Saturday 28 November 2020
Rory Stewart: 'Covid could spell the end of Boris Johnson's premiership'...
Former prime ministerial candidate Rory Stewart has said the coronavirus pandemic could cost Boris Johnson his premiership, because grasping detail is his "greatest weakness".
Friday 27 November 2020
Pennsylvania GOP seeks to reclaim power to appoint electors; 5 ways Bide...
NTD Evening News- 11/27/2020
1. The Trump Family Reunites at Camp David
2. Trump: Hard to Concede Due to Fraud
3. Top Iranian Nuclear Scientist Killed
4. Michigan Complaint: Vote Counts ‘Not Normal’
5. Third Circuit Throws Out PA Lawsuit
6. 1.2M Pennsylvania Votes Could Be Fraudulent: Expert
7. Pennsylvania GOP Seeks to Appoint Electors
8. 5 Ways Biden Allegedly Crushed Vote Norms
9. Questionable Votes Exceed Margin: Analyst
10. Dominion Employee Worked for China Telecom
11. Why GA’s Audit Did Not Expose Problems
12. GOP Flips 3rd House Seat in California
13. LA Closes Indoor and Outdoor Dining for 3 Weeks
14. Schools Remove 5 Classic Novels From List
15. Holocaust Museum Gets Backlash for Exhibit
16. US Pushes for New Alliance Against China
17. HK Chief Uses Cash Due to US Sanction
18. Venezuela Resumes Oil Shipments to China
19. US to Blacklist 89 Chinese Companies
20. Black Friday Shopping in New York City
21. USPS Recommends Shipping Packages Early
22. Rapid Test Gets Orchestra Back to Work
23. Brexit: UK, EU Trade Talks Resume
24. Academic Foreigners Detained by Iran
25. Europe: This Christmas Is Different
26. Growing Trees in Preparation for Christmas
27. A French Church Organist at Play
Thursday 26 November 2020
In full: England's new tier system announced - London and Liverpool in T...
The announcement of tougher tier restrictions sees millions of people in England placed under the highest levels of restrictions. Manchester, Birmingham, Kent and parts of Essex have been placed on very high alert under Tier 3.
The Health Secretary is setting out which tier each local authority in England will fall under in Parliament, after the end of the national lockdown on December 2.
The system has been toughened from the previous regime, meaning more authorities will move into the higher tiers.
The new tier restrictions are listed below:
Tier 1: Medium alert
Isle of Wight
Cornwall
Isles of Scilly
Tier 2: High alert
Cumbria
Liverpool City Region
Warrington and Cheshire
York
North Yorkshire
West Midlands
Worcestershire
Herefordshire
Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin
Rutland
Northamptonshire
Suffolk
Hertfordshire
Cambridgeshire, including Peterborough
Norfolk
Essex, Thurrock and Southend on Sea
Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes
London (all 32 boroughs plus the City of London)
East Sussex
West Sussex
Brighton and Hove
Surrey
Reading
Wokingham
Bracknell Forest
Windsor and Maidenhead
West Berkshire
Hampshire (except the Isle of Wight), Portsmouth and Southampton
Buckinghamshire
Oxfordshire
South Somerset, Somerset West and Taunton, Mendip and Sedgemoor
Bath and North East Somerset
Dorset
Bournemouth
Christchurch
Poole
Gloucestershire
Wiltshire and Swindon
Devon
Tier 3: Very High alert
Tees Valley Combined Authority:
Hartlepool
Middlesbrough
Stockton-on-Tees
Redcar and Cleveland
Darlington
Sunderland
South Tyneside
Gateshead
Newcastle upon Tyne
North Tyneside
County Durham
Northumberland
Greater Manchester
Lancashire
Blackpool
Blackburn with Darwen
Yorkshire and The Humber
The Humber
West Yorkshire
South Yorkshire
Birmingham and Black Country
Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent
Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull
Derby and Derbyshire
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire
Leicester and Leicestershire
Lincolnshire
Slough (remainder of Berkshire is tier 2: High alert)
Kent and Medway
Bristol
South Gloucestershire
North Somerset
Wednesday 25 November 2020
Monday 23 November 2020
Sunday 22 November 2020
Marco Pierre White | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union
Marco Pierre White is a British chef, celebrity, restaurateur and television personality. He is noted for his contributions to contemporary British cuisine. White has been dubbed the first celebrity chef, and the enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene. He was called the godfather of modern cooking by Australian MasterChef (Season 4, Episode 53). White was, at the time, the youngest chef ever to have been awarded three Michelin stars. He has trained chefs including Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone and Shannon Bennett.
