NewsFuse: April 2019

FAA considered grounding some Boeing 737 Max planes last year: source

US regulators considered grounding some Boeing 737 MAX planes last year after learning of a problem with a system that is now the main suspect in two deadly crashes, a source close to the matter said. Investigators in the Lion Air crash in October off the coast of Indonesia and the Ethiopia Airlines disaster in March have zeroed in on the planes' anti-stall system, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. Last year, inspectors with the Federal Aviation Administration discovered Boeing de-activated a signal designed to advise the cockpit crew of a malfunctioning of the MCAS system, the source said.

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Beto O'Rourke unveils climate plan with Yosemite as backdrop

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke on Monday announced his first major policy initiative, a $5 trillion plan to combat climate change that he says will keep the Earth from sliding past the point of no return in less than a generation.

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Five Things to Know About the Modern Japanese Monarchy

The country will swear in its 126th emperor on Wednesday

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East Sri Lanka on edge after Easter bombers linked to region

KALMUNAI, Sri Lanka (AP) — Suicide bombings at a militants' safe house have shaken the simple homes of this east Sri Lankan town as well as the rest of this idyllic coast, as the investigation into the Islamic State-claimed Easter bombings has spread here.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2L8qTTb

Poway Synagogue Vigil Erupts Into Debate About Trump, Anti-Semitism

REUTERS/John GastaldoPOWAY, California—An intense political debate broke out at a candlelight vigil on Sunday for the dead and wounded of Chabad of Poway synagogue, where mourners argued whether it was a lack of gun control, or a lack of political self-control, that led to this terrorist attack.A 19-year-old nursing student who penned a virulently racist manifesto is accused of opening fire on the congregation the day before, killing congregant Lori Kaye, who died when she stepped between the gunman and Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, effectively taking a bullet for her spiritual leader. Authorities say they are investigating the attack as a hate crime.Hundreds gathered in Valle Verde Park, less than a mile from the attack, including Janith Seidel, who came to the vigil to pay her respects to Kaye. and to question the absurdity of the senseless act. “I knew Lori. Everyone knew Lori,” Seidel told The Daily Beast. “She was just such a big volunteer. If you ever were involved, if you ever came to the shul, if you ever came to the Chabad at all, you knew Lori.”Seidel, who was not at the synagogue when Earnest opened fire, questioned why–yet again–anyone was allowed access to a semi-automatic weapon. “We need to license every gun,” she said. “Like a car.”A few feet away, a trio of attendees huddled together, locked in a tense conversation about the root of the problem that shattered their community. “Thank God we had a Jew with a gun,” Dorina Feygin, an older woman said, referring to the off-duty Border Patrol agent who is credited with helping chase the gunman away. “Thank God for a Jew with a gun.” (The agent said he recently rediscovered his Jewish roots.)Feygin, who emigrated from Ukraine, came to the vigil from Mt. Carmel, California, where she is a member of the local Chabad there. Feygin, a self-described Donald Trump voter, seemed to believe that anti-Semitism does not come from the right wing, but from the left. “It’s not right-white nationalism. It’s left,” she claimed. “Fascism is a socialist ideology. I’m from the Soviet Union. I should know the signs. Fascism and socialism are the same sides of a different coin.”Mary Marshall and Steve Gould, members of the Beth Israel Congregation from Carmel Valley who were standing near Feygin, disagreed. “Trump is feeding white nationalism in this country,” Marshall said. “No, he’s not,” Feygin shot back. “Of course, he is,” Gould responded. As the crowd around the trio started to interject with heated opinions, Marshall ended the dispute. “This is not the time for this,” she said. “We do not need it today. We have a very big difference of opinion. We shouldn’t talk about it right now.”Earlier in the day, Rabbi Goldstein talked at length about how he had received a phone call from President Trump. “He was so comforting. He brought amazing consolation,” he said. “I had a 15 minute conversation. He spoke to me like a friend. Like a colleague. He spoke to me like he felt for me, for my anguish and pain. We spoke about why is there so much anti-Semitism, and what we can do to change that.”During his conversation, Goldstein told Trump about his proposed solution to curb gun violence. His idea was not increased gun control, stricter background checks, or improved mental health and counseling services. Instead, Goldstein proposed implementing a moment of prayer in the school system.“I told him about how I thought we should have a moment of silence in our public schools,” he said. “It used to be that in our public schools, children would be required to pray every morning. And then, they stopped that.”Near the end of the service, a woman spontaneously took the microphone and was quickly booed off of the stage. Calling herself Janice, she claimed the rabbi, who she referred to as a “strict Jew,” was “good with money.” She suggested that Earnest might not have attacked the Chabad if he only had “Jesus in his heart.”“This is about Poway,” she said. “It’s about curing the depression in the schools. If this boy had Jesus in his heart, he wouldn't have had a gun.” When the audience began to yell ”she’s done,” Janice was quickly ushered away from the podium and the crowd returned to the difficult task of trying to understand their grief.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Victims of Seattle crane accident are identified and remembered - NBC News

