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rump is doing his best to defend skipping out on intelligence briefings since he won the election last month. It’s recently been reported that the President-elect only receives one briefing per week and on Sunday, he suggested that he is too smart to be given them daily. “I get it when I need it,” the 70-year-old said in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “First of all, these are very good people that are giving me the briefings. And I say, ‘If something should change from this point, immediately call me. I’m available on one minute’s notice.’” Last week, Reuters published a report saying that the President-elect was only receiving one briefing per week – far fewer than his predecessors. Still, Mr Trump said that daily briefings are not necessary.”I’m, like, a smart person,” he explained Sunday. “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years. Could be eight years – but eight years. I don’t need that.” Meanwhile, Mr Trump confirmed that his running mate, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, and his generals are receiving the intelligence briefings more frequently. “And I’m being briefed also,” he said, “but if they’re going to come in and tell me the exact same thing that they tell me – you know, it doesn’t change, necessarily. “Now, there will be times where it might change. I mean, there will be some very fluid situations. I’ll be there not every day, but more than that. But I don’t need to be told, Chris, the same thing every day, every morning – same words. ‘Sir, nothing has changed. Let’s go over it again.’ I don’t need that.”
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ussia has banned a picture depicting President Vladimir Putin as a potentially gay clown. Russian news outlets are having trouble reporting exactly which image of the Internet’s many Putin-gay-clown memes is now illegal to share. Because, you know, it’s been banned. But the picture was described last week on the Russian government’s list of things that constitute “extremism.”
Item 4071: a picture Item 4071: a picture of of a a Putin-like person “with Putin-like person “with eyes andlips lips made made up,” up,” captioned and with an implicit implicit anti-gay slur, implying “the “the supposed nonslur, implying supposed standard sexual orientation nonstandard sexual orientaof theofpresident of theof Russian tion the president the Federation.” Russian Federation.” The image became popular in 2013, after Russia passed a law banning propagandizing to children about “non-traditional sexual relations,” and gay rights protesters were beaten and arrested. But gay Putin memes have proliferated as Russia has cracked down on both sexual liberties and online speech in
recent years. A Kremlin spokesman told Russia’s state-run news service, Tass, that he hadn’t seen the Putin-clown picture, though he was sure it didn’t bother the president. “Kremlin says Putin skilled at brushing off ‘vulgarities’ hurled against him,” reads the state-sanctioned headline on that interview. The Kremlin has also become fairly adept at controlling what people say about each other on the Internet. Russia passed its first “Internet extremism” laws in 2013, according to the Moscow Times — a year after Putin returned to the presidency and began restricting civil rights. A year later, the paper reported, Putin signed a law imposing prison sentences for people who give so much as thumbs-up to a forbidden online post. Those include an article about a theoretical coup, which landed a philosophy professor in detention. In 2015, Russian authorities began shutting down websites of Putin critics, and restricting nearly all-anonymous blogs, The Washington Post reported. And Russia’s Internet censor has long allowed public figures to file court complaints if they run across a meme that misrepresents their “personality.”
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orth Korea has forbidden people from making sarcastic comments about Kim Jong-un or his totalitarian regime in their everyday conversations. Even indirect criticism of the authoritarian government has been banned. Residents were warned against criticising the state in a series of mass meetings held by functionaries across the country. “One state security official personally organised a meeting to alert local residents to potential ‘hostile actions’ by internal rebellious elements,” a source in Jagang Province told Radio Free Asia’s Korean Service. “The main point of the lecture was ‘Keep your mouths shut.’” Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as “This is all America’s fault” would
constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime. “This habit of the central authorities of blaming the wrong country when a problem’s cause obviously lies elsewhere has led citizens to mock the party,” an anonymous source said. Another mocking expression, “A fool who cannot see the outside world,” was also said to be circulating in the totalitarian state, referring to the country’s notoriously isolationist leader. The phrase was apparently conceived when officials voiced shock that Mr Kim did not attend celebrations held in Russia and China to mark the end of the Second World War.
