MY PROFIL

Nama : Hasan Wirayuda Tempat Tanggal/Lahir : Cibitung, 14 Mei 1993 Jenis Kelamin : Laki-laki Agama : Islam Hobi : Olahraga Kewarganegaraan : Indonesia E-mail : wirayudash@gmail.com dehanforever@gmail.com

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Monday, August 15, 2016

Disillusionment, U.S.A. Where voters are just hoping for change.

Disillusionment, U.S.A. Where voters are just hoping for change.

 
'Both of my guys won:' First-time voter Parker Fox REUTERS/Jeff Kowalsky
 
ALGONAC, MICH.--Parker Fox drifted out of the Donald Trump rally in a sort of euphoric daze, along with the thousands emptying into the parking lot alongside him. “After leaving a Trump rally, you’re very pro-Trump,” he recalled a few weeks later, describing a noisy communion with people who understood that politics mattered, unlike some people he could name at his high school. “It was so enthusiastic and so energetic you could feel it in your body. It gave you chills.”He’d barely had time to calm down when he learned through Facebook that his other favorite presidential candidate would also be passing through his quiet corner of eastern Michigan—Bernie Sanders. In fact, the U.S. senator from Vermont would be at the same community college the very next day. This thrilled Fox: his first presidential election as a voter—he was 18—and the two most crowd-whipping, pundit-defying, establishment-bucking candidates in the entire race were practically paying him personal visits.
As it turned out, the residents of this part of Michigan were especially fond of the two men who had done the most to upend the 2016 presidential race. Both Sanders and Trump won the state, with Sanders’ narrow win in the Democratic contest stupefying pollsters who had predicted a comfortable lead for Hillary Clinton. Both did especially well in St. Clair County, with double-digit victories over their rivals. And, down at the precinct level, they barnstormed Algonac, a town of about 4,056 people about an hour’s drive from Detroit on a curve of the St. Clair River in the county’s southern end corner, and neighboring Clay, home to another 9,066 or so, including Fox and his family. In some Algonac and Clay precincts, Sanders and Trump won more than two thirds of the votes. Residents have a needlessly unflattering nickname for Algonac: The Swamp, derived, apparently, from the reed marshes that engulf the town’s edges and which are prettily dive-bombed by feeding birds and buzz with hidden insects.
If Sanders and Trump were the two insurgents of 2016, then the Algonac Swamp must be a sort of encampment of their guerrilla foot soldiers. What might such a place be like, down in the trenches?
An editor’s working hypothesis was that a town full of Trump and Sanders fans might turn out to be the Angriest Town in America, and so that became our shorthand before my visit in April, only to be laughed at when I finally got the chance to broach the label with residents.
Of course, no one can persist in a permanent state of anger, especially in an entire town. Contempt, on the other hand, can smolder indefinitely, and Algonac reeked of contempt: It would take longer than a week’s visit to find someone here who does not think Washington is, on the whole, a besmirched place of selfish politicians in thrall to the powerful moneyed interests who keep them in office. Clinton, fairly or otherwise, is generally seen here as the very embodiment of this; Sanders and Trump the only possible saviors, Trump because he’s never held elected office, and Sanders, despite his decades in Congress, because he is still viewed as a cranky outsider. Nonetheless, for a small minority, the idea of a President Trump sends them into a panic.
Fox is young enough to have never had his heart broken by a politician, but he’s heard his father, Jerry, go off at the dinner table enough times to pick up some of his parents’ wariness.
“He might get a lot of this because I work for the auto industry,” said Jerry, who has a job at a nearby Chrysler truck factory and is a competitive walleye fisherman on the side. Father and son were sitting on couches in the family’s comfy living room, with large windows looking out onto surrounding woods where deer and turkeys roam. Jerry had also been struggling over whether he preferred Trump or Sanders, and so had decided to let his politics-inhaling son make the call for him.
“I’ve always heard dad saying, you know, ‘There goes another plant to Mexico,’” Fox said, doing an angry-dad voice, as Jerry gave a smiling “it’s true” nod of recognition. And so Fox marveled to hear Trump lambast companies for moving production abroad, or Sanders’ refrain that 60,000 factories have closed down in America since 2001. The rallies were like a Fox family dinner blown up to stadium size.

COMPASSION VERSUS WALL-BUILDING
Should either candidate want to make a movie adaptation of their campaign speeches, they could do worse than to set it in Algonac and Clay: A few strip-mall businesses and a scattering of mostly two-story, middle-class homes, none too far from the teal waters of the St. Clair River, along which massive freighters creep carrying goods to and from Canada. To wander around Algonac, a predominantly Republican place, is to encounter familiar stump-speech lines made manifest. There’s the town’s old Chris-Craft power boat factory that made Algonac a proud little manufacturing hub until it closed in 1960, a hole that’s never quite been filled or forgotten. Algonac falls within the gravitational pull of Detroit’s Big Three automobile companies; the factories of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler are major employers, and families’ fortunes are tied to international trade deals that both Trump and Sanders deride. Ford, in particular, has come under attack from Trump for expanding its manufacturing in Mexico. The only other language besides English on the signs at the nearest major airport, Detroit Metropolitan, is Japanese, viewed by some residents as an unnecessary concession to visiting Japanese automobile executives.
When talk turns to immigration—Sanders in terms of compassion, Trump in terms of wall-building—people here are reminded of the U.S. Border Patrol officers they see boating up and down the Canadian border, which floats somewhere halfway across the St. Clair River. Both candidates decry what they say is the undue influence of American billionaires on politics. In Algonac, they tend to picture Manuel Moroun, a Detroit businessman, in the local version of this role. He proposed building a bridge that was widely opposed here, connecting the mainland to Harsens Island, a peaceful outpost of Clay Township, home to about 1,200 people and a couple of bald eagles and currently accessible only by a small, 12-car ferry. Regulators denied the $45 million plan in June.
In some ways, voters have changed little since the 1980s, when pollster Stan Greenberg first visited neighboring Macomb County and announced that he had discovered the Reagan Democrat. The belief persists that the system is so rigged that politicians’ largesse only flows to those much richer than you, or much poorer, leaving you to struggle unaided. The difference this time—and everyone agrees it’s different this time—is that there were two viable-seeming chances to send a man to Washington who would be the very personification of your contempt. Some were voting for Trump only in his capacity as a stink bomb.