Saturday 21 November 2020
Friday 20 November 2020
The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #32 - Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey (actor, producer, and best-selling author of Greenlights) and I spoke about his new book “Greenlights”, and how to live a good life.
Thursday 19 November 2020
Watch again: Trump's legal team holds press conference about the election
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Attorney Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held a press conference on Thursday calling for 682,770 ballots to be thrown out in Pennsylvania due to voter fraud.
Philadelphia officials BLOCKED GOP election observers from observing the counting of ballots after election day.
Democrats were able to “find” one million ballots in the next 48 hours!
This was a stolen election and everyone knows it!
President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Thursday aggressively made the case for the Trump campaign's legal challenge of the 2020 election results, alleging in a firery news conference that there was a "centralized" plan to carry out voter fraud around the country.
"What I’m describing to you is a massive fraud," Giuliani said at the Capitol Hill news conference with other members of Trump's legal team, who repeatedly lashed out the news media and accused them of treating their efforts unfairly.
At one point, Giuliani repeatedly told one member of the press, "you're lying."
The former New York City mayor spoke to incidents in Pennsylvania where Republican poll watchers claimed they were not allowed to observe the counting process because they were kept too far away. A judge had ruled in their favor and ordered that they be permitted six feet away from the counting at a center in Philadelphia, but that was overturned after officials appealed.
Giuliani also claimed that while Pennsylvania does not allow absentee voters to fix any errors with their ballots, some were given that opportunity -- but not those from Republican areas.
He cited sworn affidavits from cases in Pennsylvania and Michigan from poll workers who spoke about instructions from supervisors. One affidavit said that workers in Pennsylvania were instructed to assign ballots without names to random people, resulting in thousands of people in Pittsburgh showing up to the polls to find that votes had been cast in their names.
Another affidavit said that in Michigan a supervisor instructed workers to change the dates on absentee ballots to show that they arrived earlier than they had. An affidavit also claimed that workers were told not to request photo identification from Michigan voters, even though state law requires it.
Giuliani also said that approximately 100,000 absentee ballots in Wisconsin should have been deemed invalid because there were no applications for them. President-elect Joe Biden leads President Trump in that state by roughly 20,000 votes.
“If you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin," Giuliani said.
Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis explained the lack of new evidence at the news conference to support their allegations by saying this was merely an "opening statement," and that more evidence would be forthcoming in court.
Giuliani also said that more lawsuits could be coming in Arizona and potentially New Mexico, where Trump trails Biden by nearly 100,000 votes. He also said a challenge could come in Virginia, where Biden leads by almost 500,000 votes, if they believe they could overcome that deficit.
Wednesday 18 November 2020
'Greenland': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter
'Greenland': Film Review | Hollywood Reporter
'Greenland': Film Review
by Jordan Mintzer
Gerard Butler stars in GREENLAND
Courtesy of STXfilms
'Greenland,' a Gerard Butler action movie, was the first film Anton fully financed and produced
A gritty doomsday flick that’s mostly down-to-earth.
Gerard Butler stars in Ric Roman Waugh's apocalyptic thriller, which was released theatrically overseas and will roll out on Premium VOD in the U.S. starting mid-December.
From quarantines to climate change to the Boogaloo Bois, it feels like we’re living in the midst of a real-life disaster movie. So who, in that case, actually wants to go and watch a disaster movie?
And yet, Greenland, the latest action vehicle to feature Gerard Butler in raging midlife crisis mode, offers up the kind of doomsday catharsis that the world perhaps needs. It’s premise may be a bit second- or third-grade-ish — Butler has to save his family from a comet threatening to destroy all of humanity — but the gritty verisimilitude that the star and director Ric Roman Waugh bring to the table goes a long way in making this B-level blockbuster a timely and guilty pleasure.
