Brothers Ola and Bola Osundairo, who were hired by “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett to attack him, join "Dan Abrams Live" to discuss the actor's reversed conviction. mollett, who is Black and gay, alleged his attackers shouted racist and homophobic slurs at him before a noose around his neck. “Jussie is a great actor … He does not, and cannot, say the truth,” Bola Osundairo said.
>Dough
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/us/politics/steven-j-rosen-dead.html
Steven J. Rosen, Fiercely Influential Advocate for Israel, Dies at 82
He was a prominent behind-the-scenes figure in Washington whose career was derailed when he was charged with leaking government secrets. The case was later dropped.
Steven J. Rosen, a hawkish supporter of Israel who strengthened the clout of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a Washington lobbying group, but whose career was derailed when he was charged with leaking government secrets, a case that was later dropped, died on Oct. 28 near his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 82.
His partner, Barbara Schubert, said his death, in a memory-care center, was from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Rosen was a prominent behind-the-scenes figure in Washington from the 1980s to the early 2000s, serving as the director of foreign policy issues for AIPAC, as the pro-Israel group is known. He forged consequential ties with officials in the State Department and the White House to promote American support for Israel.
He was known as a brainy, hard-charging advocate, and his private life was as changeable as his moods: He was married and divorced six times.
“He’s a mercurial character, very intense, very smart, in many ways brilliant, but somewhat misanthropic,” Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel, whom Mr. Rosen advised on a doctoral dissertation, told The Washington Post in 2006. “His personality is so intense that he can be off-putting to people, especially among the gray suits of a bureaucracy.”
Mr. Rosen had worked for AIPAC for 23 years when he was charged in 2005, under the World War I-era Espionage Act, with sharing secret national security information that he had received from government officials with journalists and the Israeli Embassy.
The highly unusual prosecution raised alarms about whether the government was moving to turn the trading of inside information, practiced daily among Washington power players and journalists, into a criminal activity. It also deeply embarrassed AIPAC, raising the sensitive issue of the role of Jewish American supporters of Israel who cultivate close, behind-the-scenes ties with government officials.
By 2009, the case had collapsed and all charges were dropped. But Mr. Rosen had already been fired by AIPAC, despite more than two decades as one of the most influential figures in an influential organization.
Over dinner at a restaurant, Mr. Rosen once showed a writer for The New Yorker a napkin and bragged: “You see this napkin? In 24 hours, we could have the signatures of 70 senators on this napkin.”
>Over dinner at a restaurant, Mr. Rosen once showed a writer for The New Yorker a napkin and bragged: “You see this napkin? In 24 hours, we could have the signatures of 70 senators on this napkin.”
From the time he joined AIPAC as a researcher in 1982, after a decade of working in academia, Mr. Rosen helped broaden the group’s influence. He promoted the view that Israel was more than a protectorate of America’s: The two countries were partners in a strategic alliance, he argued, an opinion affirmed by the Reagan administration, which designated Israel a “non-NATO ally.”
“Steve was the first person to say that little Israel could be a major non-NATO strategic ally,” Jonathan Kessler, a former AIPAC colleague, said in an interview.
Mr. Rosen lobbied for high-level cooperation, including joint American-Israeli naval maneuvers, over the initial opposition of the Defense Department. And in 1996, he and AIPAC colleagues helped draft a law placing American sanctions on Iran, which he considered Israel’s greatest threat, because of Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
One of Mr. Rosen’s innovations was to expand the reach of AIPAC’s influence by lobbying not just Congress, but also members of the executive branch. He developed close ties with officials in policy positions at the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon.
One of those contacts, Lawrence A. Franklin, an Iran analyst at the Pentagon, came under suspicion from the F.B.I. for leaking secrets to the press. In 2004, he turned cooperating witness and wore a wire while the F.B.I. recorded a conversation he had with an AIPAC analyst, Keith Weissman. Federal prosecutors said Mr. Franklin passed classified information to Mr. Weissman, who repeated it to Mr. Rosen.
According to an August 2005 indictment, both AIPAC officials then shared details with an Israeli diplomat and a Washington Post reporter, later identified as Glenn Kessler. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were charged with illegally disclosing classified national security information about terrorism and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
During the investigation of the case, prosecutors played a recording of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman’s conversation with Mr. Kessler for an AIPAC lawyer, who immediately “advised the group to fire the men,” The New York Times reported.
Neither one was charged with spying. But their indictment under the Espionage Act raised concerns that the George W. Bush administration, which was trying to crack down on leaks, was making a felony of the kind of high-level information-swapping that routinely takes place in Washington.
