3594-ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? | View Thread

TOKYO — Floods that devastated North Korea last month are turning out to be worse than initially feared, with more than 100,000 people left homeless, according to aid workers who visited the area last week.

That puts Pyongyang in the inconvenient position of having to turn to the international community for help — at the same time North Korea is facing global condemnation after its nuclear test last week.

“The effects of this flooding will be even more dramatic and devastating than initially thought,” said Chris Staines, the head of the Pyongyang office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “The people there are in a very desperate situation.”

Staines was part of a group of 22 international and local staffers from 13 aid agencies stationed in Pyongyang who last week visited the northern city of Hoeryong, across the Tumen River from China.

Floods ripped through the area Aug. 30 as Typhoon Lionrock lashed northeast Asia. North Korean authorities at first estimated that 44,000 people had been displaced between Onsong, in the north, and Musan, a major mining center 100 miles downriver.

The Washington Post's Anna Fifield reports on North Korea's fifth nuclear test and what it means for the region and one of Kim Jong Un's few remaining allies, China.(Jason Aldag, Anna Fifield/The Washington Post)

The North Korean government has confirmed that 133 people have been killed and 395 are missing as a result of the floods, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Sunday.

At least 140,000 people are in urgent need of assistance, theOCHA said in a statement, including an estimated 100,000 people who have been displaced. Water supplies to about 600,000 people have been cut.

“My impression was that this was a much worse disaster than the statistics indicate,” Staines said by Skype from Pyongyang. “The damage is very extensive, and there is clear evidence that the floodwaters were not only very high — you can see the watermarks above the window frames — but also moving very rapidly in some places.”

Authorities took the aid workers, some of whom represented U.N. agencies, to destroyed medical clinics and to a water pumping station near Hoeryong that was wiped out, leaving 50,000 people without water. Kitchen gardens and household livestock — chickens, ducks, pigs — also were washed away, Staines said.

“These households have clearly lost everything,” he said.

In some areas, communication links remain cut and the roads are still impassable.

North Korean authorities initially asked aid agencies to help with relief efforts using their existing budgets and supplies. But now officials plan to launch international appeals for donations.

Their timing could hardly be worse. On Friday, Kim Jong Un ordered North Korea’s fifth nuclear test and its largest yet, triggering international calls for more sanctions to punish the regime.

[North Korea inches closer to the ability to send a nuclear-tipped missile to the U.S.]

South Korea’s Defense Ministry warned Monday that Pyongyang could order another nuclear test at any time. The South’s Yonhap News Agency reported, citing unnamed government sources, that the North has completed preparations for a sixth test.

With so many other crises around the world competing for donations, agencies operating in North Korea — which include the United Nations’ World Food Program and UNICEF, as well as a handful of European organizations — have confronted difficulty raising money for their projects for several years and have had to scale back operations.

North Korea said the flooding was caused by the “strongest storm and heaviest downpour” since World War II. The government redirected people involved in a “200-day campaign” intended to increase production to instead help with the relief efforts.

Soldiers were sent to the disaster area Saturday, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. Workers on Ryomyong Street, an ambitious development in Pyongyang that is trumpeted in the state media on an almost daily basis, also were dispatched.

Tens of thousands of houses and public buildings collapsed, while railways and roads, along with factories and crops, were destroyed or submerged, KCNA reported.

North Korea is particularly prone to flooding because of deforestation — a result of people cutting down trees to fuel fires in their homes — and a tendency to turn every inch of arable land over to crops. Making matters worse, houses, particularly in the downtrodden northern areas, are often made of substandard, locally produced bricks.

Staines asked donor nations to remember that the flood has hurt regular people in North Korea.

“In the communities we visited, we were allowed to meet with local people, and we could see their spirit and their energy and their support for each other,” he said. “These are people who are doing the best they can. They’re just normal, everyday people.”