Released over the past months in a few dozen foreign territories, where the moderately budgeted production has so far grossed just under $28 million, the movie’s domestic theatrical plans were recently scrapped by STXfilm for a Premium VOD strategy, making it available for download by mid-December. Such a move will likely deal another blow to U.S. cinemas in desperate need of Sturm und Drang spectacles like this one, where the end of the world can be both terrifying and pretty awesome to behold.
Like a Roland Emmerich movie made with less money, bombast and in-your-face patriotism, Greenland is a darker and more ground-level experience, only really going big when it needs to (and can afford it). If anything, if feels closer to a film like World War Z than to giant-rocks-destroying-the-planet flicks like Armageddon or Deep Impact (the latter, directed by Mimi Leder, still holds up rather well), with set-pieces that play as unnervingly real no matter how improbable they may be.
At the center of all the mayhem is Butler, playing a middle-aged construction manager named John Garrity who’s been kicked out of the house by his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and could use either a stiff drink or a prescription for beta-blockers, or probably both. The only thing keeping John from going off the deep end is his son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd), who’s about to celebrate a birthday party at the couple’s picturesque suburban home — well, in John’s former home.
That party comes to a quick and teary-eyed end with the arrival of Clarke, a comet passing dangerously close to earth that leaves multiple fragments crashing into the atmosphere, sending one of several shockwaves straight into John’s messy life. Soon the family is rushing together toward a military evacuation zone — as an expert at building skyscrapers, John has been selected by the U.S. government for survival — facing tons of obstacles along the way, with pieces of Clarke raining down at untold intervals and wiping out entire cities. (For some reason, Tampa is the first to go.)
Waugh and screenwriter Chris Sparling (The Sea of Trees) do a terrific job teasing out the action in ever-increasing waves of fury, starting relatively small and then pulling out the big guns in the final act. News coverage, radio reports and other official messages lend an eerie, realistic air to the proceedings, beginning with the fact that experts seem to fully underestimate the scope of the calamity, until it’s too late and people are out raiding supermarket shelves or otherwise scrambling for their lives. Sound familiar?
Separated from his wife and son about a third of the way into the plot, John spends much of the film trying to make his way back to them, at one point traveling like a refugee in a truck headed for the Canadian border that doesn’t wind up going very far. Meanwhile, Allison and Nathan get picked up by a creepy Southern couple (David Denman, Hope Davis) who looks like they’re on their way to an Evangelical revival meeting and take way too much interest in Nathan’s future.
If it’s fairly obvious where Greenland is going from there, with all the requisite stumbling blocks en route to a treacly and hopeful finale, Waugh’s attention to detail makes this effort more than mere catastrophe porn.
The images of social breakdown — whether rioting, looting or, in one memorable scene, a bunch of millennials celebrating the mass destruction at a rooftop kegger — are telling in how they appear to be torn from the here and now. Likewise, the way the 24-hour news cycle covers events, with catchy on-screen tags like “Clarke’s Planet Killer,” underline how easily the end of the world is transformed into a spectacle that can both decimate us and serve as infotainment.
While Butler has headlined these kind of scenarios before, such as in the much less notable Geostorm, or else in the Olympus Has Fallen series — the third and best installment of which was directed by Waugh, a former stuntman whose other credits include taut thrillers like Snitch and Shot Caller — here he plays an ordinary hero whose only major skill seems to be his ability to competently drive SUVs, pickup trucks and other giant gas guzzlers. Still, this is one of his better recent performances, perhaps because he’s particularly convincing as a paunchy desperate husband who seems to be just one custody battle away from having a massive coronary.
The other key turn comes from Scott Glenn as Allison’s crusty rancher dad, Dale, a man who welcomes the apocalypse with ample supplies of sangfroid and Maker’s Mark. The calm interlude that takes place on Dale’s horse farm offers John and his family a bit of respite before a race-against-the-clock denouement that provides the film’s most daunting set-piece, when an interstate highway is suddenly pummeled by comet debris.
Such sequences remind us of why we love disaster movies in the first place: They dish out sensational depictions of earth-shattering events that we can relish from the safety of our seats (or, in the case of most U.S. audiences now, from our couches). And yet, what makes Greenland stand out is how, at certain times, what we’re watching doesn’t seem so spectacular, but very much like the real thing — albeit with a fair amount of VFX and Butler’s own brand of sweaty, stress-bucket bravado. Both of those are to be expected in this type of mid-sized blockbuster, while what sticks in your mind most about Greenland are those moments when it doesn’t feel like a movie at all.