Victims of Seattle crane accident are identified and remembered NBC News

The victims of the construction crane accident in Seattle over the weekend were identified Monday as a college freshman who wanted to be a nurse, a retired city ...

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Larry King in 'good spirits,' did not go into cardiac arrest, rep says - Page Six

Larry King in 'good spirits,' did not go into cardiac arrest, rep says Page Six
Larry King Suffers Another Heart Attack and Goes Into Cardiac Arrest TMZ
Larry King: No Heart Attack, No Cardiac Arrest The Blast
Larry King reportedly had heart attack after going into cardiac arrest, TMZ reports WJW FOX 8 News Cleveland
Larry King Recovering In Hospital After Undergoing Heart Surgery HuffPost
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The 76ers reset their defense to steal home-court away from Raptors - ESPN

The 76ers reset their defense to steal home-court away from Raptors ESPN

After failing to contain Kawhi Leonard in Game 1, the Sixers responded with stifling defense Monday night to even the series.

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Impeachment Would Be a Redundant Judgment

The Mueller investigation was supposed to be a legal process concerned with crimes. Investigators identified no crimes to charge, and so it has, naturally, become something else: no longer a theory about a criminal conspiracy — only an irritable mood.An ordeal that had been conducted under the procedures of law in accordance with legal criteria is now an ordeal that is being conducted under the procedures of politics in accordance with political criteria — or, if you prefer, with moral criteria related to Donald Trump’s character. For those who want to see President Trump impeached and who think of impeachment as a fundamentally political process in spite of its mock-trial aspect, that’s just fine. They’ll take their pound of flesh, however it is had.The problem with this point of view is that the question of Donald Trump’s personal fitness for office already has been adjudicated as a political matter: That is what happened in the 2016 presidential election. Many critics, myself included, argued that Trump was unfit for the office, both morally and intellectually. We made our arguments, the voters consulted their own consciences, and, weighing these things however it is that voters weigh them, chose Trump. There wasn’t some occult intermediary step in there. That’s how things go in politics: The people behave just as if they had minds of their own! And, sometimes, they get to have their own way.In terms of Donald Trump’s character and habits, there is practically nothing in the Mueller report — or in the public record since 2016 — that voters did not already know when they elected him. And that is really the fundamental argument against impeaching President Trump: The political judgment called for in an impeachment at this point and in this context properly ought to be understood as beside the point, if we take seriously the democratic assumption that the judgment of the people, rendered in the election, is sovereign.There isn’t some shocking new thing, and, of course, some Democrats have been talking impeachment since before Trump was even sworn in. The Democrats do not propose to impeach Donald Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, but simply for being Donald Trump. One may sympathize with that, but Donald Trump is the man the voters chose.And that goes to the real issue here: The Democrats cannot accept that they lost an election to Donald Trump. One sympathizes with that, too, but that is what actually happened, for several reasons: Trump focused on two issues — immigration and trade — that speak to a substantial bipartisan plurality with nationalistic and protectionist impulses rarely taken seriously by mainstream figures in either party; his opponent ran an inept campaign and has been questing after power for so long that both she and the voters are exhausted by it; the “elites” and Washingtonians against whom Trump & Co. inveigh were judged, not without some reason, to merit a trip to the woodshed; the so-called war on terror and the financial crisis of 2008–09 have destabilized formerly sturdy political coalitions. And, of course, it was Republicans’ turn.Which is to say: The Democrats’ talk of impeachment is