — I cannot see in Trump. There is even a dark humor, a sophistication beyond the president’s grasp.
What they have in common, however, is striking. They both emerged in a political culture deeply and equally divided into two camps: York and Lancaster, red and blue. Shrewdly navigating this divide, they were both also profoundly underestimated. For Richard’s contemporaries, it was unthinkable that such a creature might actually want the crown, let alone believe that he deserved it. And those in the elite around him in Shakespeare’s play keep being shocked by what Richard is prepared to do, by his shamelessness in his violations of norms and decency. This combination of collective incredulity and individual ruthlessness effectively destroys England in five acts.
Richard cannot obviously obliterate any standards of justice and decency, have an esteemed contemporary and brother, Clarence, drowned to death, and get away with it, can he? He surely cannot intend to murder two innocent, imprisoned children, and successfully place the blame on others, can he? He cannot kill Lady Anne’s husband and son and then try to seduce her, can he? And succeed? And then kill her too? And yet he does all of these things, quite openly, as everyone around him enables him or denies what is in front of their eyes or is, in the end, destroyed by him. And we, the audience, are oddly transfixed by the spectacle.
Richard invades the dreams of others, just as Trump insinuates his sickness into our unconscious. There is no escaping him, no force as powerful as his will to lonely power. And as it slowly dawns on people that there is nothing Richard won’t do in his attempt to fill the void within, their psyches buckle. Richard never apologizes, always lies, and thereby almost paralyzes those who could, if they ever took a real stand, oppose him. He makes them accept his reality. When he accuses a rival of deploying magic to wither his arm — an arm everyone knows was bequeathed him at birth — and proposes to execute him for it, his advisers somehow assent to the logic. Some think they can benefit by siding with Richard; others simply keep their heads down — “I will not reason what is meant hereby / Because I will be guiltless from the meaning”; others still are scared they’ll be next on the chopping block. And so the murders mount, and Richard’s power grows.
Once this dynamic unfolds, Shakespeare seems to say, there is no undoing it from within. The tyrant is not in full control of himself, and has no real idea of what to do with power when he gets it — except purge his ranks and dispatch his rivals in an endless cycle of insecurity. No one lasts for long in Richard’s orbit, or Trump’s. He rages forward blindly, and his only constancy is his paranoia, loneliness, and willingness to cause collateral damage to anything around him. The only way to defeat him, Shakespeare implies, is from outside the system itself: via an invading army, led by an exile. Even then, the damage is deep and lasting. Richard’s reign is just two years long; but the scar is indelible.
And this is indeed the kernel of what I fear: that if Mueller at any point presents a real conflict between the rule of law and Trump’s ego, the ego will win. If Trump has to fire his attorney general, and anyone else, he will. If he has to initiate a catastrophic conflict to save face, he will. If he has to delegitimize the Department of Justice, empty the State Department, and turn law enforcement against itself, he will. If he has to unleash unspeakable racial demons to save himself from political oblivion, he will not hesitate to do so. If he has to separate children from parents, describe humans as animals, and turn Christians into pagans, he will not blink. This is what a tyrant does.
What we have, of course, unlike early modern England, is a constitutional system designed to prevent such a person from coming to power, and, if that fails, to restrain him when he does. We have a tyranny currently wrapped in a democracy. But what Shakespeare shows us is that the will of the tyrant can be more powerful than any collective resistance, can leverage the masses to assent and even empower his will, can violate every single norm, and will never rest, and never, ever concede. There is an irresistible logic to this — driven by a particular form of psyche.
Trump, it seems to me, has established this tyrannical dynamic with remarkable speed. And what we are about to find out is whether the Founders who saw such a character as an eternal threat to their republic have constructed institutions capable of checking him without the impact of an external intervention, of a disaster so complete it finally breaks the tyrant’s spell. Watching what has transpired these past two years, seeing how truly weak the system is, and how unwilling so many have been to recognize our new disorder, I see no reason to be optimistic. The play is a tragedy, after all.
‘The Weight of This Sad Time’
If you think of the movies as a form of escapism, I urge you not to see Paul Schrader’s new movie, First Reformed. I saw it at a screening with the director last Wednesday night, and found myself shocked by its unflinching refusal to look away from our current reality. I’m still absorbing it.