Production companies: STXfilms, G-BASE, Anton, Thunder Road Pictures
Distributor: STXfilms
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, David Denman, Hope Davis, Roger Dale Floyd, Andrew Bachelor, Merrin Dungey, with Holt McCallany, and Scott Glenn
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Screenwriter: Chris Sparling
Producers: Gerard Butler, Basil Iwanyk, Sébastien Raybaud, Alan Siegel
Executive producers: Nik Bower, Brendon Boyea, Alastair Burlingham, Jonathan Fuhrman, Carsten H.W. Lorenz, Deppak Nayar, Danielle Robinson, Harold van Lier, John Zois
Director of photography: Dana Gonzalez
Production designer: Clay A. Griffith
Costume designer: Kelli Jones
Editor: Gabriel Fleming
Composer: David Buckley
Casting directors: Mary Vernieu, Michelle Wade Byrd
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/greenland-film-review
Tuesday 17 November 2020
Kim Guilfoyle: The people, not the media, decide an election
National Chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee and Senior Advisor for the Trump Reelection Campaign Kimberly Guilfoyle comments on the president's legal efforts to make sure every legal vote is counted!
BREAKING: Michigan's largest county refuses to certify election results
The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked 2-2, with both Republican members refusing to certify the results after discrepancies were discovered in absentee ballot poll books. Similar problems were discovered in the county's summer primary and the November 2016 election but did not impact the board's vote then.
Chairwoman Monica Palmer, a Republican, said the refusal to certify results was based on the fact that she and her GOP colleague "believe that we do not have complete and accurate information in those poll books."
Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser for the Trump campaign, immediately hailed the decision, telling a Just the News-Real America's Voice special on Tuesday night that it could impact the entire state of Michigan's ability to certify the results.
"WHY DO YOU CENSOR US?" Ted Cruz SLAMS Twitter And Facebook During Elect...
Republicans put Facebook and Twitter to the question on censorship and the future of social media
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey again testified before the Senate.
Senate Republicans grilled the heads of Facebook and Twitter at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on big tech censorship in the 2020 presidential election Tuesday, calling into question the tech companies' content moderation policies and threatening government action to end perceived bias against right-leaning points of view on their platforms.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey faced questions on their content moderation enforcement, on examples of apparent bias against President Donald Trump's supporters and conservatives, and what the role of government should be in regulating social media platforms. Republicans came prepared with specific examples of censorship, asking about the suppression of the New York Post's Hunter Biden reports, about social media posts challenging the official results of the presidential election being flagged as misinformation, and more.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Facebook and Twitter's content moderation enforcement has convinced him to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law that protects internet companies from being liable for content posted on their platforms by third parties.
Citing the suppression of the New York Post's articles, Graham accused Twitter and Facebook of exerting "editorial control" over the paper.
"What I want to try to find out is, if you're not a newspaper at Twitter or Facebook, then why do you have editorial control over the New York Post?" Graham said during his opening statement.
"They decided, and maybe for a good reason, I don't know, that the New York Post articles about Hunter Biden needed to be flagged, excluded from distribution or made hard to find. That to me seems like you're the ultimate editor," Graham continued.
"The editorial decision at the New York Post to run the story was overridden by Twitter and Facebook in different fashions to prevent its dissemination. Now if that's not making an editorial decision, I don't know what would be."
Whether Facebook and Twitter make editorial decisions by moderating content on their platforms is crucial to the debate on how government should regulate big tech. If these social media companies are providing platforms for people to use, then they are protected under Section 230 and they can't be sued, for example, for slanderous content posted by a third party that appears on their website. However, if they are making editorial decisions about the content they host on their websites, then Republicans argue they are behaving like publishers and as such would not be protected by Section 230.
Questions for Dorsey from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) focused directly on this distinction, citing Twitter's misinformation label on tweets about voter fraud as an example of an editorial action that would suggest Twitter is behaving like a publisher.
Cruz asked Dorsey directly, "Is Twitter a publisher?"
"No, we are not, we distribute information," Dorsey replied.