‘MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE’
“You guys know the story, I’m sure, of Jesus Christ in the temple, when he goes into the temple and he turns everything upside down,” said Jay DeBoyer, the only person dressed in a suit on a weekday afternoon in Johnnie Lega’s, a popular riverside Algonac dive bar filled with nautical-themed clutter. He worked behind the bar years ago when he was a student before becoming a salesman for a company that made trusses and other lumber products for the home-building industry. Now DeBoyer is the county clerk, whose job includes running elections here. He has a close-shaved head and silver goatee, his suit fits well, and he speaks in neat paragraphs of political analysis. He was evoking a rare moment in the Gospels, in which the normally sanguine Christ appears to get angry at the corrupting quality of money, as he explained why the county’s primary results were more or less as he anticipated.
“Now, we can argue from a Christian perspective, was that Christ-like? We can have that debate, that discussion. But for every circumstance there’s a reaction and there’s a resolution.” In his analogy, Christ was Trump, but Sanders, too, and also, in a sense, the voters themselves, newly awakened at the possibility of disruption. “In these non-engaged individuals who are becoming engaged, they want him to go into the temple and turn the tables upside down,” DeBoyer said. “That means we need to shake it up. We need to come back to the people in control.”
In DeBoyer’s view, this may be the first election in which the so-called culture wars will not prove decisive. DeBoyer is a Republican, though he declined to say for whom he voted. He’s pro-gun and opposes abortion, but is unfazed, for example, by Trump’s difficulty in stating what his policy on abortion access would be. Most Trump voters he knows don’t care if they only agree with “two in 10 things” that Trump says, according to DeBoyer. They just want a change. He described his family’s finances to explain why.
“I don’t have a bunch of debt. I have a mortgage and a couple of car payments. I don’t have a pension; I have to save in a 401k like everyone else. It’s impossible for me to save enough money to pay for my kids to go to college.” He has a 13-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter, who is applying to Duke. “Mathematically impossible. I live in a $125,000 house, I drive a Dodge pick-up truck and a Jeep, I don’t have any credit card debt. None of that. And it’s mathematically impossible for me to save enough for retirement and enough to send my kids to college. Household income of $100,000, with no debt. Do you understand how a person in my exact financial category gets sucked into that world, between those two? If I tend to lean to the left, I’m all in with Bernie Sanders. If I tend to lean right, I’m all in with Donald Trump. Frankly, even if he’s wrong, what he’s saying are the only options I have, the only hope I got.”
Leaving Johnnie Lega’s to head into Algonac proper, you pass by the taxidermy store of Paul Burczycki—a Trump supporter with qualms. He is angry with the government not least because his insurance payments went up with the passage of the Affordable Care Act. “Trump’s a tough guy to vote for,” he said. “He’s a loose cannon. Maybe that’s all part of his master plan.”
Further down the road, on the right, there’s Peter Beauregard’s Algonac Harbour Club on the right, a marina and restaurant on the spot of the old Chris-Craft factory.
He’s a Trump fan, too.
“I’m a lifetime Republican who has been disenchanted like, I guess, a lot of people in our town, so I’m definitely for the outsider,” Beauregard said, “and I’ve upset several of my local colleagues who are Republicans. If you’re a Republican you either love him or you hate him. There’s nobody on the fence.”
Life here revolves around the water. Almost as many driveways are graced by boats as cars. Garfield Wood, a pioneering boat builder and racer who once lived in Algonac, broke the water speed record in 1932, tearing along the St. Clair in a boat powered by airplane engines at 124.86 miles per hour. Chris-Craft made a landing craft used by the U.S. military in the D-Day invasion at Normandy, as well as mahogany-hulled powerboats that are still cherished by nostalgic collectors. The Michigan Senate is contemplating a bill that would recognize Clay Township, Algonac’s neighbor, as “the sturgeon angling capital” of the state, and some residents think it will sail through committee.
It’s beautiful in the summer, residents say, with people boating in the sunshine and the restaurants busy with seasonal visitors. Nevertheless, multiple residents liked to efface the town using the same little shorthand list, as if they’d all memorized it from the same source: Algonac? It’s three dollar stores, one grocery store, three pharmacies, and that’s about it. About 97 percent of the residents are white, according to the last census, compared to 74 percent for the United States as a whole. Both Trump and Sanders have found their most reliable support among those in this racial group.
It is only after several days in Algonac, at the annual American Indian Festival at the local high school, that I find someone willing to say she is a Clinton supporter, if in a limited sense. Ringed by chairs in the school gym, dancers moved to throbbing drums; fox furs, tribal jewelry and dreamcatchers were for sale at stalls around the gym’s edge, many run by members of tribes from Walpole Island, just across the Canadian border.
Susan Wrobel, the festival’s organizer and a lifelong Algonac resident, runs a weekly community meeting where she teaches children Anishinaabemowin, the language of her Ojibwe tribe. She said elders there have been “shaking their heads” in wonder and fear that Trump could become president. “I was very pleased whether it was Hillary or Bernie, I actually I like them both,” she said. She had just bought some new earrings, which danced as she spoke. “So I chose the Republican ticket to vote for my favorite Republican, and that was Kasich. I love Kasich. He’s the only one that talked about doing something about the national debt, and I loved that. So I thought, well, the Democratic ticket’s taken care of for me.” Michigan’s primaries are open to all voters regardless of party affiliation, and strategic voting is common. A few days after this conversation, John Kasich, the Ohio governor, would drop out of the race.

