Sanders would use wealth tax for universal child care, pre-K

WASHINGTON (AP) —

Bernie Sanders has joined fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren in proposing that a “wealth tax” can finance government-funded child care from infancy through age 3 for every American family, then provide universal pre-kindergarten programs after that.

Fresh off his win in Nevada, the Vermont senator called the nation’s child care and early education “an international embarrassment” while unveiling a plan Monday that he said would fix it. His proposal would provide a minimum of 10 hours of daily child care, even for parents who work non-traditional schedules.

Sanders previously proposed an annual wealth tax starting at 1% on households worth $32 million or more and increasing to 8% on fortunes of at least $10 billion.

That’s more ambitious than Warren's signature wealth tax, which kicks in on fortunes worth $50-plus million and would also fund universal child care.

Warren, a Massachusetts senator, and other presidential hopefuls have similarly proposed universal child care and pre-kindergarten. Sanders says the federal government will impose quality standards for his pre-kindergarten program, including minimum child-to-adult ratios and minimum wages for workers.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/sanders-wealth-tax-universal-child-110615275.html

Deep Cleaning Crew

Trump news – live: Ridicule as president and Modi take it in turns to mispronounce names, as right-wing SCOTUS wife attempts to ‘purge’ White House

Narendra Modi greets Donald Trump on his arrival in India: EPA

Donald Trump has arrived in India where he received a bear hug from Narendra Modi and a lavish welcome from the locals – only to then mangle the pronounciation of several key names in his address to a 100,000-strong crowd at the Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad, including that of legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Modi in turn mispoke and called him “Doland Trump”.

The president dished out lavish praise for the country, hailing its economic progress and thriving Bollywood film industry and celebrating the authoritarian prime minister as “very tough”, winning a huge cheer from the crowd in pledging to snuff out the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism”.

Back in DC, the president has reportedly assembled a network of allies to help him remove anti-Trump “deep state” operatives he believes are working against him in the US government, with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen understood to be involved in the effort.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-news-live-ridicule-president-102343357.html

‘Mad’ Mike Hughes dies in rocket crash trying to prove Earth is flat

BARSTOW, Calif. — A California man who said he wanted to fly to the edge of outer space to see if the world is round has died after his home-built rocket blasted off into the desert sky and plunged back to earth.

“Mad” Mike Hughes was killed on Saturday afternoon after his rocket crashed on private property near Barstow, California.

Waldo Stakes, a colleague who was at the rocket launch, said Hughes, 64, was killed.

The Science Channel said on Twitter it had been chronicling Hughes’ journey and that “thoughts & prayers go out to his family & friends during this difficult time.”

“It was always his dream to do this launch,” the Twitter message said.

Hughes also was a limousine driver, who held the Guinness world record for “longest limousine ramp jump,” for jumping 103 feet in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limousine, at a speedway in 2002.

A video on TMZ.com showed the rocket taking off, with what appears to be a parachute tearing off during the launch. The steam-powered rocket streaks upward, then takes around 10 seconds to fall straight back to earth. Shrieks can be heard as the rocket plows into the desert.

Freelance journalist Justin Chapman, who was at the scene, said the rocket appeared to rub against the launch apparatus, which might have caused the mishap with the parachute.

In March 2018, Hughes propelled himself about 1,875 feet into the air. He deployed one parachute and then a second one but still had a hard landing in the Mojave Desert in California, and injured his back.

“This thing wants to kill you 10 different ways,” Hughes said after that launch. “This thing will kill you in a heartbeat.”

He said in a video that his goal was to eventually fly to the edge of outer space to determine for himself whether the world is round.

“I don’t want to take anyone else’s word for it,” he said in the video, posted on the BBC News website. “I don’t know if the world is flat or round.”

In another video posted on his YouTube site, Hughes said he also wanted “to convince people they can do things that are extraordinary with their lives.”

“My story really is incredible,” Hughes once told The Associated Press. “It’s got a bunch of story lines — the garage-built thing. I’m an older guy. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, plus the Flat Earth. The problem is it brings out all the nuts also.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mad-mike-highes-dies-in-rocket-crash-trying-to-prove-earth-is-flat-2020-02-23?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo

>>8233732

US: Free speech no excuse for crimes of WikiLeaks' Assange

LONDON (AP) — The U.S. government began outlining its extradition case against Julian Assange in a London court on Monday, arguing that the WikiLeaks founder is not a free-speech champion but an “ordinary” criminal who put many lives at risk with his secret-spilling.

U.S. authorities want to try Assange on espionage charges that carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison over the 2010 publication of hundreds of thousands of secret military documents and diplomatic cables. Assange argues he was acting as a journalist entitled to First Amendment protection.

Lawyer James Lewis, representing the U.S. government, called WikiLeaks' 2010 document deluge “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”

“Reporting or journalism is not an excuse for criminal activities or a license to break ordinary criminal laws," he said.

Assange says the leaked documents exposed U.S. military wrongdoing. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

But Lewis said Assange was guilty of “straightforward" criminal activity in trying to hack the computer. And he said WikiLeaks' activities created a “grave and imminent risk” to U.S. intelligence sources in war zones, who were named in the documents.

"What Mr. Assange seeks to defend by free speech is not the publication of the classified materials, but he seeks to defend the publication of sources — the names of people who put themselves at risk to assist the U.S. and its allies," the lawyer said.

Lewis said some informants who had been assisting the Americans had to be relocated after the leak, and others “subsequently disappeared.”

He said it wasn't the role of the British court to determine whether Assange was guilty.

“This is an extradition hearing, not a trial," he said. “The guilt or innocence of Mr. Assange will be determined at trial in the United States, not in this court.”

Full article https://www.yahoo.com/news/extradition-hearing-begin-wikileaks-founder-084512349.html

Lock up Drug Dealers for LIFE, and there wouldn't be so many addicted people. But Nah, just slap them on the wrist, and teach the kids how to treat an OD. Far too Profitable.

Open, Insert, Squirt.' In This Town, Children Are Taught to Administer Narcan

ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. — Shortly after his first-grade class let out for the day, Nash Kitchens sat with a dozen other young children at a library and played a murder mystery game that had a surprising plot twist.

The victim was a restaurant worker who had been found dead in a freezer. The killer, the children would discover, was heroin laced with fentanyl, an often fatal opioid.

Nash, who at 7 years old has a relative who has struggled with addiction, was wide-eyed as Jilian Reece, a drug prevention educator, talked about an ongoing opioid epidemic in their small rural community. She then demonstrated how to administer Narcan, an overdose reversal nasal spray.

“It’s just like a little squirt gun,” she told the group of children, before passing around the small plastic device for them to hold and squeeze. At the end of the session, each child received a blue zippered bag containing two doses of Narcan to take home.

Like scores of communities across America, Carter County, Tennessee, which includes Elizabethton, has been struck hard by an opioid crisis that has ravaged families and reshaped how a generation of young people are being raised. Nationally, few cities have been spared as more than 400,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses.

In Carter County, where 56,000 people live in a cluster of small cities and rural towns on the North Carolina border, nearly 60 people have died from opioid overdoses since 2014. That year, 8.1 million painkiller prescriptions were written in Tennessee, more than the state’s population of about 6.5 million.

Desperate to save lives, county health officials have embraced a practical — if radical — strategy for stemming the tide of addiction: teaching children as young as 6 how to reverse an overdose.

Full article https://www.yahoo.com/news/open-insert-squirt-town-children-125954792.html