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Mid-afternoon News with Ray – Monday July 20, 2015
Cuban officials formally opened their embassy in Washington, D.C., fully restoring diplomatic relations between the nations after five decades of hostility.
At midnight Monday, Cuba’s flag was hung in the lobby of the U.S. State Department.
“A new stage will begin, long and complex, on the road toward normalization which will require the will to find solutions to the problems that have accumulated over more than five decades and hurt ties between our nations and peoples,” Cuban President Raul Castro said in a televised address.
Likewise, the United States reopened its six-story embassy in Cuba’s captial city of Havana.
“It’s a historic moment,” Cuban diplomat and analyst Carlos Alzugaray said. “The significance of opening the embassies is that trust and respect that you can see, both sides treating the other with trust and respect.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be conflicts — there are bound to be conflicts,” he acknowledged. “But the way that you treat the conflict has completely changed.”
Greek banks finally reopened Monday after being closed for three weeks.
Long lines formed outside banks in Athens as strict limits on cash withdrawals remain in place — 60 euros ($65) a day or a maximum 420 euro ($455) withdrawal weekly.
“I had 20 euros in my pocket when this happened. They said that today we would be able to withdraw 400 euros, but I could only withdraw 60,” pensioner Andreas Chrisavas said.
Greek banks closed their doors on June 29 to prevent a run on the banks after the country flirted with bankruptcy, defaulting on debts to the International Monetary Fund as its second bailout deal expired.
Now average Greek citizens will have to pay for austerity at the cash register in the form of a 23 percent sales tax, up from 13 percent, on many basic goods, making almost everything more expensive in this poor nation. Pensions have also been cut.
Bank customers will still not be able to cash checks, only deposit them into their accounts. Neither will they be able to use their credit or debit cards to withdraw cash abroad, only make purchases.
For Greeks, this is not a solution. And far left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is struggling to contain a growing revolt within his own party over the deal.
JERUSALEM, Israel — The Obama administration and the Netanyahu government continued their campaigns to either endorse or criticize the nuclear deal with Iran. The debate took place as Congress begins its 60-day period to review the agreement.
Both Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took turns on the Sunday talk shows defending their positions.
“Ronald Reagan negotiated with the former Soviet Union. Richard Nixon negotiated with what was then known as Red China. You have to negotiate sometimes with people to make the world and your country safer,” Kerry told told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“And we negotiated because President Obama thought the primary challenge here was getting a nuclear weapon away from Iran and we believe that this deal does that,” he added.
But Netanyahu suggested Iran had just received its “dream deal,” warning the agreement was destined for the same end as the 1994 accord with North Korea.
“There was a celebrated deal just a few years ago, a nuclear deal everybody — the international community, the scientific community — everybody applauded it,” Netanyahu said on “Face the Nation.”
“It was a deal with North Korea,” he continued. “That proved to be a historic deal as well. And North Korea today has a dozen nuclear bombs and is on track to get a hundred nuclear bombs. So I think that this is a repeat of the mistake of North Korea.”
Meanwhile, the clock began ticking on the 60-day period for Congress to review the agreement. The Obama administration, however, plans to take the accord to the U.N. Security Council before Congress can vote.
While Kerry and Netanyahu staked out their positions and Congress began its review of the accord, crowds in Tehran shouted “Death to America.”
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei vowed Iran’s policy toward what he called the “arrogant” United States would not change and pledged to support its allies in the region.
“America’s regional policies run counter to the Islamic Republic’s policies,” Khamenei said. “We will not stop supporting our friends in the region: the oppressed people of Palestine, the oppressed people of Yemen, the people and government of Syria, the people and government of Iraq, the oppressed people of Bahrain, and the true jihadists in Lebanon and Palestine.”
With billions of dollars in sanctions relief, many Middle East observers fear Iran will soon be able to resupply the terror groups: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
In the meantime, as one more sign of the growing tensions in the region, 47 percent of Israelis would support a unilateral strike against Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, all 15 members of the United Nations Security Council gave the Iran nuclear deal a nod of approval on Monday. While the council unanimously endorsed the accord limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for lifting sanctions, it also voted in favor of a measure that would re-impose U.N. penalties should the country breach the agreement.