Mr. Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, threatened to call as trial witnesses more than a dozen senior Bush officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to demonstrate that such activity was a routine part of policy-making, rather than something nefarious.
In 2009, with new Justice Department leadership under the presidency of Barack Obama, the charges against Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were dropped.
Mr. Rosen said then that the case had been pushed by government officials who had “an obsession with Israel and the theory that it spies on America.”
“Thank God we live in a country where you can defend yourself against an injustice like this,” he told The Washington Post.
Steven Jack Rosen was born on July 22, 1942, in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of four sons of Leon Rosen and Pauline (Dinnerstein) Rosen. His father worked in a factory, and his mother managed the home.
When Steven entered Hofstra College, his parents also enrolled there to continue their educations. His mother went on to earn a degree in fine art.
Mr. Rosen received a Ph.D. from Syracuse University in political science and spent a decade teaching, at Brandeis University, the University of Pittsburgh and the Australian National University.
In the late 1970s, he left academia to join the RAND Corporation, a research institute with close ties to the Pentagon. In the 1980s, he was wooed by AIPAC, as it hired a cadre of weapons experts and strategic analysts.
He and Ms. Schubert married in 1962, but she left after a year, she said, before divorcing him. They reunited many years later and were partners for the last 23 years of Mr. Rosen’s life, although they didn’t remarry.
Besides Ms. Schubert, Mr. Rosen’s survivors include his sons, Jesse and Jonah; his daughter, Jamie Rosen; and three grandchildren.
Ms. Schubert said that Mr. Rosen never hid the fact that he had been married and divorced so many times. “He wasn’t embarrassed about anything he did,” she said.
After he was dismissed by AIPAC, Mr. Rosen continued to seek influence over policy by writing for think tanks, including the neoconservative Middle East Forum and the European Leadership Network.
In 2009, a series of blog posts he wrote kicked off a campaign that derailed the appointment of Chas W. Freeman Jr., a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as chair of the National Intelligence Council under President Obama. Mr. Freeman angrily blamed “the Israel lobby” for his defeat.
Mr. Rosen’s son Jesse posted an Instagram reminiscence of his father this month, calling him “a real tough guy” who would never admit to losing a fight.
“He was like a stubborn wise owl,” he wrote, “who somehow always knew more than you.”
does israel have nukes?
Did Kennedy know?
hey you did the thing
this was a nuclear move wasn't it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerch_Strait_incident
it planned to blow up the Crimean Bridge with a nuclear bomb
>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14118933/petition-demanding-General-Election-Labour.html
A petition calling for a general election has exceeded the amount needed for a response from the government and needed to be considered for a debate in in parliament.
The online petition has surpassed 200,000 signatures, at the time of publication, after being widely shared on social media since being created on Wednesday.
It smashed through the 100,000 mark today which is the amount needed for it to be considered for a debate in parliament.
A petition needs 10,000 signatures for a government response.
Set up by Michael Westwood, the petition reads: 'I would like there to be another General Election.
'I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.'
The government website reads: 'Petitions which reach 100,000 signatures are almost always debated.
'But we may decide not to put a petition forward for debate if the issue has already been debated recently or there’s a debate scheduled for the near future. If that’s the case, we’ll tell you how you can find out more about parliamentary debates on the issue raised by your petition.
'MPs might consider your petition for a debate before it reaches 100,000 signatures.'
It comes following a difficult week for the the government as farmers took to the streets in protest o voice their objections to the inheritance tax measures announced in the Budget.
And in a recent poll it revealed that Keir Starmer's approval ratings have plummeted by 43 points since he entered Downing Street.
The Prime Minister has defined his brief premiership with 'tough choices' on public spending - including cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance for millions of pensioners and ending the £2 bus fare cap.
But the latest approval ratings from think tank More in Common suggest his pessimism is turning off voters who gave him an electoral landslide in July.
The proportion who feel he is doing a 'somewhat good' or 'very good' job minus those who think his performance is 'somewhat bad' or 'very bad' is at negative 38. Sir Keir started his time in No 10 positively, with a plus five approval rating.
This rose as high as eleven in August as he rode the wave of optimism.
But since a fall in September, the Prime Minister has failed to recover his own personal ratings.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14117385/jaguar-boss.html
Jaguar boss hits out at 'vile hatred and intolerance' after car fans turned on firm's widely-ridiculed woke rebrand
The revamp sees the Jaguar name spelled out in a new specially-created type font call 'Jaguar Exuberant'. It combines mainly lower case letters with an upper-case capital 'G'.
masons
>G
Highlighting that 800 people had worked on the radical redesign and re-branding, he jokingly promised: 'We have not been sniffing the white stuff.'
We have not been sniffing the white stuff.
neat