‘SAME OLD FACES’
Once again, it was time for the Algonac-Clay Historical Society’s monthly meeting. Some of the women at the society are particularly interested in the Victorian era and were making final arrangements for a forthcoming talk on Victorian hair fashions. “Hats and tea cups are encouraged,” noted the flyer. Trump struck them as unnecessarily crude.
“I don’t like the name calling,” said Marilynn Genaw, who was in charge of ordering the strawberries they’d need for the tea. “It’s good manners not to say something derogatory about an individual.” She was still deciding on how to vote.
Joan Bulley, a former Algonac bank teller and the town’s de facto historian-in-residence, could also do without Trump’s brusqueness, but wonders if it points to an underlying virtue. “One thing about Donald Trump is he tells it as it is,” she said. “I don’t care for his rudeness, his insults, but he gets things done.” Sanders, she said, is at least “a little bit more dignified” in his speeches.
She dislikes Clinton. “She doesn’t tell the truth. I don’t like that.”
Bulley’s grievance with the federal government is that she has never quite forgiven it for transforming the city’s waterfront under the “urban renewal” push of the 1960s and 1970s.
“Urban renewal demolished our town” she said. She pointed to an exhibit in the society’s museum, a little hand-drawn map of the businesses that used to line a walkable, 19th-century main street on the riverfront: Koch’s Jewelry Store, the Starlight Dance Pavilion, the Algonac Theatre. For the most part, those buildings were demolished and replaced with a pleasant, if quiet, boardwalk backed by tidy lawns, and, on the other side, the sort of boxy, parking-lot-fringed architecture that lures chain stores and franchise restaurants. She kept pointing at the exhibits. “This was Henry’s on the corner,” she said, referring to one of her favorite restaurants. “It’s now a parking lot, which is stupid. If they would have saved some of these stores we would at least have something to attract people.”
As the historical society meeting breaks up for homemade snacks and cake, I meet Bud Zeigler, 85, who spent 12 years sanding down Chris-Craft powerboats on the assembly line until the factory moved to Florida, taking some of his colleagues with it. Soon after, he ended up as a carpenter making Pontiacs at General Motors down the road, working there for 30 years until retirement. His complaint about the government is that it’s always the same old faces in charge, who never seem to get things done.
“I voted for Bernie Sanders,” he said. “I just wanted to break it up a little bit. Because everybody figures this one is favored, that one is favored, well, give the other guy a chance.” He chuckles a bit at this.
“Somewhere along the line you’ve got to get somebody in there that maybe can change things a bit with a new thought in their head, without having the same ones always running for office, families running, you know?”
Even in late April, there was little doubt that it’d be Clinton versus Trump come November. Trump thinks he can flip Michigan, a state that has reliably gone with theDemocratic presidential candidate for years, to support him. At the Schoolhouse Grille, a buzzing restaurant on Harsens Island, two women stepped outside at the end of the Saturday night dinner rush. Sheltering from the drizzle in an outdoor bar area, the two friends discussed how they would approach the polling booths in November.
Kristin Bane, who owns the restaurant and was seeking to escape the kitchen’s heat, is a Democrat who voted for Sanders. She likes Obama not least because she also spent part of her childhood in Hawaii, opposes fracking and thinks the government should spend more on education. Nancy Bryson, who came out for a smoke and whose family runs the island’s ferry service to the mainland, most admires the two presidents Bush.
“I enjoy listening to Bernie,” Bryson said. “I do. And I think that there are so many things that he’s saying that I’m, ‘You know what? I agree with you wholeheartedly. But I don’t want the government to tell me that I have to do that. I don’t want to be taxed to do that.’”
Bryson argued that Trump would help bring the country back to its founding principle. Bane was unconvinced.
“How can we vote for a man who’s proposing to build a wall that we have spent so many years breaking down in other countries?” Bane said as Bryson lit a cigarette.
“My grandfathers and my uncles have died because they were trying to break down walls in other countries so that we could live free—and we want to build one? That’s the wrong message.”
“OK, I disagree with you there but I love you,” Bryson replied. Her mother was an immigrant, she explained, arriving at Ellis Island from Copenhagen as a 12-year-old girl. The barriers to immigration are higher than they were in the Ellis Island era, but Bryson said there was still no good reason to immigrate to the United States through anything but the legal channels.
“I’ve been wanting to have this conversation for a long time,” Bane said, without backing down on her point. “It’s good that we can do this and not get angry and stomp our feet about it.”
They found common ground in their dislike for Clinton.
“And Benghazi?” Bryson said. “I mean it’s just unforgivable what happened there.”
“I think she’s a professional liar,” Bane said.“I agree.”
Still, for Bane, the idea of having to vote for someone other than Sanders in November left her anguished.
“I could say, ‘Oh, you know, change, yes change, I want change, and so Trump is the quickest way to a change in government.’ I could tell myself that hopefully it’s going to work out for the best. But I can’t get past some of these issues like the wall, and I can’t get past some of these issues like abortion. ‘A woman should go to jail.’ What the fuck?”
It became apparent that Bryson was not aware that Trump has said he now opposes abortions. This new information was absorbed quickly.
“Oh, he’s going anti?” she said. “Well you know what, here’s the bottom line, he’s just trying to buy the Christian base.”
Neither was surprised at how well Sanders and Trump had done in Michigan.“The common ground with them is change,” Bane said.
“Anti-establishment,” Bryson said.
“Here’s how I feel,” Bane said, in a sort of closing statement. ”I would hope that Bernie would get in at least to in to run against Trump. I have no time for Hillary Clinton. And when it comes down to it I more than likely will not vote for her. And if it comes down to her and Trump, even though I cringe and I think what’s going to happen, I at least will have some hope of some kind of change. Something’s going to shift if he gets in there. Something’s got to give. And at least there would be that hope still attached to him. With her, I almost fear her. I think she’s a dangerous woman. I think she’s an extremely dangerous woman.” Again, she worried about Trump’s wall and his position on abortion. “A painful change is still change.”The two women smiled at each other and hugged and then hurried through the drizzle back into the restaurant.
'BOTH OF MY GUYS WON's
Fox and his parents were approaching November with less trepidation. After attending the Trump and Sanders rallies in quick succession, he made up his mind and informed his parents, who were similarly torn between the two, of his decision. Fox thinks women should be allowed to have abortions and that same-sex couples should be able to marry, views he attributes to his age, and here he felt he parted company with Trump.
“I couldn’t find anything with Bernie I disagree about. At all. And that’s the reason. As simple as it gets.” Also, he said, “it seemed like Trump didn’t need my help,” he said, which was part of his father’s thinking, too. They would vote for Trump in November instead.
Fox’s mother, Tracy, came in from work and sat down in an armchair opposite her sons; her husband moved to sit at the floor by her feet. The family talked politics for another hour as the room darkened, illuminated only by a muted CNN flashing on the television.
“Both of my guys won,” Fox said with satisfaction, “so that’s cool.”