Several states that have ordered the National Guard to arm military personnel at facilities and recruiting offices in the wake of last week’s shooting rampage in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Those states include Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida.
“I will not permit our citizen-soldiers to remain unable to defend themselves and our facilities around the state,” Indiana Gov. Mike Pence told reporters.
The Pentagon also ordered recruiters into civilian clothes at the office.
Skip Wells was one of the four Marines killed in the shootings in Chattanooga last week.
“We send our service people into harm’s way overseas and that tends to be when we worry about them the most,” his father, Kip Wells, told reporters. “We don’t tend to worry so much when they’re here at home.”
Nancy Proxmire, the mother of the fifth victim, Navy Petty Officer Randall Smith, made a trip to the memorial outside the military recruiting office in Chattanooga on Sunday. Smith died of his wounds in the hospital Saturday.
In tears, Proxmire told reporters, “My son is a hero! He died doing what he loved. He’d have it no other way.”
Meanwhile, the family of the alleged gunman, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, broke their silence this weekend. They expressed sympathy to the victims’ families and noted that the 24-year-old suffered serious mental illness and depression.
“There are no words to describe our shock, horror, and grief,” the family said in a statement.
“We understand there are many legitimate questions that need to be answered,” the family said. “Having said this, now is the time to reflect on the victims and their families, and we feel it would be inappropriate to say anything more other than that we are truly sorry for their loss.”
Abdulazeez was a devout Muslim. So far, the FBI has no evidence he talked with terrorists.
While the biggest weather story of the week is undoubtedly the blockbuster snow affecting western New York, there’s an equally rare phenomenon occurring on the other side of the country: it’s raining in California, and more could come as we head into the winter.
After a winter and early spring yielding record low Sierra snowpack compounding a crippling multi-year drought, parts of California saw a strangely out-of-season soaking late this past week.
Record rainfall fell in southern California. On Thursday, showers and thunderstorms brought locally heavy rainfall to the San Diego area. San Diego International Airport measured 1.51 inches of rain in just about 90 minutes. A total of 1.63 inches fell on Thursday at Lindbergh Field, making it the wettest day in May on record.
This heavy rain brought flash flooding to the area with multiple water rescues reported. There was also a rain delay for the baseball game between the Washington Nationals at San Diego Padres on Thursday night. This is only the fifth rain delay at San Diego’s Petco Park since opening in 2004.
San Diego is also experiencing its second wettest May as of Friday evening, with a monthly total of 2.35 inches. The current record for wettest May is 2.54 inches set in 1921.
Record rainfall also occurred in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday where a daily rainfall record of 0.69 inches of rain was set. LA broke the daily record rainfall again on Friday with an additional 0.16 inches. The previous record was only 0.03 inches set in 1902.
Satellite image and jet stream midday Thursday along the West Coast. Teal-shaded streamlines depict the strongest jet-stream level winds, illustrating the sharp southward plunge of the jet stream off the West Coast.
For much of this past winter and early spring, the polar jet stream had taken a large northward migration into Canada, keeping Pacific storms away from the West Coast.
Instead, late this past week, the jet took a sharp southward plunge over the eastern Pacific Ocean, steering vigorous upper-level disturbances into the West Coast.
While this precipitation may be considered “manna from heaven” in this sun-worshipping state, it is only a tiny drop in a massive bucket that is this multi-year drought.
Let’s stick to the positive news, here. How unusual is this May rain?
How Rare is a May California Soaking?
January-April was the third driest such period on record in California, exceeded only by 2013 — the state’s record driest year — and 1977.
From May through October, only 9 percent of the year’s average rain fell in Los Angeles.
In May, that monthly average was a mere 0.26 inches of rain as the dry season started to set in.
However, L.A. picked up almost four times their average May rainfall in just a two-day time span this week (Thursday and Friday).
In fact, L.A. has only recorded 13 Mays since 1878 with at least an inch of rain, for an average return interval of once every 10-11 years. This last occurred in 2003.
