The 2020 United States presidential election is scheduled for Tuesday, November 3, 2020. 

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Ten Things You Can Do For UN World Toilet Day

Thursday, 19 November

If you’re reading this and you have a toilet, you are luckier than the 2.5 billion people on this planet who lack access to improved sanitation. More than 1 billion people still face the indignity of defecating in the open, and women and girls are being assaulted while going to the toilet. 

Every year on 19 November, World Toilet Day is a chance to get involved in the global movement for toilets and sanitation for all, and raise awareness of the need for action to end the sanitation crisis. In 2013, 19 November was designated as UN World Toilet Day. The theme for this year’s World Toilet Day is dignity and equality, inspiring action to end open defecation and putting a spotlight on how access to improved sanitation leads to a reduction in assault and violence on women. 

Sustainable sanitation is a matter of dignity, equality, and safety, and is crucial to improving the health and wellbeing of one-third of humanity. What can you do to help make ‘sanitation for all’ a reality this World Toilet Day?

1. Run in The ‘Urgent Run’

Participate in The Urgent Run or host your own event for this year’s UN World Toilet Day. The Urgent Run (www.urgentrun.com) is a global mobilisation event to draw attention to the urgent calls for action to end the sanitation crisis. Sixteen events have been registered in 12 countries including Singapore, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Ghana, Italy, Senegal, and Mozambique. If you can’t wait to see health, dignity and wellbeing for all through sustainable sanitation, join The Urgent Run, or hold an event. 

2. Do a ‘Big Squat’ 

Hold a big squat and raise awareness of the more than 1 billion people who face the indignity of open defecation, which spreads diseases including cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and diarrhoea. Stop, drop, squat and share! Get friends, colleagues, classmates or family together, invite people in the local community and squat in a public place. Take photos or video, and share them on YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter. Use the hashtags #bigsquat, #worldtoiletday and #opendefecation. 

3. Share

Access to sanitation would make life safer and healthier for 1.25 billion women. Join the global movement for toilets and sanitation for all, and raise awareness by posting on Facebook, Instagram, Google+, posting a Vine or Tweeting this World Toilet Day. Show that you give a crap about toilets and sanitation, and raise your voice to call for action. Use the hashtags #wecantwait #worldtoiletday #opendefecation #sanitation and #igiveashit.  

4. Become a toilet advocate 

Clean and safe toilets are fundamental for health, dignity, privacy, equality and education. Contact your local representative, community leader or member of parliament and let them know you care about public toilets in your area. Does your town need new public toilets? Are the toilets safe and accessible, clean and well-maintained? Is there an appropriate ratio of toilets for men and women, or ‘potty parity’? Talk toilets with your local representative today. 

5. Watch  

Watch a World Toilet Day playlist and share videos on Facebook or Twitter to join the call for toilets and sanitation for all. Here’s one to start with – meet Mr Toilet. Jack Sim is a man on a mission to end the sanitation crisis, and he started by tackling the toilet taboo. Meet the man behind the World Toilet Organization who is proud to be called ‘Mr. Toilet’.

6. Talk crap!

1,000 children died per day from diarrhoeal diseases due to poor sanitation in 2013. These deaths are preventable, but what we don’t discuss, we can’t improve. Help break the ‘toilet taboo’ by talking crap with friends and family, colleagues, classmates or neighbours: have a conversation, send an email, send a text, post to Facebook, and raise awareness of the importance of action on sanitation. 

7. Toilet Selfie 

Did you know that more people own a mobile phone than have access to a toilet? Next time you go to the bathroom, think about how lucky you are, and snap a #toiletselfie and post it to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter for World Toilet Day – and keep it clean! Let your friends know they’re lucky if they have access to a toilet and encourage them to join the sanitation movement. 

8. Invest in toilets and sanitation for all

One third of the world’s population still lacks access to adequate sanitation. Donate to support the work of the World Toilet Organization at worldtoilet.org and your donation will go towards advocacy and awareness, and to support capacity building and social enterprise sanitation projects in Cambodia, India, and Mozambique.

9. Learn 

Did you know that toilets and sanitation are considered a human right? In 2010, the UN General Assembly recognised sanitation and water as a human right, essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights. Visit World Toilet Organization’s website worldtoilet.org and the UN World Toilet Day website unwater.org/worldtoiletday to learn about the sanitation crisis and how you can get involved. 

10. Tell us what you’re doing 

How will you commemorate UN World Toilet Day on 19 November? Join the call for action to end the sanitation crisis on UN World Toilet Day, and share what you’re doing. Reply to @worldtoilet and @UN_Water on Twitter or email online@worldtoilet.org. Some of the best activities will be featured on the World Toilet Day website and in World Toilet Organization’s social media.  

Read more:

https://www.worldtoilet.org/ten-things-you-can-do-for-un-world-toilet-day/

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/27529#comments

OANN also has an established presence at White House news briefings, with reporter Chanel Rion using her access to ask questions that give the President and his press secretary rein to speak on far-right theories and personal grievances.

