Pakistan attack: Gunmen storm five-star hotel in Balochistan

Three gunmen who stormed a five-star hotel in the restive Pakistani province of Balochistan, killing at least one guard, have been shot dead by security forces, officials say.

The attack and subsequent siege, which targeted the Zaver Pearl-Continental Hotel in the strategic port city of Gwadar, lasted several hours.

A hotel spokesman said there were no guests and few staff due to Ramadan.

The separatist Balochistan Liberation Army said it carried out the attack.

The group said that the hotel, the centrepiece of a multi-billion-dollar Chinese project, was selected in order to target Chinese and other investors.

The Observer view on the European elections and Nigel Farage’s malign message

Observer editorial

Neither of the major parties has done enough to challenge the leader of the Brexit party

Across Europe, rightwing nationalist populism is on the march. Britain is no exception. Polls are putting Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in the lead. If it does as well as expected in the European elections, it will be the second time Farage has pulled it off: in 2014, Ukip topped the poll with 27% of the vote. Farage’s relative success is partly the product of his intuitive understanding of how to deploy the populist playbook: whip up public disenchantment with the establishment, accuse the elites of thwarting the will of the people and offer misleadingly simple solutions to complex problems.

With voters so disillusioned with the two main parties, it’s a seductive formula. But his success is at least as much explained by the eagerness of mainstream politicians to yield to his brand of politics, rather than to challenge it. On Europe, Farage has only ever stoked anti-EU sentiment without ever offering constructive fixes. He has consistently got away with telling untruths: that the EU is on the cusp of creating a pan-European army; that EU membership costs the UK £55m a day; that three-quarters of British law is made in Brussels. He has repeatedly praised Norway as a model for the UK’s relationship with the EU in the past, but last week denied it.

Yemen war: End to fighting could be in sight as Houthi rebels announce withdrawal from lifeline port

UN peace deal placed pullback of all forces from city in September, but until Saturday neither side had compliedBel Trew @beltrew

Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they are beginning a unilateral withdrawal from Hodeidah, a move which could save a fractured peace deal and end the fighting.

The bulk of food and humanitarian aid to the war-torn country comes through the lifeline port, which over the past year has become the front line of the war between the rebels and the Gulf-backed Yemeni government.

The fighting had strangled the flow of aid to millions who are on the brink of famine.

A witness told the Reuters news agency that Houthi forces had started leaving the port. The information is yet to be confirmed by the United Nations (UN).

Terror Group Boko HaramThe Suicide Bomber Who Survived

Halima was supposed to die at a market in Chad. And her mission was to take as many people as possible with her — a mission forced upon her by the terror group Boko Haram. But she survived, and the 20-year-old is now learning how to live again.

By Till Mayer in Bol, Chad

With just a few meters left to go before reaching her village, Halima can hardly stand it. The 20-year-old quickens her pace when she sees the first huts, ecstatic to be back home, even if only for a brief visit. Her gait is a bit unsteady — after all, it’s not easy to walk through fine sand on two prosthetic legs.

Halima doesn’t come often to the Lake Chad island of Gomerom Doumou, which lies at the southern edge of the Sahara and straddles the borders of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. It takes an hour and a half to travel by boat from the small town of Bol in Chad to Halima’s home island, weaving through a maze of small islands and floating grass carpets.

“Am I a bad person?” Why one mom didn’t take her kid to the ER — even after poison control said to.

The emergency room bill I can’t stop thinking about.

Two years ago, 36-year-old Lindsay Clark was facing a terrible decision.

Her 2-year-old daughter Lily had gotten into a small bottle of the anti-nausea drug Dramamine.

“It had a child lock on it, but I caught her sitting there with a bunch of white stuff in her mouth,” Clark says. “I immediately swept her mouth with my finger, but I wasn’t sure how many pills she ate.”

Clark had to decide: Should she take Lily to the emergency room?

Sri Lanka Catholics hold first Sunday mass after Easter attacks

Thousands of Catholics attended mass in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo Sunday amid tight security to prevent a repeat of Easter bomb attacks that killed 258 people.

Soldiers armed with automatic assault rifles guarded St. Theresa’s church at Colombo’s Thimbirigasyaya residential quarter, while members of the congregation were searched for explosives.

The sprawling church car park was empty as the authorities did not allow any vehicles into the compound as part of high-level security.

Or perhaps I should call it News Delivery Specialist to pair with my Newsstand Delivery Manager cred which was a real job where I was in charge of 50 or so Retail locations on a weekly basis (I had other responsibilities too, I was full time). I have awards from the Columbia School of Journalism also (though not from that job, albeit the same publisher) so I think I’m above average qualified for a Journalist.

But Paperboy is not a real job (except in the sense of dutiful delivery with desultory demand for payment). My first real job was doing mall intercepts for a Consumer Research Field Service company (Do you you have pimples, oily skin, blemishes, white heads, black heads, or zits? What do you mean “No” you Pizza Faced Zombie?).