In San Diego, this is even more unusual.
Only once since 1930 has this city synonymous with picture-perfect weather seen a one-inch rainfall in May — May 8, 1977 — when 1.49 inches was measured at Lindbergh Field.
Sierra snow isn’t all that typical in May, either.
Tahoe City, California, only averages 2.3 inches of May snow. By this time of year, spring snowmelt of the heavy Sierra snowpack is well underway, replenishing the state’s reservoirs, a prime source of drinking water.
Senior weather.com meteorologist Nick Wiltgen noted the winter storm warning issued for the Sierra earlier this week was the latest-in-season such warning by the National Weather Service in Sacramento since 2011.
To reiterate, this welcome May event is a tiny drop of drought relief.
While often overstated and oversimplified to imply relief is certain, the developing El Nino may offer hope since the Pacific storm track may not be blocked from California as often next fall and winter, when the real wet season returns to a thirsty state.
Tornadoes ripped through western Illinois Thursday, with the town of Cameron, population 600, taking a direct hit.
Video captured several funnels forming as a multi-vortex storm ripped through Warren County, located southwest of Chicago.
The twisters caused significant damage and left many residents without power. Illinois State Police officials say there no major injuries.
“I lived in this town in 1989 when the last tornado touched down,” Cameron resident Mike Trout, told the Galesburg Register-Mail. “The damage this time is far, far worse; 1989 doesn’t even compare to this.”
Honeybee ‘Crisis’ Now Seen as False Alarm
In 2006 commercial beekeepers began reporting unusually high rates of honeybee die-offs over the winter, blaming a variety of factors for the decline.
Since then the media have warned of a “beepocalypse” threatening America’s food supply. In 2013, NPR said bee declines could bring “a crisis point for crops,” and a Time magazine cover looked ahead at a “world without bees” that are responsible for pollinating one-third of the crops Americans eat.
But here’s the buzz now: There are more honeybee colonies in the U.S. today than in 2006. Data released in March by the Department of Agriculture showed that the number of honeybee colonies is at a 20-year high, and U.S. honey production is at a 10-year high.
“Since colony collapse disorder began in 2006, there has been virtually no detectable effect on the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States, nor has there been any significant impact on food prices or production,” according to the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a Montana-based non-profit environmental think tank, which attributes the industry’s health to the “savvy” of commercial beekeepers.
The beekeepers have been actively rebuilding their colonies, often by splitting healthy colonies into multiple hives and buying new queen bees from commercial breeders.
The fees beekeepers charge farmers to provide pollination services have risen for a few crops, but the higher fees have helped beekeepers offset the cost of rebuilding their hives.
According to the USDA, the honeybee industry thrived last year, with the number of colonies rising to 2.74 million from 2.64 million in 2013. The honey yield per colony also rose, from 56.6 pounds to 65.1 pounds, and production increased from 149 million pounds to 178 million.
Yet the Obama administration last year announced the formation of a task force to develop a “federal strategy” to promote honeybees and other pollinators. Last month the task force disclosed a plan aimed at reducing honeybee-colony losses to “sustainable” levels. It calls for more than $82 million in federal funding to promote pollinator health.
PERC observed: “Somehow, without a national strategy to help them, beekeepers have maintained their colonies and continued to provide the pollination services our modern agricultural system demands.
“With U.S. honeybee colonies now at a 20-year high, you have to wonder: Is our national pollination strategy a solution in search of a crisis?”
Last week, pro-life activists published a three-hour video of Planned Parenthood’s top doctor talking about the exchange of fetal organs that are extracted from women during abortion. “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part,” Dr. Deborah Nucatola tells her lunch guests, undercover activists who posed as members of a biologics startup. “I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
Ever since the video’s release, the apologists for legal abortion at Planned Parenthood and in the media have been trying to crush this story with euphemisms. The mainstream media dutifully repeated and expanded on Planned Parenthood’s talking points. The story went like this: A group of fanatics, one of whom is known to pray (ew!), perpetrated a hoax. They falsely portrayed Planned Parenthood’s program of life-saving tissue donations as a sale (which would be illegal).