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One In Eight Young People In The UK Have Never Seen A Real Cow
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ne in eight young people in the UK have never seen a cow in real life, according to a survey. While they may have spotted a cow on television, 12pc of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK are so unfamiliar with the countryside they have never seen cattle in person. A fifth said they have never even left the city they live in. The research also found a substantial lack of knowledge among young adults when it comes to basic fruit and vegetables. More than half of those polled did not know strawberries are a summer fruit and nine in ten do not know turnips are best grown in the winter. Over half say it is more than a year since they climbed a tree while for
29 per cent it is that long since they swam in a river. Four in ten confess their knowledge of the countryside is ‘poor’ or ‘extremely poor’.Just two in ten believe their knowledge of the countryside is ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Former JLS singer JB Gill, who recently took up farming after spending his life living in London, is encouraging youngsters to improve their knowledge of the country.
(2,000 people were polled by The Prince’s Countryside Fund ahead of National Countryside Week.)
1 in 5 Sausages Tested Across Canada Contained Different Meat Than Labelled
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federally funded study has found that 20 per cent of sausages sampled from grocery stores across Canada contain ed meats that weren’t on the label. The study, published this week in the journal Food Control, was conducted by researchers at the University of Guelph and commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It examined 100 sausages that were labelled as containing just one ingredient — beef, pork, chicken or turkey. “About one in five of the sausages we tested had some off-label ingredients in them, which is alarming,” said Robert Hanner, lead author of the study and an associate professor with the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph. The CFIA reached out to Hanner
for the study after the European horse meat scandal in 2013, where food labelled as beef was found to have horse meat — in some cases beef was completely substituted by horse meat. The goal of the study, the federal food regulator said, was to examine scientific methods used by Hanner to see if the CFIA could use them in its regulatory practices. The scientific tools showed promising results, the CFIA said. ` Seven of 27 beef sausages examined in the study contained pork. One of 38 supposedly pure pork sausages contained horse meat. Of 20 chicken sausages, four also contained turkey and one also had beef. Five of the 15 turkey sausages studied contained no turkey at all — they were entirely chicken. None of the sausages examined contained more than one other type of meat in addition to the meat the sausage was meant to contain.“The good news is that typically beef sausages predominantly contain beef, but some of them also contain pork, so for our kosher and halal consumers, that is a bit disconcerting,” Hanner said.
A Garbage Patch The Size Of Mexico Was Just Discovered In The Pacific Ocean
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cientists have found another patch of plastics, human trash, and chemical sludge deep within in a remote pocket of the Pacific Ocean. Much like the more northerly “Great Pacific garbage patch” found between Hawaii and mainland US, it’s definitely not good news. The new patch was recently confirmed by a project led by oceanographer Charles Moore of the Algalita Research Foundation during a six-month voyage around the Pacific, off the coasts of Chile and Easter Island and within the South Pacific Gyre. Previous research has hinted at the presence of the patch, but this is most concrete evidence to date. The researchers are still in the process of crunching the data on this new discovery, however Moore estimates it has the potential to be as big as
a million square kilometers (386,100 square miles) – that’s four times the size of the United Kingdom. “We discovered tremendous quantities of plastic,” oceanographer Charles Moore from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, told ResearchGate. “My initial impression is that our samples compared to what we were seeing in the North Pacific in 2007, so it’s about ten years behind.” Make no mistake, this patch is huge. However, they’re perhaps not as dense as some images portray. Initial analysis shows that most of the plastics found in this new discovery are the size of a grain of rice, with around a million plastic particles per square kilometer. However, it does also include large pieces such as bottles, caps, fishing nets, etc. So far, most of the trash in the newly confirmed patch looks like it came from commercial enterprises, such as the fishing industry, as opposed to litter from consumers like you and me. These patches are generally caused by giant systems of circulating currents, known as a gyres, that sweep marine debris up from ports, rivers, harbors, docks, and ships. The debris then becomes trapped in certain areas by oceanic features, like winds or currents, and accumulate in great amounts. Eventually, these “patches” form. The most famous of which is the central North Pacific Ocean discovered in the 1980s.