partly about 2020, but it’s mainly about 2016, and their adolescent psychic need to believe that the presidential election that brought Donald Trump to the White House was illegitimate rather than an opportunity they simply blew. The theory that the election was thrown by Russian trolls posting dank memes on Twitter is hard to take seriously. If we had a list of every voter whose mind was changed in 2016 by an anonymous social-media account with a Cyrillic bio, then disenfranchising those voters would be a good start on improving things for 2020. Alas and alack, we don’t do that sort of thing. But the argument that bot-executed shenanigans nullified democracy in 2016 amounts to the Democrats protesting: “These trolls robbed us of the support of our natural base: morons!”There’s no quality control in social media — and less quality control in ordinary news media than there used to be. Lies, distortions, exaggerations, and pure inventions are going to be out there in the intellectual marketplace, whether they originate in Moscow or in Brooklyn. That’s a real problem, but it doesn’t invalidate the outcome of the 2016 election.There are many reasons to oppose an impeachment at this time: One is that no one has made a very persuasive case for one, all of the Democrats’ arguments up to this point having been transparently pretextual. Another is that the Republican majority in the Senate all but ensures that the process would be purely symbolic, an exercise in chaos for pleasure’s sake. A third is that it normalizes the invocation of a procedure that should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances in the service of ordinary short-term partisan interests. For comparison, consider that there was no serious impeachment talk when Barack Obama authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress — or when he took executive actions that he himself had described as unconstitutional only months before. That suggests a pretty high standard — and if “I think that guy is a fink!” ends up being a common rationale for impeachment, then you’d better make your peace with anarchy, because Washington is going to be a ghost town.But the most important reason for forbearance here is that a political judgment already has been rendered on Donald Trump’s character — and, if you don’t like how that came out, there’s another chance right around the corner.

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No Mass for Sri Lanka's Catholics; no veils for Muslim women

AMPARA, Sri Lanka (AP) — The effects of Sri Lanka's Easter suicide bombings reverberated across two faiths Sunday, with Catholics shut out of their churches for fear of new attacks, left with only a televised Mass, and Muslim women ordered to stop wearing veils in public.

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AJ Freund death: Parents of 5-year-old Crystal Lake boy due in court Monday

The parents of slain 5-year-old Crystal Lake boy A.J. Freund are scheduled to appear in court Monday morning.

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Suspected explosive device found, man arrested in New Zealand's Christchurch

New Zealand police said on Tuesday a man was arrested and bomb disposal officers found a package with a suspected explosive device at a vacant property in Christchurch, where 50 people were killed in attacks by a lone gunman on two mosques in March.

from Reuters: World News https://reut.rs/2PBS07T

Beast from the east: Indian mountaineers reckon they've found Yeti footprints

Mountaineers from the Indian army on a expedition in Nepal have found mysterious large footprints in the snow that they think belong to the Yeti, or the abominable snowman, the military said on Tuesday.

from Reuters: World News https://reut.rs/2vpRIYv

Factbox: The main political parties in South Africa's election

South Africans voting for a new national parliament on May 8 will have 48 parties to choose from -- more than at any election since the end of white minority rule in 1994.

from Reuters: World News https://reut.rs/2PL18qZ

Sri Lanka maintains high alert for attacks ahead of Ramadan

Sri Lankan security forces maintained a high level of alert on Tuesday after the Easter Sunday bombings, officials said, amid intelligence reports that Islamist militants were planning fresh attacks before the start of the holy Islamic month of Ramadan.