What has gone largely unmentioned is that the activists also released a complete unedited video. The media went to extreme lengths to avoid quoting this doctor on which parts of an unborn child she “crushes” to preserve valuable organs. The media also failed to mention that she discussed Planned Parenthood affiliates that want to “do a little better than break even” on these transactions. And the reports don’t mention that a firm associated with the sale of these fetal livers, hearts, and headsadvertised the fiscal benefits of preserving them, and had that very daytaken its website offline.
Planned Parenthood’s top talking point was that the video was “dishonestly edited.” The truth is more the opposite. The video revealed the reality that Planned Parenthood and its defenders are working hard to spin. When Planned Parenthood gives one of its patients this consent formfor organ donation, the language is dishonestly edited, referring to hearts and livers as “blood and/or tissue.” When speaking candidly to presumed professionals in the biz, however, PP’s top doctor is far more precise. After all, how do you think Planned Parenthood would react to legislation requiring it to explicitly ask patients if they want to donate the “heart, liver, or brain” of their aborted child to research?
I doubt addressing the conscience of most hard-core abortion supporters is likely to effect change. A moment’s reflection on biology tells you that at the time of conception (not implantation), a unique human DNA code comes into being, bearing a likeness to its mother and father. A moment’s reflection on evolution tells you that from that same moment, the mother’s own body goes through physiological changes designed specifically to protect a healthy unborn child from harm. A glancing familiarity with human reproduction tells you that elective abortions are performed on unborn children with recognizably human features. Arms that can flail, fingers that can grasp, brains that can perceive pain. There is no one part of abortion that is more horrifying than abortion itself.
Someone who knowingly accepts the “crushing” and “snipping” of developing children as part of life in enlightened times, who resolves themselves to this practice as society’s comprehensive and just response to a pregnant woman in crisis, is a person whose conscience is at the ready to accept or wave away any enormity around the practice. If you forced yourself to contemplate them at length, you might question the moral character of the whole enterprise. So you dismiss as local crime Kermit Gosnell’s horror-clinic, where plunging the sink revealed a baby’s arm, and you turn away from stories about hospitals that burn the remains of unborn children as part of a renewable heating energy source. Planned Parenthood’s financial transactions in recently severed baby heads is just the humanitarianadvance of “Science! FTW!” Could you object if they labeled a bag of heads with a meme of Neil deGrasse Tyson? What, are you such a troglodyte that you are “grossed out by science?” We’re just plunging science deep into some necks — I mean “tissue” — here.
Some argue that the pro-life activists are just taking advantage of a natural squeamishness to medical procedures, that they “zero in on those gross medical details for maximum impact.” As if the phrase “I’m gonna crush this” is something only a properly desensitized medical professional can understand. I don’t believe the reaction of disgust here is purely physical.
Just this week I’ve watched television shows that included innocent people being shot in the head, with their blood spilling out in a little gusher. There was once a popular show on SpikeTV called 1,000 Ways to Die, in which extremely gruesome deaths were re-enacted for a thrill. Medical dramas and documentaries show people going into active and traumatic surgery.
We can see bloody cop dramas because we are allowed to deplore the actions depicted, and console ourselves that they are extraordinary and unlawful. The gore of 1,000 Ways to Die we can live with because the events are so abnormal, so unchosen. And the details of medical dramas on television (and in our own lives) are bearable because we know that doctors are trying to save a human life.
The reason the pro-life activist video has to be dismissed as a “hoax” is the same reason the hailed pro-choice activist kept the film of her own abortion framed from the neck up. And it’s the same reason Planned Parenthood wants media outlets to use their bloodless language about “tissues.” Because the clinic, the media, and the culture want your approval of abortion as ordinary, lawful, and competently chosen. They can’t let you see what it actually is: the violent destruction of a human life.
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So until the next newscast this is Ray Mossholder, praying for you my friend. Hav
Mid-afternoon News with Ray – Monday July 20, 2015
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Mid-afternoon News with Ray – Monday July 20, 2015