Louisiana flooding: - ravaged and destroyed huge portions of southern state

Days of heavy rain have caused historic flooding in the US state of Louisiana, bringing as much as 31in (79cm) across a third of the state.

The downpour continued for more than 72 hours, leading to widespread and dramatic flooding in the affected area and downstream along the Amite river.Louisiana has seen four times the average amount of rainfall for August.

"What made this so disastrous is the large area," says Ken Graham, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service's New Orleans/Baton Rouge office.

Graham says much of the eastern portion of the state, from the northern Mississippi border all the way to the Gulf of Mexico saw rainfall of at least 15 inches over 48 hours. That's about 11,000 sq miles, about twice the size of Connecticut.
"Normally you would see some small pockets with these kinds of rainfall totals, but this is the largest area of this kind of rainfall I've seen in my career."

The result has been devastating. At least 13 people have died and more than 40,000 homes have been damaged.

Towns along the Amite river have experienced some of the worst flooding. In Denham Springs, the river topped 46.2ft, four feet higher than its previous record in 1983.
In one parish east of Baton Rouge, officials believe 75% of the homes had been damaged, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has made disaster declaration in 20 of the state's 64 parishes. More than 86,500 people have registered for assistance from the agency.

 State officials estimate about 30,000 people have been rescued. Others have not been so lucky. According to the New York Times, a number of people have died after being swept away by surging rivers.

For the state of Louisiana, the storm is among the worst in the state's history. Graham said there had been major flooding from storms in 1983 and 1995 - "We talk about these as benchmarks - but this one beat them all."

 Thousands of members of the US Nation Guard have been deployed in the region to assist with search and rescue operations.

The Red Cross has said it is launching its largest relief effort in America since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In the almost four years since Sandy, other major disasters in the US have included, among others:

-The 2014 Washington state mudslide, which killed 43

-The Moore, Oklahoma tornado, which killed 24 and involved $2bn in damage

-Major flooding and tornado outbreaks in Texas and Oklahoma in 2015, which killed 31

-The 2016 East Coast blizzard, which killed at least 45

A local Baton Rouge paper has criticized President Obama for not visiting the affected area. On Tuesday Governor Bel Edwards made a comment that while federal agencies have been responsive, the flooding had not received as much attention as some of the major hurricanes that have hit the area.
"When you have a storm that is unnamed - it wasn't a tropical storm, it wasn't a hurricane - a lot of times people underestimate the impact that it has," Mr Edwards said, calling the flooding "historic" and "unprecedented".

By Taylor Kate Brown - Washington
Additional reporting and production by Charlie Northcott

Donald ...the full Monty

 

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer ... A woman points at a statue of a naked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016 in New York's Union Square. The statue was removed by New York City Department of Parks and Recreation

NEW YORK (AP)( Canadian Press) — It's Donald Trump like you've never seen him before.

Life-size naked statues of the Republican presidential nominee greeted passers-by in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cleveland on Thursday. They are the brainchild of an activist collective called INDECLINE, which has spoken out against Trump before.

In a statement, the collective said the hope is that Trump, the former host of "The Apprentice" reality TV series, "is never installed in the most powerful political and military position in the world."

The statues were created by an artist in Cleveland. They are of a stern-faced Trump with his hands folded over a bulging belly. Some parts of male genitalia are visible while others seemingly are missing. Point made.

Abuse of Power - ex district attorney sexual predator

Harry Morel

DESTREHAN, La. — FBI agents were watching — and recording — when a powerful Louisiana prosecutor arrived at the apartment of a woman facing a drunken driving charge. Bringing two bottles of wine, Harry Morel sat on her couch, discussed her case, and then began to grope her, authorities say.

The video of that July 2012 encounter with Danelle Keim would finally help the FBI build a case against the man who served as St. Charles Parish's elected district attorney for more than three decades.

But as Morel faces sentencing on Wednesday, the evidence also suggests how difficult it can be to balance the scales of justice. Federal and state authorities said Morel solicited sex from at least 20 women in exchange for favourable treatment. They even called him a sexual predator, but he wasn't charged with any sex crimes.

"So, I'm an important guy?" Morel asked as Keim tried to resist his sexual advances, according to a transcript filed in court.

"Important? Um, yeah," she said.

"Well," Morel said, "then I need to order you to kiss me."

Danielle Keim and son. Less that 24 hours after helping FBI catch Morel, she was dead

Important was an understatement for Morel, who had been re-elected five times.

