Though a resort area, and mostly White area, one in four people there live below the federal poverty level.

USA Today, “Extent of Tennessee fire damage comes into grim focus”, 30 Nov 2016:

The center of Gatlinburg’s tourist district escaped heavy damage, but “it’s the apocalypse” on either side, said Newmansville Volunteer Fire Department Lt. Bobby Balding.

[...]

“In my 25 years of federal (park) service, I’ve participated in many fires, but none of that could have prepared me for this.”

CNN, “Gatlinburg fires: 4 dead; crews search for missing”, 30 Nov 2016:

Investigators believe the trail fire was “human caused,” without offering further information, but it’s still under investigation.

READ MORE...

The Somali shooter at Ohio State had apparently been inspired by neo-liberal propaganda presuming that Muslim incursions and compradors which had been promoted and backed in Burma by right-wing Western sources supposedly had some right to remain there.

Washington Post, “I can’t take it anymore’: Ohio State attacker said abuses of Burma’s Muslims led to ‘boiling point”, 29 Nov 2016:

Participants in a vigil at Jacob’s Porch pray after the attack of Ohio State University, who rammed his car into a crowd of pedestrians and attacked them with a butcher knife.

The Ohio State University student who carried out a knife attack on campus Monday wrote in a Facebook post shortly before the rampage that the abuse of a little-known Muslim community in Burma had driven him to the “boiling point,” writing, “I can’t take it anymore,” CNN reported.

“Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma has led to a boiling point,” Abdul Razak Ali Artan allegedly wrote on his Facebook page shortly before Monday’s rampage, where he injured 11 people with a butcher knife before police killed him.

                 

“America! Stop interfering with other countries,” he wrote.

Artan’s Facebook post throws a little-known and long-persecuted Muslim community in western Burma, also known as Myanmar, into the spotlight.

More than 1 million Rohingya Muslims live in Burma, but they have long been denied citizenship and other basic rights, and many from Burma’s Buddhist majority consider them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi — the Nobel laureate leading Burma’s new civilian government — has been criticized for refusing to use the term “Rohingya,” which she says is inflammatory.

In recent weeks, thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing into the forests and neighboring Bangladesh on the heels of a brutal military crackdown that followed a terrorist attack on police posts Oct. 9, allegedly carried out by Rohingya militants.

Human Rights Watch has alleged that the military has perpetrated a scorched-earth campaign, providing before-and-after satellite images that showed three villages completely burned. The death toll estimates vary, but several dozen have been killed since October, activists say.

Earlier this week, a U.N. refugee agency official, John McKissick, was in the Bangladesh region of Cox’s Bazar — where more than 30,000 people, many of them Rohingya, have fled to — and told the BBC that Burmese troops were “killing men, shooting them, slaughtering children, raping women, burning and looting houses, forcing these people to cross the river” into Bangladesh. He said that the “ultimate goal” of Burma’s government is “ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.”

       
        Kosher/ Neo-liberal media jerking the tears and prayers from fellow Abrahamics

As Trump shows his right wing and Jewish-collaborative colors the dubiousness of White Nationalist support is highlighted.

Mnuchin led the 2009 mortgage bailout of failed subprime mortgage lender IndyMac, now known as One West - the bank received 900 million in federal bail-out money.

Minuchin helped back the construction of Trump International Hotel in Chicago. Trump later sued him to secure more favorable terms.

Minuchin also has interests in the film industry.

Minuchin donated to both Republicans and Democrats in the past, including to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Washington Post, “Trump expected to name financier Steve Mnuchin to Treasury”, 29 Nov 2016:

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to name investor and former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary, opting for an industry insider with no government experience to helm the agency in charge of the nation’s finances, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mnuchin (pronounced mah-NEW-chin) joined Trump’s whirlwind campaign in May as finance chairman, despite the fact that he had never worked in politics and that he had donated to Democrats in the past. He quickly earned Trump’s trust as he worked closely with the Republican National Committee to raise substantial amounts of money in a short period. On policy issues, he was instrumental in crafting the details of Trump’s proposal to overhaul the tax code.