Talk of shifting funds away from Trump premature: Republican official

Talk of shifting funds away from Trump premature: Republican official

 
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S., August 13, 2016. REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin
 
 
A senior official with the Republican National Committee on Sunday played down the prospect that the party would cut off cash and logistical support to White House nominee Donald Trump in order to shift resources toward congressional races.Last week 70 Republicans wrote a letter urging the RNC to stop helping Trump and to focus instead on candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The letter, signed by former members both of Congress and RNC staff, said Trump's actions were "divisive and dangerous" and posed a threat to the party and the country.
Sean Spicer, RNC communications director, said in a telephone interview that abandoning Trump with nearly three months to go to the Nov. 8 election "doesn't make logical sense."
In October 1996 the RNC moved money from the presidential race to congressional candidates after Republican nominee Bob Dole fell far behind Democratic President Bill Clinton in opinion polls.
But Spicer said giving up on Trump could be harmful to other Republican candidates and there was still time for him to rebound in opinion polls against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"Number one, you need a strong top of the ticket. That's number one. Number two, we're only six points down," Spicer said, referring to the gap that Clinton has opened up against Trump in some national polls.
Clinton led Trump by more than five percentage points in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.
Clinton has strong leads in hotly contested states such as Pennsylvania and New Hampshire and some polls show her within a few percentage points of Trump in some states such as Georgia that normally lean strongly Republican.
Any discussions of cutting off funds to Trump in August would be "ridiculous," Spicer said.
Trump has polarized the party with his vow to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and his plan to impose a temporary ban on Muslims seeking to enter the country.
Trump has been criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for a prolonged feud with the Muslim family of a fallen U.S. Army captain and his assertion last week that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had co-founded the Islamic State militant group.

Gymnastics: Bullies are tormenting Douglas, says mother

Gymnastics: Bullies are tormenting Douglas, says mother




Bullies are ruining U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglas's Olympic adventure by attacking her appearance, accusing her of being unpatriotic, and by mocking her with a mean-spirited nickname, "Crabby Gabby", on social media, her mother told Reuters.
The 20-year-old athlete has been attacked for a perceived lack of patriotism for not placing her hand over her heart as the U.S. anthem was played during a medal ceremony and for not joining a standing ovation for two team mates.
Her mother, Natalie Hawkins, says Douglas is heart-broken.
"She's had to deal with people criticizing her hair, or people accusing her of bleaching her skin. They said she had breast enhancements, they said she wasn't smiling enough, she's unpatriotic. Then it went to not supporting your team mates. Now you're "Crabby Gabby"," Hawkins said in an interview.
"You name it and she got trampled. What did she ever do to anyone?"
For the second Games running, Douglas has found herself caught in a firestorm despite yet another gold winning performance in Rio.
In 2012 Twitter went into overdrive after Douglas became the first African-American gymnast to win the Olympic all-around title. But rather than lauding her excellence, critics rounded on her for the state of her hair during the final.
Four years on and Douglas has another Olympic gold, from the women's team competition, but the sheen from that victory has also been tarnished after TV cameras showed her standing to attention during the national anthem.
"I don't think respecting your country or your flag boils down to whether you put your hand over your heart or not," Hawkins said.
"It's in your actions towards your country, how well are you abiding by its laws, how well are you helping your fellow citizens?
"We grew up in the military community. My mum spent almost 30 years in the military, my dad's a two-time Vietnam vet. Because of that it was so insulting that they would accuse my daughter of being unpatriotic when we are so tied to the military family.
"When the Star Spangled Banner is played, most military members either salute or stand to attention."
But Tuesday's furor over what the correct protocol is when the American flag is raised was neither the beginning nor the end of Douglas' problems.
She was also criticized for not giving team mates Simone Biles and Aly Raisman a standing ovation when they claimed gold and silver in Thursday's all around final.
With accusations that Douglas was angry and jealous at being denied a place in the final, since rules state only the top two performers from each country can progress to the final, #CrabbyGabby started trending on social media.
"We've been brought to many tears because I don't know what she's done to warrant such an attack. To me it looks like she is being bullied," said Hawkins.
All this unwanted attention on her daughter has been painful for Hawkins to watch. Despite being in Rio to cheer on Douglas, she is unable to give her a comforting hug because of team rules limiting contact to phone calls and texts until they are done competing.
"What I saw in the stands was someone who was hurting and she was also angry," added Hawkins.
"What was going through her head was 'I'm being attacked for everything I do so I might as well not do anything. Because no matter what I do, I am being attacked'."
Did Hawkins think Douglas was targeted because of her race?
"Many people are telling me that all the time. And that's from white people and black people. I don't want to believe (it's a race attack) as I want to have more faith," she said.
"But when I go on Twitter, I can't help but see that all the blacks are saying: 'was it just the white people that are saying this against us?'
"Maybe people are very frustrated. Our country has a lot of unrest and turmoil recently and people are frustrated and maybe they just want to vent and they just see someone innocent ... and bully them."
For now though, Hawkins says she has advised her daughter to stay offline and instead focus on competing in Sunday's asymmetric bars final.
"They keep attacking her about not smiling but they don't know what she is dealing with. If they did, this would not be a conversation. They would (understand). But this is not the time or place to tell that story," said Hawkins, who raised four children as a single mother.
"I want ... people to show me if they have ever seen Gabrielle being disrespectful ... or say something inappropriate. There is nothing because for her being a role model is such a supreme honor.
"Gabrielle's had her heart broken, but she's determined she will go out (on Sunday) and she knows she still has a job to do for Team USA. It's a huge honor for me to be her mother as she's the bravest person I know."

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Trump rails against press in response to reports of chaos



Trump rails against press in response to reports of chaos


U.S. Republican Donald Trump on Saturday repeated his attack on President Barack Obama that he helped "found" Islamic State and railed against media reports that his campaign is failing, at a campaign rally in Connecticut, a state where he has a long-shot of being victorious.
Speaking for more than an hour in a sweltering room, Trump spent a significant portion of his speech complaining about the media.
He again threatened to revoke the press credentials of The New York Times. The credentials allow reporters access to press-only areas of his campaign events. He has already banned other outlets, including The Washington Post.
On Saturday, the New York newspaper published an article detailing failed efforts to make Trump focus his campaign on the general election.









