CNN used to be my default network.  During the Obama years I found them to be more diverse in content than the other cable news channels. Unfortunately, that has changed for the worse. Too much Trump, too much bias.  I miss the other stories and the excellent documentaries like "Blackfish".

Attendees at a business conference in Berlin laughed and applauded on Tuesday when organizers cut off U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross' remarks.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Ross spoke onscreen for about 20 minutes at an event hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party before organizers cut off his video feed.
"That was the U.S. secretary of commerce, who had promised us a 10-minute statement," Werner M. Bahlsen, head of the party's economic council, told the audience, as quoted by Bloomberg. "As you saw, he spoke a bit slowly, so it took a bit longer. Now we look forward to the chancellor's speech."

it will be a 3 hour Trump roast.

Trump claimed that Scarborough and Brzezinski courted him for an interview at Mar-a-Lago around the New Year's Eve holiday.
"She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!" the president wrote.
He actually said yes, according to accounts of their meeting. Trump, Scarborough and Brzezinski mingled with guests and had a private chat.
For the record, photos from Mar-a-Lago do not show any blood or bandages on Brzezinski's face.

Then, I noticed yesterday that retired men's tennis star John McEnroe had decided to weigh in on the remarkable career of Serena Williams, who's won 23 Grand Slam titles including this year's Australian Open, before going on maternity leave in February. Speaking to NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro, he said that Williams would rank "like 700" as a player on the men's circuit.

Now, to be fair to McEnroe, who's otherwise been a huge fan of Ms. Williams as well as a champion of women's tennis and a staunch advocate for equal prize money, his remarks were rather unfairly seized upon by members of the media, who took them out of their overall context as "click bait," i.e., a means to manufacture controversy and generate the requisite amount of outrage from the usual suspects.

But I think these two stories also show that, on the 45th anniversary of Title IX's enactment nearly 44 years after Billie Jean King whipped the gloriously middle-aged Bobby Riggs in straight sets in pro tennis's celebrated "Battle of the Sexes," we still have a pretty long way to go in the march for women's overall equality.

As for Serena Williams, per the Washington Post's Sally Jenkins in a good article pushed off the front page of the sports section thanks to McEnroe's out-of-context remarks, she's been leveraging her celebrity as her sports most high-profile star to push for an increased presence of women as entrepreneurs and managers in the field of information technology:

"If the benchmark is workplace equity, some comparable sameness in status and pay, the news is very bad: There are about as many women decision-makers in board rooms as there are in 'Lord of the Flies,' and people still act like it's because they haven't crossed some physical Rubicon to fully prove their merit.

"Serena Williams is the greatest tennis player in history, and in the last year she earned about $10.5 million, which is great -- except that Novak Djokovic earned more than twice that, at $21.6 million. Why? Because tournament directors and corporate sponsors cling to the idea that because men play longer matches they are superior and entitled to more. Which makes no sense at all in an entertainment business: As McEnroe has observed, you don't pay more money for a movie ticket just because it lasts three hours.

"It should no longer be incumbent on one or a few female athlete-activists to make these points by winning exhibition matches against inferior men. We don't need more women-deciders and equal pay because it's right or moral, but because it creates a broader talent pool, and better work. This is everyone's problem, not just Serena Williams's or Billie Jean King's. 'I get tired of everyone saying, "Thanks for what you did for women," King said. 'Everybody can be an influence.'"

It's a topic that's certainly worth further public and private discussion.

Washington Post | June 23, 2017
Six Nazi spies were executed in D.C. White supremacists gave them a memorial -- on federal land. - "News of the unsettling discovery soon reached Jim Rosenstock, who worked in resource management for the National Park Service and also happened to be a local history buff. He was curious, but also skeptical. How could someone have planted such an item there? And why? And -- above all -- who? Rosenstock needed to see it for himself so he, too, made the hike into Blue Plains, a woody area known best for a wastewater treatment plant and an abundance of mosquitoes. And that's when he saw the stone. 'I kind of started doing a little bit of my own research,' Rosenstock recalled of that day in 2006 when he began to help unravel an only-in-Washington mystery, complete with World War II espionage, nationwide panic, a mass electrocution, J. Edgar Hoover chicanery, white supremacists, classic federal bureaucracy and a U.S. Supreme Court case that played a significant role in America's modern war on terror."