“He’s an expert on finance issues,” said Stephen Moore, who worked with Mnuchin as an adviser to the president-elect on the campaign trail. “He clearly, like Donald Trump, understands that the number one goal for this administration is going to be to grow the economy and get jobs.”

The president-elect scored an early victory Tuesday night when air-conditioning manufacturer Carrier announced that it would reverse plans to move one of its factories from Indiana to Mexico. The company, which is owned by United Technologies, said about 1,000 U.S. jobs would be preserved.

Trump’s tough talk on trade during his campaign helped cement his populist appeal. But Trump — a real estate developer famous for his flashy style — appears to be staffing his Cabinet with advisers who also have amassed extraordinary wealth. Trump is expected to nominate industrialist billionaire Wilbur Ross to lead the Commerce Department, and Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos was named as Trump’s pick for education secretary last week.

Wallsreet Journal, “Treasury Pick Steven Mnuchin Bet on Donald Trump and Won”, 29 Nov 2016:

Former Goldman Sachs executive turned Hollywood financier was Trump’s campaign finance chairman

Major western media outlets, The New York Times and Yahoo are misleading the public - they are vilifying Assad as he retakes Aleppo, inducing the misconception that it is Assad that has created the situation that has led to civilian casualties and from which the residents have had to flee.

Whereas Assad (a Left Nationalist) should be applauded for re-taking Aleppo on behalf of Syria and Aleppo natives, a misconception has been created by these Western outlets that casualties have resulted from Assad’s arbitrary aggression and that rather than seeking temporary safety from the fighting, civilians are fleeing Assad.

Rebels prevented some refugees from fleeing

New York Times, “Thousands Flee Aleppo, Syria, as Government Forces Advance”, 28 Nov 2016:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Thousands of people were sent fleeing for their lives on Monday as rebel fighters lost a large stretch of territory to government forces in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, in what could prove to be a turning point in the conflict, both militarily and psychologically.

Residents described desperate scenes of people’s being killed by shells as they searched for shelter after their homes came under the heaviest bombardment yet of the nearly five-year civil war. Years of airstrikes and shelling have destroyed entire neighborhoods of the rebel-held half of the divided city, once Syria’s largest and an industrial hub.

At least 4,000 people have fled from the rebel-held eastern districts to the city’s government-controlled western side and have registered with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in Jibreen, a neighborhood there, Jens Laerke, the spokesman for the United Nations office of humanitarian affairs, said on Monday.

As the rebels absorbed the harshest blow since they seized more than half the city four years ago, it seemed increasingly likely that President Bashar al-Assad would eventually manage to take back all of Aleppo.

That would give the Syrian government control of the country’s five largest cities and most of the more-populous west, leaving the rebel groups that are most focused on fighting Mr. Assad with only the northern province of Idlib and a few isolated pockets in the provinces of Aleppo and Homs and around the capital, Damascus.

Throughout the day, government troops, supported by Iranian-backed militias from Iraq and the militant group Hezbollah, advanced from the east and north into the rebel-held areas of Aleppo. That included Hanano, one of the first areas to fall, in 2012, and Sakhour.

Residents of Aleppo, Syria, told us how they feel when they hear an aircraft overhead. Eastern Aleppo has been under heavy bombardment by Syrian and Russian forces.

Kurdish-led militias were also involved in the fight, advancing from the west, from the Kurdish-controlled neighborhood of Sheikh Maksoud, taking the rebel-held district of Sheikh Fares.

Kurdish militias have staked out areas of de facto autonomy in parts of the country but are not entirely aligned with either the government or the rebels. The state news media and opposition activists have portrayed them in the current fighting in Aleppo, however, as working with the government to fight rebels. The Kurdish militias have clashed previously with rebels in Aleppo, who shelled the Sheikh Maksoud area.

If the government takes back the whole city, large parts of Syria will still remain outside its control, as Kurdish groups and the Islamic State hold most of the eastern half of the country. But it could effectively spell the end of the Syrian insurgent movements that sprang up against Mr. Assad after a crackdown on protests in 2011.