"These are the most dishonest people," Trump said. "Maybe we'll start thinking about taking their press credentials away from them."
Trump visiting Connecticut, a heavily Democratic state, raised eyebrows among many Republicans.
"It's asinine that he would be in Connecticut holding a public rally less than 90 days before the election," said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak. "You don't see Hillary publicly campaigning in Idaho and Mississippi. I have to think this proves the candidate is running the campaign, which explains why it's such a disaster of biblical proportions."
At several points the crowd chanted "lock her up," a frequent campaign rally chant in reference to Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump told the crowd that normally he responds by saying he intends instead to defeat her in the Nov. 8 election, but this time added, "You know what? You have a point!"
Trump also dropped his recent efforts to say he was not being serious when he said Obama was the "founder" of the Islamic State militant group .

"It's the opinion of myself and a lot of people that he was the founder," Trump told the crowd.
Democrats and Republicans alike have criticized Trump's assertion as patently false.
Trump took a detour from attacking Clinton's economic record to discuss the 1998 scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky and former President Bill Clinton, whom Republicans attempted to impeach.
"Remember when he said, he did not have sex with that woman, and a couple of weeks later, oh you got me," Trump said, to cheers. He then made reference to a blue dress that became a symbol in the investigation. "I'm so glad they kept that dress, so glad they kept that dress, because it shows what the hell they are."



Muslim cleric and associate shot to death on New York street

Muslim cleric and associate shot to death on New York street

 

A Muslim cleric and an associate were fatally shot by a lone gunman on Saturday while walking together following afternoon prayers at a mosque in the New York City borough of Queens, authorities said.The gunman approached the men from behind and shot both in the head at close range at about 1:50 p.m. EDT on a blistering hot afternoon in the Ozone Park neighborhood, police said in a statement, adding that no arrests had been made.
The motive for the shooting was not immediately known and no evidence has been uncovered that the two men were targeted because of their faith, said Tiffany Phillips, a spokeswoman for the New York City Police Department. Even so, police were not ruling out any possibility, she added.
The victims, identified as Imam Maulama Akonjee, 55, and Thara Uddin, 64, were both wearing religious garb at the time of shooting, police said. Police had initially identified Uddin as Tharam.
The men were transported to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center where they died, hospital spokesman Andrew Rubin said.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group known by the acronym CAIR, said Uddin was an associate of the imam.

 
A sketch of a suspect in the shooting of a Muslim cleric and an associate, who were killed on Saturday while walking together following afternoon prayers at a mosque in the New York City borough of Queens, released by New York Police Department, August 13, 2016. New York Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
"These were two very beloved people," Afaf Nasher, executive director of the New York chapter of CAIR, told Reuters. "These were community leaders.
"There is a deep sense of mourning and an overwhelming cry for justice to be served," Nasher said. "There is a very loud cry, too, for the NYPD to investigate fully, with the total amount of their resources, the incident that happened today."
The organization held a news conference on Saturday evening in front of the mosque, the Al-Furqan Jame Masjid, where the two men had prayed.
"We are calling for all people, of all faiths, to rally with compassion and with a sense of vigilance so that justice can be served," Nasher said. "“You can’t go up to a person and shoot them in the head and not be motivated by hatred.”

The suspect was seen by witnesses fleeing the scene with a gun in his hand, police said.

"We are currently conducting an extensive canvass of the area for video and additional witnesses," Deputy Inspector Henry Sautner said in a statement.
Eric Phillips, a press secretary for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, said the mayor was closely monitoring the police investigation into the shootings.
"While it is too early to tell what led to these murders, it is certain that the NYPD will stop at nothing to ensure justice is served,” Phillips said in a statement.


Akonjee was described as a peaceful man who was beloved within Ozone Park's large Muslim community.
"He would not hurt a fly," his nephew Rahi Majid, 26, told the New York Daily News. "You would watch him come down the street and watch the peace he brings."
Video footage posted on YouTube showed dozens of men gathered near the site of the shooting, with one of them telling the crowd that it appeared to be a hate crime, even as police said the motive was still unknown.
"We feel really insecure and unsafe in a moment like this," Millat Uddin, an Ozone Park resident told CBS television in New York. "It's really threatening to us, threatening to our future, threatening to our mobility in our neighborhood, and we’re looking for the justice."
In June, CAIR issued a statement calling for Muslim community leaders to consider increasing security after the Orlando massacre and incidents that it said had targeted Muslims and Islamic houses of worship.
A gunman who called himself an "Islamic soldier" killed 49 people in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub on June 12.

Violent protests erupt in Milwaukee after police kill armed suspect

Violent protests erupt in Milwaukee after police kill armed suspect

Protesters in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood of the U.S. midwestern city of Milwaukee fired gunshots, hurled bricks and set a gas station on fire on Saturday night after a patrol officer shot dead an armed suspect there, authorities said.Police did not disclose the race of the suspect or the officer involved in the shooting, which occurred on Saturday afternoon in Sherman Park. The violence comes as anger over police killings of black men and women in the United States remains unabated.
A statement by the Milwaukee Police Department did not name the suspect but said he was 23 years old, had a lengthy arrest record and was carrying a stolen handgun loaded with 23 rounds of ammunition when police pulled over the vehicle for unspecified "suspicious activity."
The statement did not say whether he fired any shots or pointed the weapon at officers. A second suspect who fled from the vehicle was quickly taken into custody.
The officer who shot the suspect has been placed on administrative duty pending an investigation bu the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, police said.
Police said that after the shooting, some residents of Sherman Park came out onto the streets and that by evening, initially peaceful gatherings had turned violent.
The crowd fired gunshots, smashed the windows of at least two squad cars and set another one ablaze, police said. One officer was hit in the head with a brick.
Fires broke out at gas station, an auto parts store and at least three other businesses, officials and local media reported.
"This is a warning cry," Milwaukee Alderman Khalif Rainey said. "Black people of Milwaukee are tired. They are tired of living under this oppression."
Police violence against black men and women has sparked intermittent, sometimes violent protests in U.S. cities from Ferguson, Baltimore and New York in the past two years.
The outrage has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and touched off a national debate over race and policing in the United States.
In 2014, Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed black man was shot dead in a park by a Milwaukee police officer, an incident that sparked largely peaceful protests.


Sherman Park was the scene of some unrelated rioting a month ago. Coalition 4 Justice, which was formed after Hamilton was killed, called on supporters to clean up city streets and hold prayer vigils.
"Riot is the language of the unheard," the group wrote on Twitter.
As of 1 a.m. Central time (0200 ET), police said three arrests had been made in connection with the unrest.
Shortly after 2 a.m. police said they were restoring order to Sherman Park and reducing deployments, but local news footage showed a liquor store in flames just minutes before the release of the statement.
By daylight, videos posted to social media by local news outlets showed resident sweeping streets and picking up debris left by the rioting. Burned out vehicles and a torched building could be seen in the background.