A third on-duty officer arriving a short time afterward saw the black man walking toward his professional colleagues, obviously not in any kind of threatening manner, and shot him.

Well, he WAS Black.

Then the shooter claimed that the officer was hit by "friendly fire" in an exchange with the suspects.  Curiously, the officers already on the scene were talking to the soon-to-be-wounded officer and were not shooting at the suspects.  If they were involved in a firefight at the time, they were amazingly casual about their own safety.

"Well I just heard today for the first time that Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it," Trump said in an excerpt of his interview on Fox News' "Fox and Friends" released Friday. "But nobody wants to talk about that."
"The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before they even -- before the election," Trump said. "And I hardly see it. It's an amazing thing. To me, in other words, the question is, if he had the information, why didn't he do something about it? He should have done something about it. But you don't read that. It's quite sad."

Much like "Endeavour " does with Inspector Morse, this new show begins when Jane Tennison first joins the police force and will tell the story of what made Tennison Tennison.

(2)the Trump Administration's request to stay the injunctions by the lower courts that bar enforcement until the cases were decided on the merits was granted in part, finding that the injunctions were too broad.

 Enforcement is narrowed to foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the US.

Examples of a relationship for an individual is close family--a foreign national wishing to enter the US to live with or visit a family member;

 a relationship with an entity is a formal, documented, and formed in the ordinary course rather than for purposes of evading.  An example of a relationship with an entity is a student admitted to a University, or a worker who accepted
an offer of employment from a US company or as a visiting lecturer at a University.  The same criteria would apply for refugees--if no bona fide connection, it tips to the government.

The White House alleged on Monday that the Syrian government appears to be preparing a chemical attack on civilians. In a statement, the White House appeared to threaten military action against Syria.
"The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the [Bashar al] Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children," the White House wrote in a Monday night statement. "As we have previously stated, the United States is in Syria to eliminate the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. If, however, Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price."

A leading pro-Trump dark money group just helped Republicans win a huge special election victory. Now it's threatening to take out a vulnerable GOP Senator.
America First Policies, a non-profit advocacy outfit, plans on spending seven figures attacking Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller if he maintains his opposition to White House-backed health care legislation, the group confirmed on Friday.

Praise Jesus

The 80-year-old justice sparked a flood of speculation that he was set to announce his retirement when he moved up by a year a long-scheduled reunion of his former clerks.

But he made no announcement about his future at the event, held this weekend at the court, one attendee said.

The legal site Above the Law quoted Kennedy as joking at the reunion that he had an announcement that had been the subject of speculation: "The bar will remain open after the end of the formal program."

Aitabdellah Salem spent 138 additional days in jail after a judge ordered his release from Rikers Island. Salem claims his Legal Aid attorneys did not inform him that his bail was reduced from $50,000 to just $1.
Although Mayor Bill de Blasio released plans last week to close the city's notorious jail complex within a decade, 9,400 detainees are still being held at the facility critics deem inhumane. From November 28, 2014 to April 15, 2015, Salem was one of them..
He's now suing the city of New York and his "negligent" Legal Aid attorneys, among others, in Manhattan federal court for "unlawful incarceration and restraint of liberty," according to the suit filed Monday. The suit accuses senior officials in the New York City Department of Correction of knowingly allowing jail employees to break Rikers policies, creating an unwritten policy that is "deeply embedded in the culture of the Department of Correction."

"The shooting of Robert "LaVoy" Finicum on a snowy Oregon highway on Jan. 26, 2016, was one of those instant American dramas in which every photo, every eyewitness account and every millisecond of video become forensic evidence in a public debate over whether someone deserved to die at the hands of police."

a moment after Finicum staggered out of the truck with his arms in the air, a video taken by one of the passengers inside the truck shows an apparent shot hitting the roof of the vehicle and striking a window.

Anyone care to offer any free policy advice on how a person should react when the cops have already begun unloading their self loading arsenals in your direction?