“It’s like doomsday,” said Zaher al-Zaher, an antigovernment activist in eastern Aleppo, who could communicate only in short bursts of text messages, as internet connections were failing.

Hisham al-Skeif, a member of a council in the rebel-held eastern districts of Aleppo, said he was scrambling to find housing for families who had fled from areas that had been recaptured by the government in the past day.

“The problem today, in this moment, is not water and food,” he said, at one point choking with tears. “We are threatened with slaughtering, slaughtering.”

The advances shattered a standoff that had lasted months, after government forces surrounded and besieged the rebel-controlled parts of the city this year, closing off regular access to food, medicine and other supplies.

The battle of Aleppo has followed a pattern established by the government: Encircle a rebel-held area; bombard it with airstrikes, barrel bombs and artillery; hit not only rebels but medical clinics, schools and other civilian structures; and wait for exhausted residents to run away or make a deal.

That approach has worked in the old city of Homs, and in several Damascus suburbs. But eastern Aleppo is by far the biggest prize the government has tried to win in this way.

In the past two weeks of fighting alone, at least 225 civilians, including at least 25 children, have been killed by government bombardments in rebel-held areas. At least 27 civilians, including 11 children, have been killed by rebel shelling.

Despite an outcry from the United Nations and many governments condemning indiscriminate attacks, the world has largely stood by, unable or unwilling to stop the carnage, even as Syria’s civil war has become a proxy war, with Russia and Iran backing the government and the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, to varying degrees, backing the rebels.

“This is violence that is organized and executed by the Assad government with the willing support of the Russians and the Iranians,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Monday in response to the latest news from Aleppo.

READ MORE...

These ancient “guardians of the gates” of Nimrud, called “lamassu”, were rescued by William Henry Layard and preserved at The British National Museum. Similar ancient treasures remaining at Nimrud were destroyed by Isil.

NPR, “In Northern Iraq, ISIS Leaves Behind An Archaeological Treasure In Ruins”, 26 Nov 2016:

In northern Iraq, outside Mosulin 2014, The Islamic State captured the ancient site of Nimrud and destroyed many of its archaeological treasures that date back 3,000 years. Isil were recently driven out of Nimrud, allowing archaeologists and others to come back and survey the extensive damage.

....including what remained of the remnants of temples and roads to the ancient palace of Ashurnasirpal II.

The king of the Assyrian empire, he built his palace at Nimrud almost three millennia ago. Enough of the cuneiform inscriptions, carved stone friezes and sculptures were left that it had been reconstructed throughout the 20th century by Iraqi and international archaeologists, and later by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, as a kind of on-site museum, where visitors could really imagine the stately building on a hill.

[There was] great pair of sculptures guarding the gate – the mythical beast called a lamassu with the face of a man, body of a bull and the wings of an eagle.

“It was very important to put them at the gates,” she explained recently, “to drive away evil spirits from the city.”

[...]

Then, in 2014, the Islamic State surged through Iraq, taking nearly a third of the country’s territory, along with several ancient sites, including Nimrud, which is about 20 miles southeast of Mosul. They smashed and blew up Ashurnasirpal II’s palace.

[...] attacking the masonry and sculptures, deeming them heretical.

Last week, the Iraqi army retook Nimrud from the extremists, part of a push by an assortment of Iraqi security forces to dislodge ISIS from Mosul and surrounding areas. So Salih returned to see the site for herself.

[...]

In front of the grand entrance to what archaeologists call the northwest palace, built with thick walls around a central courtyard, was a grim pile of chunks

[...]

Ancient tablets with cuneiform writing lie around in pieces. The entrance to the palace is blocked with rubble, with tiny pieces of ancient inscription mixed up in it. A climb to the top of the walls reveals a courtyard strewn with wreckage.

The pride of the palace used to be a stone frieze of the Assyrian figures known as winged genies.

[...]

Now they are all but destroyed.