Reading from Section 230, Cruz defined a publisher as "any person or entity that is responsible in whole or in part for the creation or development of information provided through the internet or any other interactive computer service," then asked Dorsey if Twitter acted as a publisher by censoring the New York Post.
Again, Dorsey said Twitter is not a publisher but that it has policies and terms of service that users agree to abide by with enforcement action taken against users who violate the agreement. But Cruz accused Twitter of applying its policies "in a partisan and selective manner," criticizing Twitter for enforcing its "hacked materials" policy against the New York Post but neglecting to do so against other news outlets that reported news obtained from "hacked materials."
Continuing, Cruz said Twitter has a "star-chamber power" over speech on its platform and accused the company of making "publishing decisions" by putting warnings on statements about voter fraud that state, "Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the United States."
"That's taking a disputed policy position, and you're a publisher when you're doing that," Cruz charged.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also raised concerns about what he called Twitter and Facebook's "distinctly partisan approach" to moderating content on their websites. Citing about an incident in October when Twitter locked U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan's account, flagging as hate speech a seemingly benign tweet about how new wall on the southern border "helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country," Lee asked why the tweet was censored.
"We evaluated his tweet and we found that we were wrong. … That was a mistake; we reverted it," Dorsey explained. But Lee expected this answer.
"What we're going to see today is that mistakes happen a whole lot more, almost entirely on one side of the political aisle rather than the other," he said before turning to Zuckerberg and asking why Facebook "stunningly" took almost two weeks to unblock an advertisement from the Susan B. Anthony List that a third-party fact-checker mistakenly said was "partly false."
"I'm not familiar with the details of us re-enabling that ad ... it's possible that this was just a mistake or a delay," Zuckerberg said.
"I appreciate your acknowledgement of that the fact that there are mistakes. As I noted previously, those mistake sure happen a whole lot more on one side of the political spectrum than the other," Lee said. Noting that more than 90% of employees at both Twitter and Facebook donated to Democratic candidates, Lee wondered aloud if those political biases affect the apparent one-sided nature of big tech's "mistakes."
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) picked up this line of questioning, inquiring about the political leanings of Facebook and Twitter employees and asking if it's possible there's "systemic bias" within these companies.
"I do think it's undisputed that our employee base, at least the full-time folks, politically would be somewhat or maybe more than just a little somewhat to the left of where our overall community is," Zuckerberg said, acknowledging that his company likely leans farther left than the average American Facebook user.
Zuckerberg did point out that it employs 35,000 content moderators in locations around the nation, not just in Silicon Valley, and that it would be incorrect to assume that they all are biased against Republicans.
Dorsey said political biases are not something his company would "interview for" before acknowledging that most people perceive that his company leans left and judge Twitter's intentions based on that perception.
"If people don't trust our intent, if people are questioning that, that's a failure and that is something we need to fix and intend to fix," Dorsey said.
Sasse did break with his colleagues and express skepticism about having the federal government take action to regulate social media in response to bias.
"I especially think it's odd that so many in my party are zealous to do this right now when you would have an incoming administration of the other party that would be writing the rules and regulations about it," he said.
His final question inquired about where Zuckerberg and Dorsey see the future of content moderation going over the next three or five years if the government does not act.
Zuckerberg said Facebook will increase its focus on transparency. He said Facebook has "already committed to an independent external audit" of its content moderation enforcement metrics and suggested that such a review could be part of a government regulatory framework created by Congress.
Dorsey said that a "centralized global content moderation system does not scale" and said tech companies need to "rethink" how they operate content moderation. He suggested a decentralized approach that gives users more choice about how they interact on social media.
"Having more control so that individuals can moderate themselves, pushing the power of moderation to the edges and to our customers, and to the individuals using the service is something we'll see more of," Dorsey said. "Having more choice around how algorithms are altering my experience and creating my experience is important."
https://www.theblaze.com/republicans-put-facebook-and-twitter-to-the-question-on-censorship-and-the-future-of-social-media
Monday 16 November 2020
Sunday 15 November 2020
Saturday 14 November 2020
Friday 13 November 2020
Thursday 12 November 2020
Wednesday 11 November 2020
Monday 9 November 2020
Sunday 8 November 2020
Saturday 7 November 2020
Friday 6 November 2020
Thursday 5 November 2020
Wednesday 4 November 2020
Tuesday 3 November 2020
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