According to the FBI and the local sheriff, the 73-year-old prosecutor repeatedly used his power to prey on vulnerable women. But as the patriarch of one of a handful of families with deep connections in politics and law enforcement, he was long considered untouchable in the swampy Louisiana parish, where roughly 50,000 live about 20 miles west of New Orleans.

That began to change when Keim dialed 911, and her plea for help reached the FBI.

"Justice finally came calling for former St. Charles Parish District Attorney Harry Morel," U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite said at an April news conference announcing his guilty plea, to a narrowly tailored charge of obstructing the federal investigation.

Morel faces no more than three years in prison. That angers Keim's mother, Tammy Glover, who hopes to address U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt before he issues the sentence. She says Morel should have been charged and convicted of more serious offences .

"I'm not a physical person at all, but I just want him to hurt," she told The Associated Press in an interview at her home. Still, her disappointment doesn't overshadow her pride in her daughter's courage.

"She's our hero. She's the hero of St. Charles Parish," Glover said. "She went after the most powerful man in St. Charles Parish, and she got his ass."

Keim's undercover work would have made her a key government witness. Glover recalls how proud her daughter was in 2013 when she showed her a report in the Times-Picayune newspaper, which revealed that the FBI was investigating whether Morel had been trading leniency for sex with defendants or their relatives.

"That was my justice," Glover said.

Less than 24 hours later, she was dead. The 27-year-old mother of a young son suffered from drug addiction, like most of the women Morel was accused of preying upon. Her overdose was yet another blow to a case that was challenging from the start. Some people have wondered if her sudden death was not so accidental after all. Without her sworn testimony to back up the recordings, the case could fall flat.

Keim had begun wearing a wire for the FBI after making the desperate 911 call to report Morel had sexually assaulted her at her home in April 2010, shortly after her drunken driving arrest.

"He grabbed me, he kissed me and he touched me in my private areas," she told a dispatcher, her voice trembling. "He wanted me to take off my clothes. He wanted me to take my pants off so he can please me."

Keim said Morel left after she pulled away from his kiss — and that she worried it would be "my word against his."

The sheriff's office summoned the FBI. It wasn't the first such allegation about Morel to reach the agency.

St. Charles Parish Sheriff Greg Champagne said he alerted the FBI after he was contacted in 2009 by a woman who claimed Morel told her that her husband's drunken driving charge could be "taken care of" if she would meet him at his camp in Mississippi to "play" while her husband was in jail. Polite said investigators suspect Morel preyed on women for decades, and he conceded that the full extent of his conduct may never be known.

"By title, he was the embodiment of justice," Polite said in April. "However, in the darkness of his heart, he was something else entirely — a man who perverted his position of power to take sexual advantage of desperate women who needed help. And he did this over and over and over again."

Trump already claiming the election will be rigged if Hillary wins ... Trump groupies are fertile ground for his deceptive rhetoric

The Washington Post

Aaron Blake:

With nearly three months to go before the presidential election is decided, Donald Trump is already explaining his loss.

Trump has argued with increasing certitude that it would be due to a “rigged” system that includes voter fraud on a massive scale — all apparently to the benefit of Hillary Clinton. It also apparently won't matter how badly he loses; fraud and rigging will account for the margin.

“The only way we can lose, in my opinion — and I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on,” Trump said Friday night in Pennsylvania, a state where the cheating would have to account for Clinton’s current double-digit lead in the polls. “I really believe it.”

The question is how many Republicans will believe it. And based on the data we have, the answer is: Probably a lot.

The conspiracy theory is brazen in its simplicity and lack of factual basis, especially this far before votes are actually cast. And yet, in a number of ways, it’s pretty clear that this is the kind of explanation that many Republicans will embrace.

A Bloomberg poll released last week showed that 34 percent of likely general election voters agreed with the statement that the election will be “rigged” — a number that included 56 percent of Trump supporters.

The question, it bears noting, was more about general rigging of the election and not specifically whether it would actually be enough to tip the scales in one direction or another.

The Democratic-leaning automated pollster Public Policy Polling asked North Carolina voters last week a more specific question: “If Hillary Clinton is elected president, do you think it will be because more people voted for her, or because the election results are rigged for her?” This is establishing a more direct causal relationship; it’s not just the election being "rigged,” but also that this rigging will be the deciding factor. In this case, 69 percent of Trump supporters agreed.

Both of these polls could oversell just how much Trump backers will actually blame a rigged system for a Clinton win. Each offers a binary choice in which the alternative to a rigged system perhaps just isn’t attractive — the idea that the system isn't rigged and that Clinton will win more votes. But, clearly, many and even a majority agree that some kind of rigging exists.