When the White House Correspondents Association barred Rion from attending on days she wasn't rostered, White House officials reportedly intervened to let her in.

In May she asked whether Trump would pardon former President Barack Obama for "illegally wiretapping Trump Towers ... and other potential crimes out there", referencing a conspiracy theory.

In March, Trump singled out Rion to ask a question, noting as he did that she was "OANN ... you treat me very nicely".

Rion's question: "Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels, and they work right here at the White House with direct access to you?"

Over this same period, Trump has been fiercely critical of Fox News — especially its decision to air its polls that show Democrat Joe Biden ahead of the incumbent in the Presidential race.

Trump has publicly lashed the network at least 16 times this year.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-11/donald-trump-attacks-fox-news-supports-one-america-network/11866402

Meanwhile:

... But in practice, the Obama administration created rules and regulations that forced religious employers, and religious non-profit organizations, to subsidize practices that violated their religious faith.

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case that privately held companies could not be forced to provide contraceptive coverage through Obamacare against the religious beliefs of their owners. The contraceptives in question included some drugs that could also be used to cause abortions. And this past week, in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, involving a Catholic charity providing services to the indigent elderly, the Supreme Court ruled that a new Trump administration rule exempting religious groups from Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate could stand.

In response to that 7-2 decision — in which even liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer concurred — Biden said he would reverse the religious protections and restore the previous status quo under the Obama administration.

“As disappointing as the Supreme Court’s ruling is, there is a clear path to fixing it: electing a new President who will end Donald Trump’s ceaseless attempts to gut every aspect of the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said, as quoted by Fox News. “If I am elected, I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the Hobby Lobby ruling: providing an exemption for houses of worship and an accommodation for nonprofit organizations with religious missions.”

Fox News points out that the Obama administration’s “accommodation” did not include the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Read more:

https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/07/09/joe-biden-vows-to-reverse-supreme-court-on-religious-exemptions-in-obamacare/

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Meanwhile: in regard to: "illegally wiretapping Trump Towers ... and other potential crimes out there", referencing a conspiracy theory... Not a theory as claimed by the article above:

Manafort wiretapped under secret court orders 06:21

On December 9, 2019, the Justice Department Inspector General released a report regarding the opening of the investigation on Russian election interference and Donald Trump's campaign. In the report, the IG contradicts what CNN was told in 2017, noting that the FBI team overseeing the investigation did not seek FISA surveillance of Paul Manafort: "We were also told that the team also did not seek FISA surveillance of Manafort...and we are aware of no information indicating that the Crossfire Hurricane team requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of Manafort."

Washington (CNN)US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

Read more:

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html

We also know that Flynn was "entrapped" by the FBI....

Michael Flynn’s defense claims FBI notes show agents tried to entrap the former national security adviser

See also:

https://saraacarter.com/sullivan-asks-appeals-court-to-reconsider-decision-to-dismiss-flynns-case-it-will-backfire/

The United States Army addressed an email to all of its civilian and military staff denouncing white supremacism.

The thrust of the message is that celebrating Columbus Day, denying the existence of white privilege, talking about American exceptionalism and claiming that there is only one human race are characteristic signs of the far right (meaning President Trump).

The email was sent by the Army’s Equity and Inclusion Agency as part of its Operation Inclusion, and was signed by Casey Wardynski, Assistant Secretary of the Army in charge of Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

The email contravenes the Hatch Act which bounds all federal employees to a confidentiality obligation and prohibits any form of political engagement.

The Pentagon assured that the email was sent by mistake and retracted it.

Representative (Republican, Alabama) Mo Brooks referred the matter to Attoney-General William Barr.

According to polling organizations, in the 2016 presidential elections, US senior military staff officers voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, while rank-and-file soldiers voted just as overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article210509.html

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"I need someone who understands that we are in a battle for the soul of this nation. And that if we’re going to get through these crises - we need to come together and unite for a better America. Kamala gets that," Biden added.

“I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021," Biden also said in an email statement, according to Political Wire.

Harris said via Twitter Tuesday that she is "honored" to join Biden as the Democratic party's nominee for vice president.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202008111080138325-us-presidential-candidate-joe-biden-picks-kamala-harris-as-2020-running-mate/

see also: on the importance of statistics... in unconventional virtual reality...

Soon, president Kamala Harris... Read from top.

From Aída Chávez/The INTERCEPT

July 3 2020

THERE’S A WAR GOING ON OVER KAMALA HARRIS’S WIKIPEDIA PAGE, WITH UNFLATTERING ELEMENTS VANISHING

In recent presidential cycles, the velocity of edits made to a Wikipedia page have correlated with the choice of vice presidential running mate.

CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC SEN. Kamala Harris is widely seen as a front-runner for a spot on the ticket with presumptive nominee Joe Biden, with vetting well underway. 

Presidential vetting operations have entire teams of investigators, but for the public, when the pick is announced, the most common source for information about the person chosen is Wikipedia. And there, a war has broken out over how to talk about Harris’s career. 

At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of Harris’s “tough-on-crime” record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that “it is not progressive to be soft on crime” — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning.   