And despite numerous international initiatives and conferences on emergency heritage management, despite regular statements by Iraqi officials about the importance of the country’s ancient heritage, no soldier is guarding the site. Not so much as a local tribesman.

[...]

Although the site is historically Assyrian, it is not just Iraq’s small, Assyrian minority that sees it as part of its history. Iraqis often cite Nimrud as a source of national pride, part of the long history of the land once known as Mesopotamia.

[...]

No one knows when that might start. The British Museum is leading a project to train Iraqi archaeologists in emergency management.

“All the area which has been under ISIS control will need to be inspected and assessed,” said John MacGinnis, the archaeologist who leads the project.

But MacGinnis said for that to begin, the area has to be secure. And at Nimrud, ISIS is still within mortar range. The sounds of fighting nearby echo every day around the ruins.

MailOnline, 25 Nov 2016:

Erdogan: “I’ll let EVERY migrant into Europe.”

The furious Turkish president has vowed to open his country’s borders to all migrants in revenge after the European Parliament voted to halt EU membership talks.

Turkey’s bid to join the EU now looks doomed after the European Parliament demanded that membership talks with Ankara are frozen.

The demand was made amid growing unease over Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ‘increasingly authoritarian regime’ in the country

The EU struck a deal earlier this year to return migrants to Turkey in return for a package including aid for the refugees and accelerated membership talks.

But now Erdogan has declared that if the freeze continues he will open Turkey’s gates for all migrants to flood into Europe.

Speaking at a congress on women’s justice in Istanbul, he said: ‘If you go any further, these border gates will be opened.

Slovak PM Fico called some journalists “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes.”

Visigrad Post, 26 Nov 2016:

lovakia, Bratislava – Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said some journalists are “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes” as he was questioned about allegations made on Sunday by a former employee of the MFA and the anti-corruption NGO Transparency International.

Zuzana Hlávková was part of a team of the Slovak MFA in charge of organizing cultural events related to the Slovak presidency of the EU. At a news conference on Monday held in conjunction with Transparency International, she accused her superiors of pressuring her into sidestepping public procurement for the ceremony, and working instead with an events agency close to Fico’s leftwing Smer party, wrote Reuters.

She also alleged that a concert marking the start of the presidency in July was organised without public procurement, and that the cost of organizing the event had been set higher than required. Transparency International, an NGO supported by Soros’ Open Society Foundation, leads this attack on the Slovak Prime minister which is well-known for his statements against Soros and some NGOs.

Asked by journalists on Wednesday, November 23, about these allegations, the Slovak PM Robert Fico spoke harshly to journalists. “Some of you are dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes, and I stand by my words,” Fico told journalists. “You don’t inform, you fight with the government.”

Speaking at the same news conference as Fico, the foreign minister, Miroslav Lajčák, also rejected the accusations. “Everything was in line with the law, and the budget allocated for the presidency won’t be even fully spent,” he said.

Science Mag, “Meet the frail, small-brained people who first trekked out of Africa, 22 Nov 2016:

On a promontory high above the sweeping grasslands of the Georgian steppe, a medieval church marks the spot where humans have come and gone along Silk Road trade routes for thousands of years. But 1.77 million years ago, this place was a crossroads for a different set of migrants. Among them were saber-toothed cats, Etruscan wolves, hyenas the size of lions—and early members of the human family.

Here, primitive hominins poked their tiny heads into animal dens to scavenge abandoned kills, fileting meat from the bones of mammoths and wolves with crude stone tools and eating it raw. They stalked deer as the animals drank from an ancient lake and gathered hackberries and nuts from chestnut and walnut trees lining nearby rivers. Sometimes the hominins themselves became the prey, as gnaw marks from big cats or hyenas on their fossilized limb bones now testify.

“Someone rang the dinner bell in gully one,” says geologist Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas in Denton, part of an international team analyzing the site. “Humans and carnivores were eating each other.”