(The Washington Post)

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 9/13/2016 2:07:30 PM
	15 Years Later, Physics Journal Concludes: All 3 WTC Towers Collapsed Due To Controlled Demolition SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 By Jay Syrmopoulos Over the past 15 years many highly respected academics and experts have come forward to challenge the official narrative on the collapse of the WTC towers forwarded by the U.S. government. The official government position holds that the collapse of all three towers was due to intense heat inside of the buildings. But a new forensic investigation into the collapse of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11, published in Europhysics News – a highly respected European physics magazine – claims that“the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.” While many in the mainstream have attempted to label anyone questioning the official narrative as a “tin foil hat” conspiracy theorist, many highly respected experts have come forward to lampoon the idea that the buildings collapsed due to the intense heat and fires following two terrorist-directed plane crashes. “Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities,” the four physicists conclude in the damning report. The new study is the work of Steven Jones, former full professor of physics at Brigham Young University, Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical design engineer with over 25 years of structural design experience in the aerospace and communications industries and Ted Walter, the director of strategy and development for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization that today represents more than 2,500 architects and engineers. The comprehensive study in Europhysics News directly challenges the official narrative and lends to a growing body of evidence that seriously questions the veracity of the government narrative. In 2002, the National Institute of Standards and Technology remarked that the case was exceptionally bizarre. There were no other known cases of total structural collapses in high-rise buildings caused by fires and so it is deeply unusual that it should have happened three times in the space of one day, noted NIST. Official investigations have never been able to thoroughly and coherently explain how this might have happened and various teams tasked with examining the collapse have raised difficult questions about the veracity of the government’s story. Perhaps most damning of all, the experts claimed that after a thorough forensic analysis of video footage of the building’s collapse, it revealed signs of a controlled implosion. Additionally, Jones has co-authored a number of papers documenting evidence of unreacted nano-thermitic material in the WTC dust. The authors of the study note that the buildings fell with such speed and symmetry that they there was no other feasible explanation for the sudden collapse at free-fall speeds – directly refuting studies that attempted to debunk the idea that the building fell without resistance. These respected experts’ new forensic analysis only adds to the growing movement of people calling for a new and impartial investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center. Revealing the scope and breadth of public disbelief in the official government narrative surrounding the events of 9/11, even presidential candidate Jill Stein has recently called for a new investigation. Jay Syrmopoulos writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared. (activistpost.com)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 9/13/2016 2:23:35 PM
	Tent Cities Full Of Homeless People Are Booming In Cities All Over America As Poverty Spikes SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 By Michael Snyder Just like during the last economic crisis, homeless encampments are popping up all over the nation as poverty grows at a very alarming rate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half a million people are homeless in America right now, but that figure is increasing by the day. And it isn’t just adults that we are talking about. It has been reported that that the number of homeless children in this country has risen by 60 percent since the last recession, and Poverty USA says that a total of 1.6 million children slept either in a homeless shelter or in some other form of emergency housing at some point last year. Yes, the stock market may have been experiencing a temporary boom for the last couple of years, but for those on the low end of the economic scale things have just continued to deteriorate. Tonight, countless numbers of homeless people will try to make it through another chilly night in large tent cities that have been established in the heart of major cities such as Seattle, Washington, D.C. and St. Louis. Homelessness has gotten so bad in California that the L.A. City Council has formally asked Governor Jerry Brown to officially declare a state of emergency. And in Portland the city has extended their “homeless emergency” for yet another year, and city officials are really struggling with how to deal with the booming tent cities that have sprung up… There have always been homeless people in Portland, but last summer Michelle Cardinal noticed a change outside her office doors. Almost overnight, it seemed, tents popped up in the park that runs like a green carpet past the offices of her national advertising business. She saw assaults, drug deals and prostitution. Every morning, she said, she cleaned human feces off the doorstep and picked up used needles. “It started in June and by July it was full-blown. The park was