In 2016, The Atlantic published an article about Wikipedia edits and how a burst of activity could foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, noting that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s page had seen significantly more edits than any other candidate’s in the weeks leading up to the announcement. The article also cited a 2008 Washington Post report about Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page seeing more than 65 edits in the hours leading up to John McCain’s announcement.

Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.

Harris has been working to distance herself on the national stage from her prosecutorial record in California, which has increasingly become a political liability, while taking a lead on Democratic police reform legislation after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, she branded herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and shifted left on issues like health care and climate change. But the most drastic gap is between her current messaging on crime and her past.  

A section in her bio that detailed her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for financial fraud, despite recommendations from her staff attorneys, has also been deleted: 

In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin‘s bank OneWestdespite evidence “suggestive of widespread misconduct” according to a leaked memo. … In 2017, she said that her office’s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on “following the facts and the evidence … like any other case”. In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to her campaign, making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin, but as senator, she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.

A section on an Ethics Commission finding Harris guilty of a campaign spending violation during her San Francisco district attorney race has also been deleted. A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.

The Wikipedia user, who goes by the username “Bnguyen1114,” has made hundreds of edits to Harris’s page throughout the last several months, often getting into fights over the proposed edits with other Wikipedia editors, who pointed out that the language was getting pulled directly from press releases and campaign literature. “You seem to have gone through a database of press releases from Harris’s office, cataloging every single one and adding it to the article,” one Wikipedia editor said. “That is not how we write encyclopedic articles.”

On June 11, the Wikipedia user removed this section referencing the Orange County scandal from the page, saying that they were proofreading for length: 

Later that year, Harris appealed a judge’s order to take over the prosecution of a high-profile mass murder case and to eject all 250 prosecutors from the Orange County District Attorney’s office over allegations of misconduct by Republican D.A. Tony Rackauckas. Rackauckas was alleged to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence. Harris noted that it was unnecessary to ban all 250 prosecutors from working on the case, as only a few had been directly involved, later promising a narrower criminal investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice began an investigation into Rackauckas in December 2016, but he was not re-elected.

In her first bid for public office, Harris embraced a “tough-on-crime” approach in the San Francisco district attorney race and unseated Terence Hallinan, who was considered one of the “most left-wing politicians in the country.” Under Hallinan, the district attorney’s office focused on rehabilitative justice initiatives instead of incarceration, which led to the lowest felony conviction rates of any county in California. 

While campaigning in the Mission District, SF Weekly reported at the time, Harris slammed Hallinan for failing to prosecute anti-war protesters for property destruction. “It is not progressive to be soft on crime,” she said.

On June 8, the Wikipedia user removed this quote from the page, saying that the changes made were “minor edits for length.” 

In a paragraph about Harris announcing a new state law requiring law enforcement agencies to collect statistics on how many people are shot, seriously injured, or killed by police officers throughout the state, the user removed the following sentence: “Harris was later criticized by criminal justice advocates for her measured approach.” 

This user also tried to make edits to the “Bernie Bro” Wikipedia page, a term that refers to the persistent myth that Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign had a monolithic base of support concentrated only among young white men. 

According to the user’s edit history, they tried to remove a paragraph explaining that although Sanders’s base skewed white in 2016, the Vermont senator actually had the most diverse base of any of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Harris’s most fervent online supporters, or stans, call themselves the “KHive.” Though members of the KHive are excited by the prospect of Harris, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, shattering another glass ceiling, they also cite her policy positions as a reason for their support. They generally consider her background as a prosecutor to be a political strength.

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/02/kamala-harris-wikipedia/

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...

Mr. Mellon’s millions would be a big deal in any cycle, but the gift was especially welcome for this incumbent this year. The fact that an outsider like Mr. Mellon has emerged as one of the few supporters willing to be so generous illustrates a surprising problem for the president: his struggle to attract and retain a reliable stable of millionaires and billionaires willing to write seven-figure checks, despite his takeover of the Republican Party and a policy agenda that largely serves the interests of America’s ultrawealthy.

Mr. Trump is hardly lacking for cash; he has received huge numbers of small donations online from a fervent grass-roots base, and he raised a jaw-dropping $165 million in July for his campaign and the two fund-raising committees that he shares with the Republican National Committee. The Trump Victory fund, one of those committees, has also collected respectable sums through donations that cannot exceed $580,600 — as opposed to super PACs, which are vessels for unlimited contributions.

But the president’s sagging popularity, driven by his erratic and divisive behavior during the coronavirus crisis, has prompted some of the wealthiest Republicans — the heavy artillery of modern politics — to delay, divert or diminish their giving, just as Joseph R. Biden Jr. has begun to tap a rich vein of Wall Street and Silicon Valley support, party operatives and donors said in interviews.

Thus far, only six of the top 38 donors to Trump-related super PACs in 2016 and 2018 have contributed to America First for the president’s re-election, according to a New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance data.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/us/politics/trumps-campaign-big-donors.html

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Meanwhile at the polls...