It’s about a minister in a remote but historic church in upstate New York, with merely a handful of congregants, who is desperately trying to sustain some kind of faith. God cannot reach him, as he staggers through a desert of isolation and doubt. The words of Scripture are ashen in his mouth, his marriage is over after the death of a child, and his journal marks a slow and painstaking drift into despair. In all this, he becomes involved in the life of a young woman, pregnant, whose husband, an environmental radical, wants an abortion. The husband cannot in good conscience bring a new child into being when the Earth is headed toward climatic disaster and political strife. And it is the faithless minister who is asked to persuade him to have hope. [Spoilers ahead.]
He fails. And the father-to-be decides to kill himself instead, and the priest is lured to the body, lying in a snowy woodland, the head blasted to a bloody pulp by a rifle. This suicide awakens the minister to a deeper realization of the sincerity of the man’s environmental conscience, and radicalizes him to do what he can to save an unsavable Earth, even as desperation envelops his soul. The Christian in me kept wishing for some kind of peace for the man, some element of divine grace to descend and point the way forward. But nothing comes. And so you watch as the priest begins to wander sideways into madness and self-destruction, diagnosed with cancer, and longing in some way for his own extinction, quietly drinking himself into oblivion, kept alive solely by the resilient figure of the pregnant young woman, her refusal to give up on the life within her, and the remote possibility of love as a form of salvation in the here and now.
As I watched this mercilessly bleak story, two friends either side of me decided to get up and leave. In fact, there was a steady pace of exits in the crowd — in front of the director himself. “I can’t take this anymore,” my friend whispered as she ducked out. And it was indeed hard to endure. Schrader gives the audience no signals to interpret what we’re seeing. There is no music. There is no comic relief. There is instead a picture of an etiolated Christianity, a ghost of faith, kept alive only through the lies of the Prosperity Gospel or the cheap techniques of entertainment disguised as spirituality. And behind it all, the menace of environmental death, the warming of the planet, the wiping out of so many species, the eradication of a future which looks anything like the past.
“Are you in despair?” I asked Schrader in the conversation after. Not quite, he explained. He posited that there is a distinction between optimism and hope. He cited Camus in evoking the choice to believe, the act of will to see a future worth living, even when all the evidence around us, and the withdrawal of God from our lives, renders that choice seemingly quixotic. And I understood what he was saying. I have read Camus. I have also clung to the words of Thomas Merton, as the priest does. It is just that I could not summon the will, as I listened to Schrader, to make that choice myself.
“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
People are sending mariachi bands and taco trucks to troll the lawyer who shouted at Spanish workers - Independent
May 15, 2018
People are sending mariachi bands and taco trucks to troll the lawyer who shouted at Spanish workers
Posted by Lowenna Waters in news
UPVOTE
Remember the lawyer who threatened to call ICE because some women were talking in Spanish in a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan?
Well, an activist is raising money in a GoFundMe campaign to send a mariachi band and taco truck to his New York office.
NowThis
✔
@nowthisnews
People are raising money to hire a mariachi band to follow around the NYC lawyer behind the racist rant video
9:26 AM - May 18, 2018
18.8K
8,975 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
On Wednesday, Schlossberg went viral after aggressively accosting customers and staff at Fresh Kitchen on Madison Avenue near East 39th Street because they were speaking Spanish.
Edward Suazo, the husband of one of the women targetted by the abuse, posted a video of the altercation to Facebook where it has now had 5.6 million views.
In the almost minute long clip, Schlossberg is filmed shouting:
Your staff and clients are speaking Spanish when they should be speaking English. Every person in here is speaking it... It's America!
He then threatens to call ICE to 'get them ejected from my country'.
Soon after the video went viral, an activist set up the GoFundMe page dubbed 'Mariachis for Aaron'.
On the original call for donations, the post read:
Raising $500 to send a Mariachi band to cheer up the staff and attorneys at The Law Office of Aaron M. Schlossberg Esq. P.L.L.C. after a difficult day. We are requesting the band to sing the famous, endearing, and warm Spanish children song, La Cucaracha, the cockroach.
They continued:
We are countering hate and racism with the sound of music.
Since then, the campaign has smashed its original target of $500, and has closed donations on $1,094 because they have enough money.
In an update on the page, the activists have said that they've been brainstorming what to do with the extra funds, and they think it would be nice to add party accessories, like piñatas.
In a sign off, the activists are also keen to create a follow up event:
Let us know when you want to raise funds to send kebab to Trump officials in prison.