U.S. Democrat Pelosi gets 'obscene and sick' calls after hack

U.S. Democrat Pelosi gets 'obscene and sick' calls after hack

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Linux bug leaves USA Today, other top sites vulnerable to serious hijacking attacks

Linux bug leaves USA Today, other top sites vulnerable to serious hijacking attacks

"Off-path" attack means hackers can be anywhere with no man-in-the-middle needed.


Computer scientists have discovered a serious Internet vulnerability that allows attackers to terminate connections between virtually any two parties and, if the connections aren't encrypted, inject malicious code or content into the parties' communications.

The vulnerability resides in the design and implementation of RFC 5961, a relatively new Internet standard that's intended to prevent certain classes of hacking attacks. In fact, the protocol is designed in a way that it can easily open Internet users to so-called blind off-path attacks, in which hackers anywhere on the Internet can detect when any two parties are communicating over an active transmission control protocol connection. Attackers can go on to exploit the flaw to shut down the connection, inject malicious code or content into unencrypted data streams, and possibly degrade privacy guarantees provided by the Tor anonymity network.
At the 25th Usenix Security Symposium on Wednesday, researchers with the University of California at Riverside and the US Army Research Laboratory will demonstrate a proof-of-concept exploit that allows them to inject content into an otherwise legitimate USA Today page that asks viewers to enter their e-mail and passwords. The malicious, off-site JavaScript code attack is possible because the vulnerable USA Today pages aren't encrypted. Even if they were protected, attackers could still terminate the connection. Similar attacks work against a variety of other unidentified sites and services, as long as they have long-lived connections that give hackers enough time—roughly 60 seconds—to carry out the attack.




Top sites remain vulnerable

The problematic RFC 5961 has not yet been fully implemented in Windows or Mac OS X, so those operating systems aren't believed to be vulnerable. By contrast, the Linux operating system kernel, starting with version 3.6 introduced in 2012, has added a largely complete set of functions implementing the standard. Linux kernel maintainers released a fix with version 4.7 almost three weeks ago, but the patch has not yet been applied to most mainstream distributions. For the attack to work, only one of the two targeted parties has to be vulnerable, meaning many of the world's top websites and other services running on Linux remain susceptible.
In an accompanying research paper titled Off-Path TCP Exploits: Global Rate Limit Considered Dangerous, the researchers said the vulnerability is the result of changes in the way TCP establishes a connection. When carrying out a so-called three-way handshake, the first of two parties sends a SYN (short for synchronize) packet, the receiving party responds with a SYN-ACK (synchronize-acknowledgement) packet, and the connection is established when the first party sends an ACK packet.
While similar attacks have existed for several years, the introduction of RFC 5961 makes this new exploit much more powerful. That's because the attacker need only have an Internet connection, even when there's no man-in-the-middle ability to control or monitor traffic passing between the two parties. The researchers wrote:
In this paper, we discover a much more powerful off-path attack that can quickly 1) test whether any two arbitrary hosts on the Internet are communicating using one or more TCP connections (and discover the port numbers associated with such connections); 2) perform TCP sequence number inference which allows the attacker to subsequently, forcibly terminate the connection or inject a malicious payload into the connection. We emphasize that the attack can be carried out by a purely off-path attacker without running malicious code on the communicating client or server. This can have serious implications on the security and privacy of the Internet at large.
The root cause of the vulnerability is the introduction of the challenge ACK responses and the global rate limit imposed on certain TCP control packets. The feature is outlined in RFC 5961, which is implemented faithfully in Linux kernel version 3.6 from late 2012. At a very high level, the vulnerability allows an attacker to create contention on a shared resource, i.e., the global rate limit counter on the target system by sending spoofed packets. The attacker can then subsequently observe the effect on the counter changes, measurable through probing packets.
Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that the attack is extremely effective and reliable. Given any two arbitrary hosts, it takes only 10 seconds to successfully infer whether they are communicating. If there is a connection, subsequently, it takes also only tens of seconds to infer the TCP sequence numbers used on the connection. To demonstrate the impact, we perform case studies on a wide range of applications.
Besides injecting malicious JavaScript into a USA Today page, the researchers also show how the vulnerability can be exploited to break secure shell, or SSH, connections and tamper with communications traveling over Tor. In the latter case, attackers can terminate key links in the Tor chain—for instance, those connecting an end user to an entry node, an entry node to a middle relay, or a middle relay to the exit node. The Tor attack could be particularly effective if it knocked out properly functioning exit nodes because the technique would increase the chances that connections would instead use any malicious exit nodes that may exist.
"In general, we believe that a DoS attack against Tor connections can have a devastating impact on both the availability of the service as a whole and the privacy guarantees that it can provide," the researchers wrote. "The default policy in Tor is that if a connection is down between two relay nodes, say a middle relay and an exit relay, the middle relay will pick a different exit relay to establish the next connection. If an attacker can dictate which connections are down (via reset attacks), then the attacker can potentially force the use of certain exit relays."
The researchers went on to offer a workaround solution while administrators of vulnerable systems wait for a permanent fix. While Windows, OS X, and most other operating systems aren't believed to be vulnerable, the researchers warned that they could become susceptible if developers don't use extreme care when more fully implementing RFC 5961.
"It is a subtle problem," researcher Zhiyun Qian told Ars when asked if the vulnerability resided in the RFC specification itself or a specific implementation of it. "I want to say that the RFC is written in a way that if OSes implement it straightforwardly, it is going to be problematic. So I think we should probably split the responsibility between the RFC and implementation."


New air-gap jumper covertly transmits data in hard-drive sounds

New air-gap jumper covertly transmits data in hard-drive sounds

"DiskFiltration" siphons data even when computers are disconnected from the Internet.