mobbed,” she said. “We’ve got a problem here and the question is how we’re going to deal with it.” But of course it isn’t just Portland that is experiencing this. The following list of major tent cities that have become so well-known and established that they have been given names comes from Wikipedia… Camp Hope, Las Cruces, New Mexico ^[1] Camp Quixote, Olympia, Washington State^[2] Camp Take Notice, Ann Arbor, Michigan^[3] Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon Opportunity Village, Eugene, Oregon Maricopa County Sheriff’s Tent City, Phoenix, Arizona New Jack City and Little Tijuana, Fresno, California^[2] Nickelsville, located in Seattle^[2]^[4] Right 2 Dream Too, Portland, Oregon^[5] River Haven,^[6] Ventura County, California^[7]^[8] Safe Ground, Sacramento, California^[2] The Jungle, San Jose, California^[2] Temporary Homeless Service Area (THSA),Ontario, California^[2] Tent City (100+ residents) of Lakewood, New Jersey^[9]^[10] Tent City, Avenue A and 13th Street, Lubbock, Texas^[11] Tent City, New Jersey forest^[12] Tent City, Bernalillo County, New Mexico^[13] Tent City, banks of the American River, Sacramento, California^[14]^[15]^[16]^[17]^[18]^[19]^[20]^[21]^[22] Tent City 3, Seattle Tent City, Chicago, Illinois [1] Tent City 4, eastern King County outside of Seattle The Point, where the Gunnison River and Colorado River meet^[23] The Village of Hope and Community of Hope, Fresno, California^[2] Transition Park, Camden, New Jersey Tent City, Fayette County, Tennessee, [2] Camp Unity Eastside, Woodinville, WA [3] China Hat Road, Bend, Oregon Most of the time, those who establish tent cities do not want to be discovered because local authorities have a nasty habit of shutting them down and forcing homeless people out of the area. For example, check out what just happened in Elkhart, Indiana… A group of homeless people in Elkhart has been asked to leave the place they call home. For the last time, residents of ‘Tent City’ packed up camp. City officials gave residents just over a month to vacate the wooded area; Wednesday being the last day to do so. The property has been on Mayor Tim Neese’s radar since he took office in January, calling it both a safety and health hazard to its residents and nearby pedestrian traffic. “This has been their home but you can’t live on public property,” said Mayor Tim Neese, Elkhart. If they can’t live on “public property,” where are they supposed to go? They certainly can’t live on somebody’s “private property.” This is the problem – people don’t want to deal with the human feces, the needles, the crime and the other problems that homeless people often bring with them. So the instinct is often to kick them out and send them away. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fix the problem. It just passes it on to someone else. As this new economic downturn continues to accelerate, our homelessness boom is going to spiral out of control. Pretty soon, there will be tent cities in virtually every community in America. In fact, there are people that are living comfortable middle-class lifestyles right at this moment who will end up in tents. We saw this during the last economic crisis, and it will be even worse as this next one unfolds. Just like last time around, the signs that the middle class is really struggling can be subtle at first, but when you learn to take note of them you will notice that they are all around you. The following comes from an excellent article in the New York Post… Do you see grocery stores closing? Do you see other retailers, like clothing stores and department stores, going out of business? Are there shuttered storefronts along your Main Street shopping district, where you bought a tool from the hardware store or dropped off your dry cleaning or bought fruits and vegetables? Are you making as much money annually as you did 10 years ago? Do you see homes in neighborhoods becoming run down as the residents either were foreclosed upon, or the owner lost his or her job so he or she can’t afford to cut the grass or paint the house? Did that same house where the Joneses once lived now become a rental property, where new people come to live every few months? Do you know one or two people who are looking for work? Maybe professionals, who you thought were safe in their jobs? Don’t look down on those who are living in tents, because the truth is that many “middle class Americans” will ultimately end up joining them. The correct response to those who are hurting is love and compassion. We all need help at some point in our lives, and I know that I am certainly grateful to those who have given me a helping hand at various points along my journey. Sadly, hearts are growing cold all over the nation, and the weather is only going to get colder over the months ahead. Let us pray for health and safety for the hundreds of thousands of Americans that will be sleeping in tents and on the streets this winter. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. Top Image Credit (activistpost.com)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 9/13/2016 2:50:54 PM
