Laura Ingraham loses advertisers, goes on ‘vacation’

Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s shtick is to bully and smear and she tried to do this to David Hogg, one of the high school survivors of the Parkland shooting, but found that young people are not pushovers for her tactics. Hogg responded by calling advertisers to boycott her show. When about a dozen of them did so, Ingraham tried to mend the damage by issuing an apology to Hogg “in the spirit of Holy Week”, a weird invoking of religion that not only did not stem the fleeing of advertisers but also prompted widespread mockery.
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Pulse nightclub shooter’s wife acquitted of all charges

The mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June 2016 was a horrific event even by the standards of the US where mass killings are so common, in which 49 people were killed and 58 wounded by a single person Omar Mateen, showing how much firepower he had at his disposal. Mateen himself was killed after a three-hour standoff with police. Mateen had sworn allegiance to ISIS and said that his motive was revenge for US actions against ISIS.
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Diplomatic tit for tat kabuki

We have just gone through another round of diplomatic expulsions. After Russia was accused of poisoning an ex-Russian spy and his daughter in the UK, many nations on the EU, NATO, and the US ‘punished’ Russia by expelling some of their diplomats and closing some consulates. In retaliation, Russia has expelled US diplomats and closed a US consulate in Russia. Such retaliatory moves are a sign that relations between the parties involved have reached a particularly low ebb.
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Racism in cricket

It is said that sports do not build character as much as reveal it. The cricket cheating scandal is a good example of that truism. Today, the Australian cricket authorities issued further summary punishments to captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft, issuing one year bans for Test and first class cricket on Smith and Warner and nine-months on Bancroft. Smith will not be eligible for consideration for captaincy for two years. The announcement singled Warner out as the ringleader of the plot and was not only stripped from his leadership role, he was banned for life from ever being considered for the captaincy. All three will also have to perform 100 hours of community service.
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Transgender and third gender in Pakistan

I have been harshly critical in the past about Pakistan’s slide into religious intolerance, with its Muslim fundamentalist zealots killing and otherwise threatening non-Muslims under the cover of the state’s odious blasphemy laws. The prohibitions, discrimination, and harassment campaigns against the LGBT community in the Islamic world are also well documented. But I heard an encouraging story about a Pakistan TV station having its first transgender news anchor. Maavia Malik is a former model and her selection has not caused the kind of uproar one might have expected in a conservative Muslim country but was instead greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response.
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These students keep impressing me more and more

Siblings Lauren and David Hogg, both students at the Parkland high school where 17 students were killed, were on CNN after the rally being interviewed by Alyson Camerota. Just watch the interview and you will be impressed by how skillfully they countered Camerota’s repeated suggestions that they tone down their rhetoric against politicians and the NRA so that we can all ‘come together’ to solve the issue, the bogus ‘kumbaya’ bipartisanship rubbish that mainstream media love to promote as a means of maintaining the status quo. She was quite condescending in the way she spoke to the Hoggs, treating them as if they were naïve about political realities. They were having none of it and quickly shot down her suggestions using cogent arguments. It should perhaps be noted that Camerota used to work for Fox News before shifting over to CNN.
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I got suckered yet again into watching TV, dammit!

I have been vaguely following the Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) and Donald Trump story as just one more tawdry detail about the political world. I have a TV but no cable and almost never watch any broadcast programs mainly because the constant interruptions for commercials drive me crazy. So it takes considerable prodding for me to watch a program. The much-hyped 60 Minutes interview of Clifford was on last night and I had heard so much about it being explosive that I decided to check it out. The program was due to start at 7:00pm but the preceding basketball game went into overtime so it did not get going until after 7:30, so I got to watch a huge number of commercials.
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