  What was it that allowed them to move out of Africa without fire, without very large brains? How did they survive?
  Donald Johanson, Arizona State University

This is the famous site of Dmanisi, Georgia, which offers an unparalleled glimpse into a harsh early chapter in human evolution, when primitive members of our genus Homo struggled to survive in a new land far north of their ancestors’ African home, braving winters without clothes or fire and competing with fierce carnivores for meat. The 4-hectare site has yielded closely packed, beautifully preserved fossils that are the oldest hominins known outside of Africa, including five skulls, about 50 skeletal bones, and an as-yet-unpublished pelvis unearthed 2 years ago. “There’s no other place like it,” says archaeologist Nick Toth of Indiana University in Bloomington. “It’s just this mother lode for one moment in time.”

Until the discovery of the first jawbone at Dmanisi 25 years ago, researchers thought that the first hominins to leave Africa were classic H. erectus (also known as H. ergaster in Africa). These tall, relatively large-brained ancestors of modern humans arose about 1.9 million years ago and soon afterward invented a sophisticated new tool, the hand ax. They were thought to be the first people to migrate out of Africa, making it all the way to Java, at the far end of Asia, as early as 1.6 million years ago. But as the bones and tools from Dmanisi accumulate, a different picture of the earliest migrants is emerging.

By now, the fossils have made it clear that these pioneers were startlingly primitive, with small bodies about 1.5 meters tall, simple tools, and brains one-third to one-half the size of modern humans’. Some paleontologists believe they provide a better glimpse of the early, primitive forms of H. erectus than fragmentary African fossils. “I think for the first time, by virtue of the Dmanisi hominins, we have a solid hypothesis for the origin of H. erectus,” says Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

       

This fall, paleontologists converged in Georgia for “Dmanisi and beyond,” a conference held in Tbilisi and at the site itself from 20–24 September. There researchers celebrated 25 years of discoveries, inspected a half-dozen pits riddled with unexcavated fossils, and debated a geographic puzzle: How did these primitive hominins—or their ancestors—manage to trek at least 6000 kilometers from sub-Saharan Africa to the Caucasus Mountains? “What was it that allowed them to move out of Africa without fire, without very large brains? How did they survive?” asks paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson of Arizona State University in Tempe.

They did not have it easy. To look at the teeth and jaws of the hominins at Dmanisi is to see a mouthful of pain, says Ann Margvelashvili, a postdoc in the lab of paleoanthropologist Marcia Ponce de León at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi. Margvelashvili found that compared with modern hunter-gatherers from Greenland and Australia, a teenager at Dmanisi had dental problems at a much younger age—a sign of generally poor health. The teen had cavities, dental crowding, and hypoplasia, a line indicating that enamel growth was halted at some point in childhood, probably because of malnutrition or disease. Another individual suffered from a serious dental infection that damaged the jawbone and could have been the cause of death. Chipping and wear in several others suggested that they used their teeth as tools and to crack bones for marrow. And all the hominins’ teeth were coated with plaque, the product of bacteria thriving in their mouths because of inflammation of the gums or the pH of their food or water. The dental mayhem put every one of them on “a road to toothlessness,” Ponce de León says

       

[...]

Regardless of the Dmanisi people’s precise identity, researchers studying them agree that the wealth of fossils and artifacts coming from the site offer rare evidence for a critical moment in the human saga. They show that it didn’t take a technological revolution or a particularly big brain to cross continents. And they suggest an origin story for first migrants all across Asia: Perhaps some members of the group of primitive H. erectus that gave rise to the Dmanisi people also pushed farther east, where their offspring evolved into later, bigger-brained H. erectus on Java (at the same time as H. erectus in Africa was independently evolving bigger brains and bodies). “For me, Dmanisi could be the ancestor for H. erectus in Java,” says paleoanthropologist Yousuke Kaifu of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

In spite of the remaining mysteries about the ancient people who died on this windy promontory, they have already taught researchers lessons that extend far beyond Georgia. And for that, Lordkipanidze is grateful. At the end of a barbecue in the camp house here, he raised a glass of wine and offered a toast: “I want to thank the people who died here,” he said.