	THE GEORGE W. BUSH WHITE HOUSE ‘LOST’ 22 MILLION EMAILS The outrage and press coverage was nothing compared with that surrounding Hillary Clinton's emails. BY NINA BURLEIGH ON 9/12/16 AT 12:31 PM For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished. Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?” U.S. President George W. Bush holds a news conference in the briefing room of the White House in Washington July 15, 2008.KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails. The media paid some attention to the Bush email chicanery but spent considerably less ink and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s digital communications in the past 18 months. According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016. In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public, not the president, owned the records. The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House’s rudimentary first email system. Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records, even as the number of White House emails began growing exponentially. (The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989, a federal lawsuit to force the White House to comply with the PRA was filed by several groups, including the National Security Archive, which at the time was mostly interested in unearthing the secret history of the Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court order, issued in the waning hours of the first Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White House email backup tapes from beingerased. When Bill Clinton moved into the White House, his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort to uphold a side deal he’d cut with the National Archives and Records Administration to allow him to treat his White House emails as personal. At the time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White House communications director—defended the resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn't want subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails. The Clinton White House eventually settled the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—even invited members of the National Security Archive into the White House to demonstrate how the new system worked. If anyone tried to delete an email, a message would pop up on screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA. “We were happy with that,” recalls Blanton, who edited a book on the Reagan-Bush email evasion, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Messages the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy. Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit. The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious. Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney's office were in the administration's system but he couldn’t get them. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney listens as former President George W. Bush makes remarks about the U.S. defense budget after meeting with military leaders at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., November 29, 2007.LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush's assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.” In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it. Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public. The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating on a different track but having no more luck. In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines and possible jail time, but no punishment was ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals court stayed the Senate’s ruling in October 2008, while the White House appealed. Rove’s lawyer claimed Rove did not “intentionally delete” any emails but was only conducting “the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly,” according to the Associated Press. By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration basically ran out the clock. And neither the Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter. The committee’s final report on the matter was blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.” At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency on the White House’s part, but The Washington Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House explanation that the emails could have been lost due to flawed IT systems. The mystery of what was in the missing Bush emails and why they went missing is still years away from being solved—if ever. The National Archives now has 220 million emails from the Bush White House, and there is a long backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests already. But not all of the emails will be available to the public until 2021, when the presidential security restrictions elapse. Even then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers still have years of work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days’ worth of emails around the time of the WMD propaganda campaign that led to war, Blanton says. “To your question of what’s in there—we don't know,” he says. “There was not a commitment at the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance motivated by political reasons? Or was it ‘We gotta save money’?” Former U.S. President George W. Bush winks to a member of the audience before he delivers the final State of the Union address of his presidency at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 28, 2008.TIM SLOAN/REUTERS Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails were ever truly “lost,” given that every email exists in two places, with the sender and with the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about forcing the State Department to publicly release Hillary Clinton’s emails, Blanton and his fellow researchers have decided not to press their fight for the release of the Bush emails. Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush email record will be found intact after 2021, when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National Archives. “Did they find all of them? We don't know,” he says. “Our hope is that by that time, the government and the National Archives will have much better technology and tools with which to sift and sort that kind of volume.” Blanton says he’s not expecting that kind of upgrade, though. “Their entire budget is less than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter,” he says. “It’s an underfunded orphan.” Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A source involved with the stymied congressional investigation recalled the period as “an intense time,” but the Obama administration didn’t encourage any follow-up, devoting its political capital to dealing with the crashing economy rather than investigating the murky doings that took place under his predecessor. Since then, no major media outlet has devoted significant—or, really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly, the Bush administration was hiding (or losing). (Newsweek)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 9/13/2016 5:15:51 PM
	North Korea defied world with nuclear test. Now it seeks aid for flood disaster. Three North Koreans were rescued by China from their flooded village, Chinese state media reported September 2. (Reuters) By Anna Fifield September 12 at 10:56 AM TOKYO — Floods that devastated North Korea last month are turning out to be worse than initially feared, with more than 100,000 people left homeless, according to aid workers who visited the area last week. That puts Pyongyang in the inconvenient position of having to turn to the international community for help — at the same time North Korea is facing global condemnation after its nuclear test last week. “The effects of this flooding will be even more dramatic and devastating than initially thought,” said Chris Staines, the head of the Pyongyang office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “The people there are in a very desperate situation.” Staines was part of a group of 22 international and local staffers from 13 aid agencies stationed in Pyongyang who last week visited the northern city of Hoeryong, across the Tumen River from China. Floods ripped through the area Aug. 30 as Typhoon Lionrock lashed northeast Asia. North Korean authorities at first estimated that 44,000 people had been displaced between Onsong, in the north, and Musan, a major mining center 100 miles downriver. The Washington Post's Anna Fifield reports on North Korea's fifth nuclear test and what it means for the region and one of Kim Jong Un's few remaining allies, China.(Jason Aldag, Anna Fifield/The Washington Post) The North Korean government has confirmed that 133 people have been killed and 395 are missing as a result of the floods, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Sunday. At least 140,000 people are in urgent need of assistance, theOCHA said in a statement, including an estimated 100,000 people who have been displaced. Water supplies to about 600,000 people have been cut. “My impression was that this was a much worse disaster than the statistics indicate,” Staines said by Skype from Pyongyang. “The damage is very extensive, and there is clear evidence that the floodwaters were not only very high — you can see the watermarks above the window frames — but also moving very rapidly in some places.” Authorities took the aid workers, some of whom represented U.N. agencies, to destroyed medical clinics and to a water pumping station near Hoeryong that was wiped out, leaving 50,000 people without water. Kitchen gardens and household livestock — chickens, ducks, pigs — also were washed away, Staines said. “These households have clearly lost everything,” he said. In some areas, communication links remain cut and the roads are still impassable. What life looks like inside North Korea View Photos From playing soccer to going to the zoo, a glimpse inside the Hermit Kingdom. North Korean authorities initially asked aid agencies to help with relief efforts using their existing budgets and supplies. But now officials plan to launch international appeals for donations. Their timing could hardly be worse. On Friday, Kim Jong Un ordered North Korea’s fifth nuclear test and its largest yet, triggering international calls for more sanctions to punish the regime. [North Korea inches closer to the ability to send a nuclear-tipped missile to the U.S.] South Korea’s Defense Ministry warned Monday that Pyongyang could order another nuclear test at any time. The South’s Yonhap News Agency reported, citing unnamed government sources, that the North has completed preparations for a sixth test. With so many other crises around the world competing for donations, agencies operating in North Korea — which include the United Nations’ World Food Program and UNICEF, as well as a handful of European organizations — have confronted difficulty raising money for their projects for several years and have had to scale back operations. North Korea said the flooding was caused by the “strongest storm and heaviest downpour” since World War II. The government redirected people involved in a “200-day campaign” intended to increase production to instead help with the relief efforts. Soldiers were sent to the disaster area Saturday, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. Workers on Ryomyong Street, an ambitious development in Pyongyang that is trumpeted in the state media on an almost daily basis, also were dispatched. Tens of thousands of houses and public buildings collapsed, while railways and roads, along with factories and crops, were destroyed or submerged, KCNA reported. North Korea is particularly prone to flooding because of deforestation — a result of people cutting down trees to fuel fires in their homes — and a tendency to turn every inch of arable land over to crops. Making matters worse, houses, particularly in the downtrodden northern areas, are often made of substandard, locally produced bricks. Staines asked donor nations to remember that the flood has hurt regular people in North Korea. “In the communities we visited, we were allowed to meet with local people, and we could see their spirit and their energy and their support for each other,” he said. “These are people who are doing the best they can. They’re just normal, everyday people.” (The Washington Post)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 9/14/2016 10:42:07 AM