In another turn of fate, Schlossberg has been kicked out of his office space, and a Congressman has filed a formal complaint to the state court's disciplinary committee.
People are sending mariachi bands and taco trucks to troll the lawyer who shouted at Spanish workers
Posted by Lowenna Waters in news
UPVOTE
Remember the lawyer who threatened to call ICE because some women were talking in Spanish in a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan?
Well, an activist is raising money in a GoFundMe campaign to send a mariachi band and taco truck to his New York office.
NowThis
✔
@nowthisnews
People are raising money to hire a mariachi band to follow around the NYC lawyer behind the racist rant video
9:26 AM - May 18, 2018
18.8K
8,975 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
On Wednesday, Schlossberg went viral after aggressively accosting customers and staff at Fresh Kitchen on Madison Avenue near East 39th Street because they were speaking Spanish.
Edward Suazo, the husband of one of the women targetted by the abuse, posted a video of the altercation to Facebook where it has now had 5.6 million views.
In the almost minute long clip, Schlossberg is filmed shouting:
Your staff and clients are speaking Spanish when they should be speaking English. Every person in here is speaking it... It's America!
He then threatens to call ICE to 'get them ejected from my country'.
Soon after the video went viral, an activist set up the GoFundMe page dubbed 'Mariachis for Aaron'.
On the original call for donations, the post read:
Raising $500 to send a Mariachi band to cheer up the staff and attorneys at The Law Office of Aaron M. Schlossberg Esq. P.L.L.C. after a difficult day. We are requesting the band to sing the famous, endearing, and warm Spanish children song, La Cucaracha, the cockroach.
They continued:
We are countering hate and racism with the sound of music.
Since then, the campaign has smashed its original target of $500, and has closed donations on $1,094 because they have enough money.
In an update on the page, the activists have said that they've been brainstorming what to do with the extra funds, and they think it would be nice to add party accessories, like piñatas.
In a sign off, the activists are also keen to create a follow up event:
Let us know when you want to raise funds to send kebab to Trump officials in prison.
In another turn of fate, Schlossberg has been kicked out of his office space, and a Congressman has filed a formal complaint to the state court's disciplinary committee.
Royal wedding 2018: Prince Charles to walk Meghan down the aisle - BBC News
May 18, 2018
Royal wedding 2018: Prince Charles to walk Meghan down the aisle
Prince Charles will walk Meghan Markle down the aisle on Saturday when she marries Prince Harry, Kensington Palace has said.
Ms Markle's father, Thomas, is unable to attend the wedding, after undergoing heart surgery.
The Prince of Wales was "pleased to be able to welcome Ms Markle to the Royal Family in this way", the palace added.
Prince Harry's grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, will also attend the wedding, Buckingham Palace confirmed.
Prince Philip, 96, has been recovering from a hip operation.
Ms Markle's mother, Doria Ragland, will take her daughter to the wedding at St George's Chapel in Windsor.
Ms Ragland will meet the Queen for the first time at Windsor Castle later, accompanied by Meghan, 36, and Prince Harry, 33.
She has already been introduced to Prince Charles and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The ceremony begins at 12:00 BST and will be broadcast to the world.
Royal Wedding final preparations: Live Updates
Windsor's glimpse of Meghan and Harry
Reality check: Who's paying for the wedding?
How to watch the events
Image copyrightREUTERS
Image caption
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrive at Windsor Castle a day before their wedding to meet the Queen
Mr Markle had been due to arrive in the UK earlier this week, but became caught up in controversy over the apparent staging of photographs with the paparazzi.
Speaking to the BBC from Windsor, American celebrity news site TMZ's Sean Mandell said he had spoken to Mr Markle on Wednesday and that he was "doing well" and "recovering from surgery".
Mr Mandell - who broke the story - said Mr Markle realised on Tuesday that he would not be travelling to Windsor.
"Chest pains were really being exacerbated by the emotional strain he was under," he said.
"When doctors told him he needed to have surgery, he decided he needed to heed that advice, despite the fact he wanted to be here in Windsor for Meghan."
"He definitely feels he's been mis-characterised," Mr Mandell added. "That's why he felt the need to speak out when I reached him."
Ms Markle released a statement on Thursday saying she hoped her father could be given space to focus on his health.