Researchers have devised a new way to siphon data out of an infected computer even when it has been physically disconnected from the Internet to prevent the leakage of sensitive information it stores.
The method has been dubbed "DiskFiltration" by its creators because it uses acoustic signals emitted from the hard drive of the air-gapped computer being targeted. It works by manipulating the movements of the hard drive's actuator, which is the mechanical arm that accesses specific parts of a disk platter so heads attached to the actuator can read or write data. By using so-called seek operations that move the actuator in very specific ways, it can generate sounds that transfer passwords, cryptographic keys, and other sensitive data stored on the computer to a nearby microphone. The technique has a range of six feet and a speed of 180 bits per minute, fast enough to steal a 4,096-bit key in about 25 minutes.
"An air-gap isolation is considered to be a hermetic security measure which can prevent data leakage," Mordechai Guri, a security researcher and the head of research and development in the cyber security labs at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, told Ars. "Confidential data, personal information, financial records and other type of sensitive information is stored within isolated networks. We show that despite the degree of isolation, the data can be exfiltrated (for example, to a nearby smart phone)."
Besides working against air-gapped computers, the covert channel can also be used to steal data from Internet-connected machines whose network traffic is intensively monitored by intrusion prevention devices, data loss prevention systems, and similar security measures. The technique is documented in a technical paper titled DiskFiltration: Data Exfiltration from Speakerless Air-Gapped Computers via Covert Hard Drive Noise, which was published Thursday night. Guri and the other Ben-Gurion University researchers who devised the covert channel created the video demonstration below.

 
 
 
 
 
 
DiskFiltration is only the latest method devised by Ben-Gurion University researchers to bridge air gaps. Other techniques include AirHopper, which turns a computer's video card into an FM transmitter; BitWhisper, which relies on the exchange of heat-induced "thermal pings"; GSMem, which relies on cellular frequencies; and Fansmitter, which uses noise emitted by a computer fan to transmit data. In 2013, researchers with Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics devised a technique that used inaudible audio signals to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data from air-gapped machines. The techniques are effective, but their utility in real-world situations is limited. That's because the computers they target still must be infected by malware. If the computers aren't connected to the Internet, the compromise is likely to be extremely difficult and would require the help of a malicious insider, who very well may have easier ways to obtain data stored on the machine. Still, the air-gap jumpers could provide a crucial means to bypass otherwise insurmountable defenses when combined with other techniques in a targeted attack.
Receiving data transmitted by sound generated from a hard drive is generally not efficient. DiskFiltration improves the signal-to-noise ratio by focusing on a narrow range of acoustic frequencies, a feature that effectively strips out background noise. DiskFiltration works even when a hard drive's automatic acoustic management, which reduces acoustic noise, is at its default setting. Still, casual noise emissions from other running processes can sometimes interfere or interrupt the DiskFiltration transmissions.
The most effective way to prevent DiskFiltration-style data exfiltration is to replace hard drives with solid-state drives, since the latter aren't mechanical and generate virtually no noise. Using particularly quiet types of hard drives or installing special types of hard drive enclosures that muffle sound can also be an effective countermeasure. It may also be possible to jam hard-drive signals by generating static noise. Intrusion prevention systems may also be programmed to detect suspicious hard-drive seek patterns used to create the transmissions. Yet another solution is to isolate air-gapped computers from smart phones and other devices with a microphone.

T-Mobile dumps the HTC 10 after just two months

T-Mobile dumps the HTC 10 after just two months

HTC can’t catch a break as carrier opts to stop selling its flagship phone.

Poor HTC. The company's flagship handset, the HTC 10, is apparently not selling well. T-Mobile has decided to dump the device after just two months on the market.
T-Mobile hasn't come out and ended sales officially, but the HTC 10 is no longer available from T-Mobile online. The phone used to live on T-Mobile's website at http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phones/htc-10.html, but that link now redirects to a generic HTC page that only shows the HTC Desire 530. A Reddit thread notes that the HTC 10 vanished from T-Mobile's site in July, which gives it a shelf life of just two months. TmoNews says it was originally told that the 10's disappearance was "a glitch" and that the phones would be back. But as Android Police points out, the 10 is still gone, and local stores don't have any plans to receive more units.
Too bad. We called the HTC 10 the "the best Android flagship of 2016." HTC finally cleaned up the huge front bezels, and we were won over by its metal body and a software package that was close to stock Android. None of that seems to be translating into sales, though. After a 35 percent year-over-year decline in revenue for 2015, HTC is on pace for a 50 percent year-over-year decline in 2016.

Kansas couple sues IP mapping firm for turning their life into a “digital hell”

Kansas couple sues IP mapping firm for turning their life into a “digital hell”

Company fixed the error, but it may be years before the issue is resolved.

 

Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen “countless” law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm.
In their lawsuit filed against MaxMind, the IP mapping firm, the Arnolds allege:
The following events appeared to originate at the residence and brought trespassers and/or law enforcement to the plaintiffs’ home at all hours of the night and day: stolen cars, fraud related to tax returns and bitcoin, stolen credit cards, suicide calls, private investigators, stolen social media accounts, fund raising events, and numerous other events.
James Arnold has even been “reported as holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making pornographic films.”
According to the suit, which was filed last Friday in Kansas federal court, all of these accusations were and continue to be false. Earlier this year, the news site Fusion revealed to the Arnold family and to the world why so many people continuously turn up at the Butler County farm.
As Fusion’s Kashmir Hill reported:
As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.
As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.
And that precise GPS location is exactly where the Arnold family lives.
Randall Rathbun, the Arnolds’ lawyer, told Ars that this continues even now, months after Hill uncovered MaxMind’s error. “I think the last time the sheriff’s office was out was a month ago,” he said.
To its credit, MaxMind has since fixed the error in its IP databases by moving the location of a default IP address to the middle of a Kansas lake, but customers do not often update their data, so it could be many years before this issue is fully resolved.
David Robbins, a company spokesman, declined comment.
“Thanks for reaching out to us,” he said. “MaxMind is aware of the lawsuit but does not comment on pending litigation.”
The lawsuit seeks a judgement of at least $75,000, but Rathbun told Ars that he would likely seek more in forthcoming filings.

Friday, August 12, 2016

Newness is inherently tempting. As people adopt emerging technologies, brands have always followed suit. It's evolutionary. For as long as advertising has existed, brands have flocked towards new forms of communication in order to better present and differentiate themselves

Newness is inherently tempting. As people adopt emerging technologies, brands have always followed suit. It's evolutionary. For as long as advertising has existed, brands have flocked towards new forms of communication in order to better present and differentiate themselves.