	What Clinton's pneumonia really tells us By PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM (@PW_CUNNINGHAM) • 9/12/16 5:48 PM Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she walks from her daughter's apartment building Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016, in New York. Clinton unexpectedly left Sunday's 9/11 anniversary ceremony in New York after feeling "overheated," according to her campaign. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle) Hillary Clinton's case of pneumonia may not reveal as much about her health as about her barricaded style of campaigning. In several damage-control interviews Monday, staff for the Democratic presidential nominee admitted they could have done a better job of disclosing that she's suffering from a case of pneumonia that led to her wobbling exit from the Sept. 11 memorial service at Ground Zero Sunday morning. "I think that in retrospect, we could have handled it better in terms of providing more information more quickly," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told MSNBC. Clinton's doctor diagnosed her with pneumonia on Friday, but she didn't admit it until after the incident at Ground Zero led to widespread speculation about her health status. Fallon said Monday that Clinton will disclose more medical details this week, but the situation left Democrats shaking their heads. "Hopefully they will put this behind them once they release more information, but the damage has already been done," said Jim Manley, a former staffer for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Clinton's handling of the situation, which may have been prevented had her campaign been more forthcoming initially, is typical Clinton behavior, Manley said. "Sometimes they focus too much on privacy and they allow these stories to spin out of control," he said. Before the weekend, speculation about Clinton's health had been mostly pushed by right-wing media outlets and her Republican presidential opponent, Donald Trump, who has sought to portray her as too physically weak to be president. But the incident Sunday sparked widespread scrutiny, even without help from Trump, who said little about the incident other than wishing her well and announcing he would disclose his own medical records this week. "I hope she gets well soon, I don't know what's going on. I'm like you. I just see what I see … the coughing fit was a week ago, so I assume that was pneumonia also," Trump said Monday morning on Fox and Friends, referring to a coughing fit that hit Clinton during a Labor Day address, forcing her to stop speaking and drink water several times. A report by Politico put the focus on Clinton's intake of water. Several sources close to Clinton told the website that she's chronically dehydrated because she is reluctant to drink water, to the point that it's become a "source of tension with her staff." And while some Democrats sought to downplay the episode, with Sen. Chuck Schumer announcing he recently had pneumonia, others gave a reaction that could only make the Clinton camp cringe. While announcing vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine for a campaign speech, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said Kaine is "ready to become the president" if necessary. Clinton has canceled her campaign stops for the early part of the week so she can rest, and it's not clear when she will resume travel, although her doctor has said she is being treated with antibiotics and making a good recovery. Directly answering reporters' questions about her health could go a long way in assuring voters, but her campaign hasn't announced any press conferences. And Clinton aides were still somewhat evasive during interviews Monday, when asked how soon they were told about the case of pneumonia. Asked repeatedly by MSNBC host Kate Snow if he knew about the diagnosis before she fell ill in public, spokesman Robby Mook said he wasn't going to "get into details about who knew her medical information." "She made a determination with her doctor that she'd power through this," he said. "She didn't want it to affect anything and obviously this on Sunday, when she got overheated, it was clear she needed some downtime." The incident shone the health spotlight directly on Clinton, even though Trump is two years older. Trump, if elected, would be the oldest U.S. president in history. Clinton would be the second-oldest president, just behind Ronald Reagan. Both have released limited medical information: Trump, in the form of a short note from his doctor, and Clinton, with a longer, more detailed letter from her physician. (Washington Examiner)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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What Clinton's pneumonia really tells us

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she walks from her daughter's apartment building Sunday, Sept. 11, 2016, in New York. Clinton unexpectedly left Sunday's 9/11 anniversary ceremony in New York after feeling "overheated," according to her campaign. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)