Media captionTMZ's Sean Mandell says Thomas Markle thinks "news reports are not accurate"
Ms Markle's mother met William and Catherine and their eldest children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, at Windsor Castle on Thursday afternoon.
She took tea with Prince Charles and Camilla at Clarence House in London on Wednesday.
Image copyrightPA
Image caption
Ms Markle's mother, Doria Ragland (left) had been rumoured to be walking her daughter down the aisle
Ms Markle will have 10 bridesmaids and pageboys, who are all under the age of eight.
She decided against having a maid of honour, saying she wanted to avoid choosing between her closest friends.
In pictures: Crowds line streets for rehearsal
Which titles might Harry and Meghan have?
Eight different ways to spend royal wedding day
Royal wedding: All you need to know
The view from Windsor
By Hanna Yusuf, BBC News
Asdrubal Medina and Reina Reyes have travelled from the Netherlands to witness Prince Harry and Meghan's wedding.
Waiting outside Windsor Castle on Friday afternoon, they hope to catch a glimpse of Doria Ragland, as she arrives for tea with the Queen.
Their hats carry the Dutch national colours, and their pseudonyms for the next few days are "Willem" and "Maxima" - the names of the King and Queen of the Netherlands.
"It's all so very exciting, we love a royal wedding," said Reina Reyes, who made sure to point out that the English translation of her name is "Queen Kings".
The pair visited London in 2011 to see William and Kate's wedding.
Mr Medina is however disappointed that Prince Charles will be walking Meghan down the aisle, as he was hoping her mother would take on the role.
Ms Markle will spend her last night before the wedding with her mother at the luxury Cliveden House Hotel, in Buckinghamshire, about nine miles north of Windsor Castle.
Prince Harry will be staying 15 miles away at the Dorchester Collection's Coworth Park in Ascot, with his brother, the Duke of Cambridge.
Media captionHarry and Meghan's royal engagements
In Windsor, royal fans have been arriving throughout the week, with the rehearsal of the carriage procession on Thursday drawing hundreds of children, parents and pets keen to embrace the party mood.
About 250 members of the armed forces are expected to take part on Saturday and up to 100,000 people are expected to line the procession route.
Image copyrightPA
Image caption
The finishing touches, including a white, elderflower Swiss meringue buttercream, are being applied to the wedding cake.
Thames Valley Police has said it expects the town to be full to capacity by 09:00.
Royal wedding 2018: Prince Charles to walk Meghan down the aisle
Prince Charles will walk Meghan Markle down the aisle on Saturday when she marries Prince Harry, Kensington Palace has said.
Ms Markle's father, Thomas, is unable to attend the wedding, after undergoing heart surgery.
The Prince of Wales was "pleased to be able to welcome Ms Markle to the Royal Family in this way", the palace added.
Prince Harry's grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, will also attend the wedding, Buckingham Palace confirmed.
Prince Philip, 96, has been recovering from a hip operation.
Ms Markle's mother, Doria Ragland, will take her daughter to the wedding at St George's Chapel in Windsor.
Ms Ragland will meet the Queen for the first time at Windsor Castle later, accompanied by Meghan, 36, and Prince Harry, 33.
She has already been introduced to Prince Charles and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The ceremony begins at 12:00 BST and will be broadcast to the world.
Royal Wedding final preparations: Live Updates
Windsor's glimpse of Meghan and Harry
Reality check: Who's paying for the wedding?
How to watch the events
Image copyrightREUTERS
Image caption
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrive at Windsor Castle a day before their wedding to meet the Queen
Mr Markle had been due to arrive in the UK earlier this week, but became caught up in controversy over the apparent staging of photographs with the paparazzi.
Speaking to the BBC from Windsor, American celebrity news site TMZ's Sean Mandell said he had spoken to Mr Markle on Wednesday and that he was "doing well" and "recovering from surgery".
Mr Mandell - who broke the story - said Mr Markle realised on Tuesday that he would not be travelling to Windsor.
"Chest pains were really being exacerbated by the emotional strain he was under," he said.
"When doctors told him he needed to have surgery, he decided he needed to heed that advice, despite the fact he wanted to be here in Windsor for Meghan."
"He definitely feels he's been mis-characterised," Mr Mandell added. "That's why he felt the need to speak out when I reached him."
Ms Markle released a statement on Thursday saying she hoped her father could be given space to focus on his health.