Opinion sampling is a kind of Gilmore tradition and Richard and my activist brother are still employed in the field. My magnum opus of coding was a Crosstabulation Program to process Survey Results. At the time this was done by specialist Data Processing Houses that charged Thousands of Dollars per run (COBOL and Hollerith Card Tech, I later was able to get my hands on a genuine 9-Track paid for by a client who wanted backwards compatibility). It was big, really big, including 10s of Thousands of lines of Data Entry, Import/Export, Data Maintenance (more difficult than it seems damn it, you need to screen for duplicates and while assigning a unique internal ID is the start of a solution, you need an in RAM Hash Table of Used/Not Used which is not trivial in 64K of CP/M) and a Report Writer, all of which required a user interface and not just a scripting language.

I don’t work at that any more and it’s because I’m just too damn good at what I do.

My last field gig was doing NHTSA breath tests, manning “voluntary” stations in a lab coat with a clip board and a safety vest and explaining to people (after I got them in the habit of mindlessly agreeing to a series of innocuous questions) that the Police were no longer involved (true enough) and we wanted them to give us a breath-a-lyzer.

Do I have to?

No. Not at all. You can drive out that exit right there and I’ll mark you as a refusal. We’re really doing this to test the efficiency of the Police (partly true, but in a bad way).

I’ll put it the way my Cataract Surgeon did, I’m only legally allowed to claim a 98% success rate but I’m really much better than that.

But I have Milgram scruples about abusing the authority of the lab coat and I was obviously uncomfortable about the job which also involved hours of commute and standing around late at night in whatever weather so my services became less essential and I’m not unhappy they did.

But what is persuasive coercion compared to the State Enforced kind.

Electronic Warrants And Roadside Blood Draws Are The New Normal For DUI Checkpoints
by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt
Fri, May 10th 2019

A few years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration brought down the heat on itself by teaming with local law enforcement to set up roadside blood/saliva draws. The plan was to compile data on impaired driving, but the “voluntary” sample stations were staffed by cops who flagged motorists down, leading many to believe this was just another DUI checkpoint.

I am not a Cop. I never have been a Cop. No Officer was part of our Survey Team. What they did when we were not around? Anyone can abuse a lab coat, I’m only surprized more don’t.

Now that the NHTSA is out of the picture, local law enforcement is taking care of this itself. Only it very definitely is mandatory and any data-gathering would be incidental to the real purpose of these checkpoints: arresting impaired drivers. It’s 2019 in America and we can only now proudly say we’re the Home of the Roadside Blood Draw.
…
With the legalization of marijuana use in several states, there’s a new form of impairment that can’t be caught with a breathalyzer. While there’s definitely a law enforcement interest in limiting impaired driving, there’s also a lot of fiduciary pressure to continue to bust drivers generate revenue even when the driver’s drug of choice isn’t alcohol… and the driver may not even actually be impaired.

This is leading to two things: an increase in electronic warrants sent at odd hours to judges who will likely approve any boilerplate sent from a DUI checkpoint… and a whole bunch of minimally-trained officers running roadside blood drives out of police vans.
…
The only thing keeping this from being even worse is a 2016 Supreme Court decision. Without it, these blood draws wouldn’t even have a hasty judicial scrawl at the bottom of a dozen pages of boilerplate authorizing Officer Nurse to take blood from drivers’ arms. Meanwhile, officers are touting the speed of this new dystopian feature as a win for the public, since the guilty parties will be able to processed into the criminal justice system in less than half the time.

I want to emphasize these are mandatory blood draws that can be screened all sorts of ways for DNA and other markers.

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Sunday is Mothers’ Day and, as is tradition, we shower our Mom’s with flowers, cards and special meals. Once again Epicurious.com has really great breakfast/ brunch recipes to surprise Mom with on her day.

Feed a crowd with a baked take on the classic French Croque Madame sandwich with smoky ham, melty cheese, creamy sauce, and gently cooked eggs. Serve with a crisp green salad for a lovely brunch, lunch, or dinner.

Both the tart shell and filling for this luscious quiche can be prepped ahead, making it a great dish for brunch entertaining.

A quick and easy hollandaise sauce adorns this classic combination of buttery English muffins, savory Canadian bacon, and perfectly poached eggs.

The potatoes are what make this the love child of a Spanish tortilla and an Italian frittata. But you don’t necessarily need them. Fill this frittata with 2 cups of whatever leftover cooked vegetables you have in your fridge and drop “Spanish” from the name. Serve with a crisp green salad.

This simple dish of smashed avocado, citrus, salt, and seeded toast is the basis of our Avo and Egg. Avo-toast is huge. And it’s wildly popular because it’s delicious and healthy.

This makes a lot of crepes. You can halve the recipe if that makes more sense for you, or keep it as is and have crepes two days in a row. Serve with Suzette Sauce and Milk Chocolate Sauce

Breakfast loaves are so great for grabbing on-the-go, and this deliciously sweet loaf is a firm favourite of mine in the morning. ‘Bread’ just got very interesting!

Continue reading

Trump tramples and divides world, just like he does at home

Analysis by Nic Robertson, CNN

Updated 0449 GMT (1249 HKT) May 11, 2019

Nearly all countries agree to stem flow of plastic waste into poor nations