And the specific idea of a rigged 2016 election aside, a large number of Republicans have embraced these kinds of conspiracy theories and voter-fraud allegations in the past — even in the absence of any real evidence.

Trump himself, of course, once spearheaded the effort to question whether President Obama was actually born in the United States and was a legitimate president. This movement has died down a bit in Obama’s second term, after he showed his Hawaii birth certificate, but a September CNN-ORC poll showed that 20 percent of Republicans still volunteered that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and 12 percent had no opinion. Similarly, in a PPP poll that month, 29 percent of Republicans said Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

The unfounded idea that Obama is a Muslim is even more widely embraced. The CNN poll showed that 43 percent of Republicans said Obama was a Muslim (just 3 in 10 correctly said he's a Christian), while PPP pegged that number much higher — at 54 percent.

Trump’s idea of a rigged election seems to be grounded — to the extent that he has explained it — in the kind of voter fraud that could move election results several percentage points or more in many states. There are exceedingly few instances of proven voter fraud in the United States and nothing even close to the scale that Trump is talking about, but GOP voters do appear to believe that such things are possible.

A Monmouth poll on the eve of the 2012 election showed that 51 percent of Republicans believed voter fraud to be a “major problem” in the United States. Similarly, a Washington Post-ABC News poll in July 2012 showed that 57 percent of Republicans thought voter fraud was a major problem.

Those are pretty general sentiments, but a Marquette Law School poll in Wisconsin in 2014 broke it down a little more (albeit only among Wisconsinites). Given a choice between how many votes were affected by at least one type of voter fraud, 54 percent of Republicans picked the largest option, saying at least one kind of fraud affected a few thousand votes or more in each election in that state. And 41 percent of independents agreed.

A few thousand votes in Wisconsin, it bears noting, accounted for only about 0.1 percent of the vote total in the 2012 election — not the several points that would have to move for Trump's theory to hold water. He trails by double digits or close to it in many swing states. So this isn't the same as saying that Wisconsin Republicans believe in voter fraud on the kind of scale Trump is talking about.

We don’t know whether Republicans believe in the kind of fraud that can move results five to 10 percentage points for one simple reason: because it has never been seriously alleged by a major political candidate, and, thus, it hasn’t been polled.

Trump’s allegation strains credulity in many ways. Even if you believe voter fraud is more prevalent than has been proved, he’s predicting that hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes across the country will be affected by voter fraud and it will be enough to change the result — before it even happens. 

But the ground in which Trump planted this particular seed is indeed fertile.

Women rip off their burqas as Syrian residents of Manbij celebrate rescue from Isil

Women ripped off their black burqas and defiantly smoked cigarettes, while the men cut their beards as they gave the peace sign.

After two years living under the Islamic State, the last-remaining residents of the northern Syrian city of Manbij could not quite believe it when the US-backed forces arrived to rescue them.

“Why did you take so long?” sobbed one woman, who had been trapped in her basement for a week along with her two daughters and elderly father after Isil threatened to kill anyone who tried to escape. 

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) declared the city fully liberated on Friday, saying they were “starting a new history after closing the book of darkness”. 

The battle, which has displaced nearly 100,000 civilians and left more than 400 dead, proved to be the fiercest of all the offensives to dismantle the group's self-proclaimed caliphate across Syria and Iraq. 

The operation to liberate the city, which was launched in late May, was significantly slowed by the jihadists’ use of civilians as human shields, forcing troops to clear the city house by house.

Manbij was of great strategic and symbolic importance to the Islamists and they held out to the last. Some 25 miles from the Turkish border, it had been a hub for the smuggling of weapons and foreign recruits from Europe. Manbij had such a large number of British fighters, it earned the nickname locally as Little London.

The battle had not just pitted Syrian against Syrian, but Briton against Briton. 

Among those on the frontline with the SDF was Macer Gifford, a 29-year-old former currency trader from Oxfordshire.

“I wanted to join the fight against Isil in Manbij, in particular, because of the connection it has with Britain,” said Gifford, a public school-educated former Conservative councilor who had no previous military experience apart from a few days’ training with the Territorial Army. 

“I wanted to confront those people who were brought up in the West and given every chance to succeed, but who instead chose to come to Syria to brutalise and terrorise the innocent people here,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Gifford, who uses a pseudonym to protect his family, joined a unit of 40 soldiers which included a number of other Westerners.

“It was like nothing I’ve experienced before,” said Gifford, who has fought with the Kurdish army in other battles in northern Syria. “There was constant gunfire and shelling, and I mean 24/7, night and day. You couldn’t travel more than 10 yards without a sniper trying to take a shot at you.