Media captionTMZ's Sean Mandell says Thomas Markle thinks "news reports are not accurate"
Ms Markle's mother met William and Catherine and their eldest children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, at Windsor Castle on Thursday afternoon.
She took tea with Prince Charles and Camilla at Clarence House in London on Wednesday.
Image copyrightPA
Image caption
Ms Markle's mother, Doria Ragland (left) had been rumoured to be walking her daughter down the aisle
Ms Markle will have 10 bridesmaids and pageboys, who are all under the age of eight.
She decided against having a maid of honour, saying she wanted to avoid choosing between her closest friends.
In pictures: Crowds line streets for rehearsal
Which titles might Harry and Meghan have?
Eight different ways to spend royal wedding day
Royal wedding: All you need to know
The view from Windsor
By Hanna Yusuf, BBC News
Asdrubal Medina and Reina Reyes have travelled from the Netherlands to witness Prince Harry and Meghan's wedding.
Waiting outside Windsor Castle on Friday afternoon, they hope to catch a glimpse of Doria Ragland, as she arrives for tea with the Queen.
Their hats carry the Dutch national colours, and their pseudonyms for the next few days are "Willem" and "Maxima" - the names of the King and Queen of the Netherlands.
"It's all so very exciting, we love a royal wedding," said Reina Reyes, who made sure to point out that the English translation of her name is "Queen Kings".
The pair visited London in 2011 to see William and Kate's wedding.
Mr Medina is however disappointed that Prince Charles will be walking Meghan down the aisle, as he was hoping her mother would take on the role.
Ms Markle will spend her last night before the wedding with her mother at the luxury Cliveden House Hotel, in Buckinghamshire, about nine miles north of Windsor Castle.
Prince Harry will be staying 15 miles away at the Dorchester Collection's Coworth Park in Ascot, with his brother, the Duke of Cambridge.
Media captionHarry and Meghan's royal engagements
In Windsor, royal fans have been arriving throughout the week, with the rehearsal of the carriage procession on Thursday drawing hundreds of children, parents and pets keen to embrace the party mood.
About 250 members of the armed forces are expected to take part on Saturday and up to 100,000 people are expected to line the procession route.
Image copyrightPA
Image caption
The finishing touches, including a white, elderflower Swiss meringue buttercream, are being applied to the wedding cake.
Thames Valley Police has said it expects the town to be full to capacity by 09:00.
Israel's Gaza response 'wholly disproportionate' - UN rights chief - BBC News
May 18, 2018
Israel's Gaza response 'wholly disproportionate' - UN rights chief
Monday was Gaza's deadliest day of violence in years
The UN human rights chief says Israel used "wholly disproportionate" force against Palestinian border protests which have left over 100 people dead.
Zeid Raad Al Hussein told a meeting in Geneva that Gazans were effectively "caged in a toxic slum" and Gaza's occupation by Israel had to end.
Israel's ambassador said Gaza's militant Islamist rulers had deliberately put people in harm's way.
The UN meeting is considering calling for an independent investigation.
Some 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces on Monday in the seventh consecutive week of border protests, largely orchestrated by Hamas, which politically controls the Gaza Strip.
It was the deadliest day in Gaza since a 2014 war between Israel and militants there.
Did Israel use excessive force at Gaza protests?
'Hear our message': Gaza border violence in pictures
Life in the Gaza Strip
The protests had been dubbed the Great March of Return, in support of the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to land they or their ancestors fled from or were forced to leave in the war which followed Israel's founding in 1948.
The Israeli government, which has long ruled out a mass return of Palestinians, said terrorists wanted to use the protests as cover to cross into its territory and carry out attacks.
'Wilful killings'
Mr Zeid told the emergency session on Gaza that the "stark contrast in casualties on both sides is... suggestive of a wholly disproportionate response" by Israel.
An Israeli soldier was "reportedly wounded, slightly, by a stone" on Monday, he said, while 43 Palestinians were killed at the site of the protests. Seventeen more Palestinians were killed away from what he called the "hot spots".
Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
Israel and the Palestinians have blamed each other for the deaths
He said there had been "little evidence of any [Israeli] attempt to minimise casualties". Israel's actions might, he said, "constitute 'wilful killings' - a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention", an international law designed to protect civilians under occupation.
