Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Six In The Morning Wednesday January 10

California: Rescuers search for mudslide survivors


Rescue workers in southern California are searching for survivors after mudslides and flooding in which at least 13 people have died.
More than 30 miles (48km) of the main coastal road have been closed and police said the scene "looked like a World War One battlefield".
A group of 300 people are reportedly trapped in Romero Canyon neighbourhood east of Santa Barbara, with rescue efforts due to resume at daybreak.
The death toll is expected to rise.
More than 50 people have been rescued already but many places are still inaccessible. Several roads are closed, including the major Highway 101.
Some 163 people have been taken to hospital. Twenty had "storm-related injuries" and four were critically hurt.





US to loosen nuclear weapons constraints and develop more 'usable' warheads

  • New proposal is significantly more hawkish than Obama-era policy
  • Critics call development of new weapons ‘dangerous, Cold War thinking’


The Trump administration plans to loosen constraints on the use of nuclear weapons and develop a new low-yield nuclear warhead for US Trident missiles, according to a former official who has seen the most recent draft of a policy review.
Jon Wolfsthal, who was special assistant to Barack Obama on arms control and nonproliferation, said the new nuclear posture review prepared by the Pentagon, envisages a modified version of the Trident D5 submarine-launched missiles with only part of its normal warhead, with the intention of deterring Russia from using tactical warheads in a conflict in Eastern Europe.
The new nuclear policy is significantly more hawkish that the posture adopted by the Obama administration, which sought to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in US defence.


Gym gives Syrian child refugee free lifetime membership after photo shows him staring longingly through window

Mohammed Khaled works as a shoeshiner in southern Turkey



A young Syrian refugee has been given a lifetime membership at his local gym after a photo of him gazing through the window at the fitness equipment went viral.
Mohammed Khaled, 12, who works as a shoeshiner in Adiyaman province, southern Turkey, was pictured outside the centre with a footstool strapped to his back.
After the image spread across social media in Turkey, gym owner Engin Dogan tracked the boy down and offered him an all-access pass to the facility.

S. Korea's Moon Jae-in willing to meet Kim Jong Un 'under right conditions'

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the first talks with the North in two years were a good start. He said the next step was to get the North to talk nuclear disarmament.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that he would be willing to meet with the North's leader Kim Jong Un, a day after delegations from the two sides met for the first time in two years.
"I'm open to any form of meeting, including a summit under right conditions," Moon told a press conference. "Having said that, the purpose of it shouldn't be talks for the sake of talks."
North Korea agreed on Tuesday to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics in the South next month after the two sides met at Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

Venezuela is inching closer to collapse


  @CNNMoney

Venezuela has more oil than any other nation in the world, but it keeps pumping less and less.

Oil production fell in December to one of its lowest points in three decades, further depriving the cash-strapped country of its only major source of revenue and adding to the suffering of its people.
Venezuela produced 1.7 million barrels of oil a day, according to S&P Global Platts, which polled industry officials, traders and analysts and reviewed proprietary shipping data.
That's the lowest since 2002, when a failed coup temporarily took hold of the government-run oil company, PDVSA.

Newly released Senate testimony debunks a key conservative theory on Trump and Russia

The big news Republicans didn’t want you to see.

By 

The FBI was already investigating potential links between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government before they heard anything about Christopher Steele’s famous dossier on the matter. That’s the key takeaway from Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson’s extensive testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, released Tuesday by ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over the objections of her Republican colleagues.
Simpson’s hearing lasted for hours, and the transcript is extremely long and mostly fairly tedious. But Simpson does clearly state that when Steele spoke to the FBI about his findings, the bureau “believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing, and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.”
That sounds like Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who, according to a recent report in the New York Times, accidentally kicked off the Trump-Russia investigation by telling Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had political dirt on Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, after a night of heavy drinking in May 2016.

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