“Unlike their other strongholds, in Manbij they did not run away,” he said. “They’ve had years to prepare for this fight and they’ve stockpiled massive amounts of weapons and rounds.”

Pictures from newly-liberated Manbij show a bleak landscape of flattened buildings and bombed-out roads with black Isil flags still fluttering at the top of poles.

“It was hell on earth,” said Gifford. “It was unbearably hot, at around 50 degrees, sometimes we didn’t get to sleep or eat for 24 hours, and there’s the constant smell of rotting bodies out on the street.”

He said Isil fighters were wearing civilian clothes, making it hard to distinguish them from non-combatants. 

"We saw one man going into a house, where we were sure he was laying IEDs, but we weren’t 100 per cent. Unlike Isis, the SDF has rules of conduct, so I didn’t shoot,” he said. “Particularly as a foreigner in someone else’s war, you don’t want to be responsible for accidentally killing a civilian.”

He saw the use of young children as spotters as well as female snipers. Isil deploying women in battle is almost unheard of and suggests they are struggling for manpower. According to local reports, as many as 4,000 fighters were killed. 

“They don’t care who they shoot, whether it’s children, women, the elderly,” Gifford said. “There was one suicide bomber who blew himself up in the middle of a crowd of young families just to stop them leaving the city.”

Gifford, who has now completed three tours with the Kurds, decides whether to tell his family he is heading out to Syria by weighing up his chance of death or serious injury. This time around he told them. 

“In previous offensives, I worked out that the statistic was roughly one in 10 foreign fighters being killed or badly hurt,” he said. “This one is so fierce, it is more like five or six in 10.”

In the two-month battle for Manbij, he said that five Westerners had been killed and 10 wounded. After the death last week of 22-year-old Dean Carl Evans from Reading, who was shot by a sniper, Gifford believes he is now the last Briton fighting Isil. 

But he came very close to death himself on his final day in the city on Thursday, when he was caught in open view of Isil. He managed to lob an explosive at them and slip away.

Gifford said that almost all the fighters they encountered were foreigners, who had been ruling over the city’s residents with a perverted interpretation of sharia law. 

Abu Khadija, who was living in Manbij until his neighbourhood was liberated three weeks ago, said he thought dozens of British fighters had remained in the city to fight.

"Many of the foreigners were the ones made to stay behind, Isis uses them for their suicide missions," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "Lots more were brought in from Raqqa and Deir Ezzor as well as this is very important territory for them."

However, it is difficult to know the nationality of those killed, Gifford said, as fighters had burned their passports. 

“Much of the paperwork in their headquarters was in French - how women should dress, how fighters should treat their sex slaves,” he said. “It was clear these Westerners had all left their comfortable lives and taken up residence in these opulent buildings, oppressing the people who lived there,” he said. 

Reports that made it out during Isil’s two-year hold on the city revealed that there were regular beheadings in the public square and people were being jailed for crimes as minor as smoking, listening to music or not wearing the burqa. 

“I know there is an irony in me saying this as a foreigner, but I couldn’t sit at home and watch Britons and others do this,” he said.

After spending seven months on the battlefield, he earned his annual leave last week. To get out of the country, however, he had to sneak across the Syrian border into Iraq, risking arrest if caught by Kurdish authorities which disapprove of foreigners joining the war. He is now in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and is hoping he will be free to return to the UK. 

Western nations have warned their citizens against travel to Syria and Iraq and joining the fight against Isil, saying they may face criminal charges on returning home. Despite the warnings, hundreds from North America and Europe have made their way to join Kurdish forces. When they see tyranny, torture and murder of innocents, many people of courage and conviction can't stand by and watch without acting. I am not so sure they should be discouraged.  I can only feel respect and admiration for them.

Thanx to the Telegraph

Terrorist in Strathroy Ontario ... Who would have guessed??

A video of Aaron Driver, who was killed Wednesday in a confrontation with police, is projected on a screen during an RCMP news conference on Thursday.                 

In a little town not far from my own, Strathroy Ontario, the RCMP  tactical response  team shot and killed an armed terrorist who was carrying a bomb he intended to detonate in a public area on a suicide mission. He claimed allegiance to ISIS, had made a "martyrdom video" and was planning an attack within 72 hours in an urban center during morning or afternoon rush hour.