Mr Zeid said he supported a call for an "international, independent and impartial" investigation into the violence in Gaza, adding that "those responsible for violations must in the end be held accountable".
"The occupation must end," he said, "so the people of Palestine can be liberated, and the people of Israel liberated from it.
"End the occupation, and the violence and insecurity will largely disappear."
Israel occupied Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war. Although it withdrew its forces and settlers in 2005, the UN still considers the territory occupied because Israel retains control over the territory's air space, coastal waters and shared border.
'A broken body'
Israel's Ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter rejected the blame, saying it was "Israel, certainly not Hamas" which tried to avoid harming civilians.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
Israel's ambassador accused the Council of bias against her country
She said the UN Human Rights Council had returned to its "worst form of anti-Israel obsession".
The US Chargé d'Affaires Theodore Allegra agreed, saying the "one-sided action proposed by the Council today only further shows that the Human Rights Council is indeed a broken body".
Palestinian Nakba explained in 100 and 300 words
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have held weekly protests at the border in the lead-up to the 15 May anniversary of the mass displacement of Palestinians from land which became Israel in the war which followed Israel's founding in 1948.
While most Palestinians have demonstrated at a distance from the heavily guarded fence, Israel said its soldiers only used lethal force against people carrying out "terrorist activity and not on demonstrators".
Israel's Gaza response 'wholly disproportionate' - UN rights chief
Monday was Gaza's deadliest day of violence in years
The UN human rights chief says Israel used "wholly disproportionate" force against Palestinian border protests which have left over 100 people dead.
Zeid Raad Al Hussein told a meeting in Geneva that Gazans were effectively "caged in a toxic slum" and Gaza's occupation by Israel had to end.
Israel's ambassador said Gaza's militant Islamist rulers had deliberately put people in harm's way.
The UN meeting is considering calling for an independent investigation.
Some 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces on Monday in the seventh consecutive week of border protests, largely orchestrated by Hamas, which politically controls the Gaza Strip.
It was the deadliest day in Gaza since a 2014 war between Israel and militants there.
Did Israel use excessive force at Gaza protests?
'Hear our message': Gaza border violence in pictures
Life in the Gaza Strip
The protests had been dubbed the Great March of Return, in support of the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to land they or their ancestors fled from or were forced to leave in the war which followed Israel's founding in 1948.
The Israeli government, which has long ruled out a mass return of Palestinians, said terrorists wanted to use the protests as cover to cross into its territory and carry out attacks.
'Wilful killings'
Mr Zeid told the emergency session on Gaza that the "stark contrast in casualties on both sides is... suggestive of a wholly disproportionate response" by Israel.
An Israeli soldier was "reportedly wounded, slightly, by a stone" on Monday, he said, while 43 Palestinians were killed at the site of the protests. Seventeen more Palestinians were killed away from what he called the "hot spots".
Image copyrightEPA
Image caption
Israel and the Palestinians have blamed each other for the deaths
He said there had been "little evidence of any [Israeli] attempt to minimise casualties". Israel's actions might, he said, "constitute 'wilful killings' - a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention", an international law designed to protect civilians under occupation.
Mr Zeid said he supported a call for an "international, independent and impartial" investigation into the violence in Gaza, adding that "those responsible for violations must in the end be held accountable".
"The occupation must end," he said, "so the people of Palestine can be liberated, and the people of Israel liberated from it.
"End the occupation, and the violence and insecurity will largely disappear."
Israel occupied Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war. Although it withdrew its forces and settlers in 2005, the UN still considers the territory occupied because Israel retains control over the territory's air space, coastal waters and shared border.
'A broken body'
Israel's Ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter rejected the blame, saying it was "Israel, certainly not Hamas" which tried to avoid harming civilians.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
Israel's ambassador accused the Council of bias against her country
She said the UN Human Rights Council had returned to its "worst form of anti-Israel obsession".
The US Chargé d'Affaires Theodore Allegra agreed, saying the "one-sided action proposed by the Council today only further shows that the Human Rights Council is indeed a broken body".
Palestinian Nakba explained in 100 and 300 words
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have held weekly protests at the border in the lead-up to the 15 May anniversary of the mass displacement of Palestinians from land which became Israel in the war which followed Israel's founding in 1948.
While most Palestinians have demonstrated at a distance from the heavily guarded fence, Israel said its soldiers only used lethal force against people carrying out "terrorist activity and not on demonstrators".
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