However, the success of this strategy is often dependent on whether the brand uses these technologies to provide something of value to its audience. Novelty alone does not justify adoption. So the delivery of convenience, entertainment, knowledge or monetary value must be acknowledged at all times.
While some brands have embraced technology to provide value with proficiency, many have failed. Unfortunately, with today's landscape and tomorrow's forecast, the opportunities for brands to adopt new technologies will only increase exponentially, and as we have and will see, just adopting technology for the sake of it is not enough. Ultimately, a plan of consistency must be put in place moving forward.
Brands help individuals consume and project, so brands must remain consistent. As we know, it isn't easy for brands to craft and preserve these images, styles and voices in order to differentiate themselves. But what each brand has in common with one another is their need to maintain consistency. With the emergence of new technologies, the opportunities for advertising are jeopardizing a brand’s end-goal of a consistent identity.
There is growing room for error. Although adoption of the new is exciting, a brand must prioritize consistency above all else.
What all new technologies have in common, are their ability to provide freedoms. From a brand’s point of view, these freedoms are opportunities for expression. From print to radio to TV to the web, brands have always utilized new technology to better express themselves. This has been most evident when in 2009, Facebook made Business Pages identical to users'. At this moment, brands began to express themselves as near human and as your "friend". This trend hasn't been curbed. Now, individuals literally engage with brands by texting them. As technology knows no limits, these types of opportunities will continue to flourish, making such relationships that much more intimate.
The concern? When we realise it's a brand's purpose to maintain consistency, the rapid emergence of technologies and freedoms for a brand to express themselves will leave room for inconsistencies. When technology is thoughtlessly adopted, we can see images, styles and voices become fragmented by platform, channel, medium and context. For example, when a brand rushes to a new social platform or adopts trends like Chatbots or virtual reality without a consistent purpose or an alignment to provide value, brand splintering will occur. While these risks have always existed, they're particularly worth mentioning now and that much more evident, as new technologies are surfacing faster than ever before.
How does a brand navigate the previously mentioned pitfall? It's quite simple. They must return to their roots. A brand now must ask themselves, what is their mascot or persona? This exercise will allow brands to sustain the swell of changes on the horizon by establishing criterion that new technologies will demand. An amalgamation of characteristics is paradoxical, and more so detrimental to what a brand is supposed to be.


So by imagining brands as living, breathing individuals or creatures, a consistent persona will manifest itself, preventing brands from conveying conflicting images, styles and voices. As technology advances and more freedoms emerge, an established, well thought out brand identity becomes essential to marketing and advertising success. Without this, a brand will be perceived as fluid. And a fluid brand is no brand at all.

Calling for Parliament to take a second look at the EU referendum


Calling for Parliament to take a second look at the EU referendum

Elections and referenda don't come with a two-week, open-box return policy. Maybe they should. Because as the results of the European Union referendum (which was technically an advisory non-binding referendum for MPs to consider) emerged early on Friday morning, Leave voters across the UK realised that they had opened a Pandora's Box of negative consequences. And worst of all, they quickly learned that they'd been repeatedly misled to by the Leave campaign.
Within hours of winning the vote, Nigel Farage admitted that Leave advocates had "made a mistake" when they said £350 million a week would be redirected to the NHS. People had also been told that leaving the EU would put the UK in full control of immigration. Evan Davis found out on Newsnight that this too was untrue.


And there's more. The Leave campaign had advised concerned citizens not to listen to the ‘experts’ and ‘the scaremongers’ and that the economy would be just fine. And yet, in the first day of trading following the result, two trillion US dollars were wiped off the world’s share prices. UK markets lost more money in one day than the country paid into the EU over 15 years (most of which came back in grants, anyway). These losses affect everyone's pensions, jobs, salaries, and government income, and they will push Britain towards a recession that will make it even more difficult to deliver essential public services.
The pound dropped to a 31-year low, with serious impact on British imports and people's holiday travel abroad. And the UK suffered the ignominy of having its credit outlook lowered to ‘negative’ by ratings agency Moody's on the expectation that Brexit would deliver a serious blow to the UK economy.
In the political sphere, Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has announced that a second Scottish independence referendum is highly likely, while Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland have called for a vote on Irish reunification. Some have even suggested for London to become an independent state so it can stay part of Europe (and possibly part of Scotland as well).
Meanwhile, the vast majority of young people, who voted overwhelmingly to remain, feel their own future has been taken out of their hands by an aging UK population that will not have to suffer the consequences of a lifetime out of Europe. As one woman said to me "up to yesterday I thought I had the choice of living and working in 28 European countries, now I'm restricted to one!"
The decision over the UK's future was based on false promises that pushed a minority of the UK's total voting population (17 million out of 46 million) to vote the way it did. Two years before Brexit will even become reality, according to EU rules, it is already having massive consequences on the UK economy, and on society. Brexit has fractured the country more than any other event in recent memory.
Based on the misrepresentation made by the Leave campaign, Parliament needs to take the petition of more than three million people to call for a new referendum seriously. The alternative is to watch a rapid decline of Britain's health and wellbeing.


When Nigel Farage was interviewed a few months ago he said that he would call for a second referendum if Remain won by a narrow margin. "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way," he stated. He went on to say that Remain needed to win by two thirds to end it and avoid a second referendum. Mr. Farage and the Leave campaign should now accept that the reverse scenario also warrants a second look.
The vast majority of MPs voted in by the electorate want the UK to stay part of Europe.  In light of the misrepresentations of the Leave campaign, Parliament should reject the results of this non-binding referendum as Nicola Sturgeon has announced she will do in Scotland’s Parliament. Before the UK government invokes Article 50 of the European Treaty and does irreversible damage to the United Kingdom, the people’s elected representatives must decide whether the facts that have emerged really warrant abandoning the EU and whether a second referendum will be needed.
If you agree that Parliament should take a second look at the EU referendum, please sign this petition.
Update:
It has been very interesting reading the extensive and varied feedback on the opinions I shared in this blog. What is coming through loud and clear is a great deal of passion from the British public and a desire for action. Great Britain and the world at large are going through a tumultuous time. The UK’s politicians – many of them with their own individual aspirations of power - need to behave in a statesmanlike manner more than ever. The Leave campaign accused the Remain campaign of scaremongering. The current situation illustrates clearly why they were not scaremongering, they were highlighting facts. The stock market and the pound are down and the world’s markets have continued to be hit. The business world hates uncertainty and without strong leadership, I worry that the UK’s economy will suffer long-term damage that is on the verge of going beyond repair. Bold, brave action is needed urgently.