 Now that ISIS has arrived in my own back yard, I have to wonder, how safe are we? What security systems are in place to protect us? We have been far too complacent up to this point. This stuff doesn't happen in Canada.
Aaron Driver, 24, was a known radical. He was under a peace bond for communicating with what the RCMP called well-known ISIS supporters in the U.K. and the U.S. and was being watched and supervised by the Mounties and the FBI. Under the bond his movements and associations were restricted and he was not allowed use of a computer. Well I guess peace bonds don't work too well. What else do we have in place?
At a news conference in Ottawa, Mike Cabana, the RCMP's deputy commissioner for federal policing, said the FBI came into possession of the martyrdom video and tipped off the Mounties about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.
The video, which the RCMP aired at the news conference, shows a man wearing a balaclava speaking directly to the camera pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and railing against Western "enemies of Islam." The man said he was responding to a call for violence, adding, "we are thirsty for your blood" and praised recent attacks in France and Brussels before promising to act in Canada.
The RCMP said they were able to identify the person in the video as Driver by about 11 a.m. The  USA  and Canada share information on suspected radicals. We owe you one, FBI.
Police said that around 4:30 p.m., Driver left a residence in Strathroy and got into a cab that he had called. The RCMP's response team surrounded the cab and "engaged with a suspect who then detonated an explosive device in the back of a cab". The cab driver was injured but it is unknown, presently, whether Driver's injuries, although extensive, were the immediate cause of death. The officers fired on the young man and the autopsy results have not yet been released.
 Some of the citizens of Strathroy, especially the ones in Driver's immediate neighborhood have expressed anger and concern that they were not warned of a known radical in their midst. That is an area that needs attention. Are we any safer knowing who and where they are? Once their cover is blown, wouldn't they just move to a new area and start over? Wiser heads than mine will have to resolve that question.
"The government of Canada has to get far more proactive on the whole issue of outreach, community engagement, counter-radicalization, determining by how and what means positive constructive influences can be brought to bear to change what otherwise would be dangerous behaviour," said Cabana.
He stressed that law enforcement and intelligence officials are always taking "appropriate steps to keep Canadians safe" and that the national terrorism threat level for Canada remains at "medium," where it has stood since the fall of 2014.
Well, some of us, in the larger towns, are a bit leery about spending time at the big malls, arenas and theaters at the moment. It will all blow over in another week and we will slip back into our complacency and assume all will be well. After all, we have the ever vigilant Mounties watching over us. And stuff like this doesn't happen in Canada.





Trump made an unwitting agent of Russia ... according to CIA guy

A former top CIA official attacked Donald Trump on Friday as a danger to national security, saying President Vladimir Putin had made the Republican presidential candidate an "unwitting agent" of Russia.

Putin had flattered Trump into supporting positions favorable to Russia, Michael Morell, a longtime CIA officer and former deputy director of the agency, said in an opinion piece in The New York Times.

"In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation," Morell said, in an article in which he endorsed Trump's rival in the Nov. 8 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Morell did not provide evidence for his assertion, but he said Putin had used skills from his past as an intelligence officer to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in an individual.

"That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated," Morell wrote.

Trump's campaign dismissed Morell's criticism, linking the ex-CIA officer to the Obama administration's public response after the September 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

"Count how many reporters will tweet today that Michael Morell lied for #CrookedHillary to cover up Benghazi," Trump's campaign said in a Twitter message.

The incident, in which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed, occurred while Clinton was secretary of state, and Republicans have long criticized her handling of the attack and its aftermath.

Critics say administration officials tried to play down the role of Islamist militants in the attacks. Morell approved talking points after the incident. U.S. officials have said any reference to militants taking part was initially dropped for classification reasons.

Morell is currently affiliated with Beacon Global Strategies, a consulting firm with ties to senior Democrats with national security expertise, including former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta and former top Clinton aide Philippe Reines. 

Trump's vice presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, on Friday dismissed Morell's comments, saying that "standing up to Russian aggression is going to be really different under a Trump-Pence administration."

"These people are playing politics," Pence said of Morell in an interview on NBC's "Today" program.

Morell's article, in which he also said Trump had undermined U.S. security with his campaign proposal to combat terrorism by imposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, added to questions raised by some national security experts about the New York businessman's qualifications to be president.

On Thursday, a bipartisan group of experts criticized Trump's lukewarm support for the NATO alliance, comments about Russia's annexation of Crimea and other matters as "disgraceful."

Trump has also drawn criticism for his praise for Putin as a strong leader, particularly after Moscow came under suspicion from U.S. officials as being behind recent hacking of Democratic Party groups. Moscow has denied the allegations.

I don't know who to believe any more. I have decided that everyone is lying. Now I feel better and I'm going to watch the Olympics on TV.

Thanx New York Times