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April 20, 2010: An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico causes the biggest marine oil spill in history.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

May 2, 2010: The European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund sign off on a 110 million bailout of Greece, to save the EU country from default.

Source: The Guardian

June 27, 2010: The FBI arrests 10 Russian spies caught living deep undercover in the United States.

Just days later, the group was taken to Vienna, Austria, where they were turned over to Russian authorities in exchange for four Russian nationals accused of being double agents, The Guardian reported at the time.

October 13, 2010: 33 miners are rescued after spending 69 days trapped in a Chilean copper mine.

Sources: CNN, Encyclopedia Britannica

December 8, 2010: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange turns himself in to British police after Swedish authorities put out a warrant for his arrest in connection to a rape accusation.

Assange denied the allegation and said the extradition order was just a way to get him to Sweden so that he could be extradited to the US for his role in publishing information embarrassing to the American government, according to The New York Times.

While out on bail in the UK in June 2012, Assange sought asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as a way to avoid his extradition to Sweden. He lived there for seven years before his asylum was withdrawn in April 2019, following disputes with Ecuadorian authorities, and he was rearrested by British police.

However, Swedish authorities announced they were dropping the rape investigation into Assange in November 2019.

December 17, 2010: The suicide of a Tunisian street vendor serves as a catalyst for the Arab Spring.

Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside the local governor's office when government authorities confiscated his wares, according to The New York Times.

The incident caused revolutionary protests in Tunisia, and the toppling of the government within a month. Similar protests broke out in several other North African and Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

February 11, 2011: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigns under pressure from revolutionaries, giving up the seat he had held for three decades.

Anti-government protests in Egypt broke out a month earlier, as part of the larger Arab Spring, Al Jazeera reported. When Mubarak resigned, the military took control of the government. Amnesty International said that at least 840 people were killed in the protests that transpired over 18 days.

Mubarak was put on trial for the protester deaths, but acquitted in 2017, according to Al-Ahram.

March 2011: Civil war breaks out in Syria after military defectors create the Free Syrian Army, to combat those loyal to President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Protests had broken out in Syria after police tortured teenagers caught making anti-regime graffiti, according to Mother Jones.

March 11, 2011: An earthquake in Japan causes the second-worst nuclear accident in history.

The Great Sendai Earthquake of 2011 caused a tsunami in Japan's northeastern Fukushima prefecture. That tsunami in turn damaged backup generates at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which went into partial meltdown, prompting the government to order the evacuation of nearly 50,000 residents, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

April 29, 2011: 3 billion people tune in to watch Britain's Prince William marry college sweetheart Kate Middleton in a ceremony at Westminster Cathedral in London

Source: The New York Times

May 1, 2011: President Barack Obama addresses the nation to announce the death of terrorist Osama bin Laden, after a successful Navy SEAL raid on the 9/11 mastermind's compound in Pakistan.

Source: NPR

May 14, 2011: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, is pulled off a Paris-bound flight in New York and charged with sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

Three months later, prosecutors decided to drop the case after they lost faith in the credibility of the accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, The New York Times reported at the time.

Strauss-Kahn has always maintained that he did not rape Diallo, but in 2012 he settled with the hotel worker for an undisclosed sum after she sued him for sexual assault, according to The Guardian.

July 7, 2011: Rupert Murdoch's News of the World tabloid shutters after it was revealed that staffers hacked into the phones of prominent figures like Prince William to mine for stories.

Sources: CNN, CSM

July 22, 2011: A right-wing Christian extremist kills 77 people most of them children in attacks on Oslo, Norway, and the nearby island of Utoya.

In August 2012, the attacker was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum possible sentence since Norway doesn't have the death penalty, according to CNN.

July 23, 2011: Grammy Award-winning singer Amy Winehouse, 27, is found dead at her home in north London.

Though the troubled songstress had released just two studio albums in her career, the second, "Back to Black," was a critical and popular success. Rolling Stoneranks it #451 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

A coroner later determined the singer's cause of death was from drinking too much alcohol, according to the BBC.

September 17, 2011: The Occupy Wall Street movement begins with about 1,000 people protesting in downtown Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

The group's main issue was the power and influence held by the richest Americans.

The group held the park for about three months before police kicked them out on November 15. By then, similar protest camps had been started in other cities across America, according to The Week.

October 3, 2011: American Amanda Knox, 24, is freed from an Italian prison after her conviction in the 2009 murder of her British roommate is overthrown.

Knox served nearly four years of a 26-year sentence before she was cleared, according to CNN.

July 20, 2012: A shooter opens fire at a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight," in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring dozens of others.

The shooter was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

September 11, 2012: US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans are killed after a mob storms the US mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Source: CNN

October 22, 2012: After being accused of conducting an elaborate doping scheme, American cyclist Lance Armstrong is stripped of his seven Tour de France medals and banned from cycling competitions for life.

He initially denied the accusations before telling Oprah Winfrey in 2013 that they were true.

October 29, 2012: Superstorm Sandy causes widespread death and damage, especially in the Northeastern US.

Source: Business Insider

November 6, 2012: Voters in Colorado and Washington vote to legalize recreational marijuana, becoming the first states in the US to do so.

Nine other states have since followed suit, from Alaska to Maine.

February 28, 2013: Basketball legend Dennis Rodman travels to North Korea and meets leader Kim Jong-un, becoming the first American to meet the new leader since he assumed office two years prior.

Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, The New York Times

March 13, 2013: Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected pope, becoming the first South American to lead the Roman Catholic Church. He assumes the name Pope Francis.

Pope Francis was elected after his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, abdicated, becoming the first pope to voluntarily resign since Celestine V in 1294.

April 15, 2013: Two pressure cooker bombs explode at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 250 others.

Brothers Tamerlan, 26, and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, 19, initially escaped the scene, and the city of Boston was effectively shut down for days as law enforcement teams hunted for the bombers.

Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police four days later. A wounded Dzokhar was arrested later that morning, after seeking shelter in a dry-docked boat.

Two years later, Dzokhar was sentenced to death for his role in the bombings.

May 16, 2013: The now-defunct news site Gawker publishes a video showing Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

Ford initially refuses to step down, and his increasingly bizarre behavior over the coming weeks and months make international headlines.

His term as mayor came to an end on November 30, 2014, after he dropped out of the race to deal with a cancer diagnosis. But he still won for city councilor of his old constituency with 58% of the vote. He served just two years in that role before dying at the age of 46 in March 2016.

May 6, 2013: Three women who had been missing for about a decade are rescued from the Cleveland, Ohio, home of Ariel Castro.

Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23, and Michelle Knight, 32, had each disappeared between 2002 and 2004. They finally escaped after Berry kicked down a screen door and yelled at a neighbor to call 911, according to CBS News.

Castro, 53, later pleaded guilty to several charges to avoid the death penalty, only to die by suicide in his cell a month later.

June 6, 2013: The Guardian and the Washington Post publish stories based on information leaked to them by government contractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden flees the country and is eventually allowed asylum in Russia.

July 6, 2013: "Glee" star Cory Monteith is found dead in a Vancouver, British Columbia, hotel room after succumbing to a drug and alcohol overdose.

Source: USA Today

July 7, 2013: Scottish tennis player Andy Murray becomes the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936.

Source: Tennis.com

July 13, 2013: The Black Lives Matter movement begins after George Zimmerman is acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the shooting death of black teen Trayvon Martin.

On February 26, 2012, Zimmerman shot dead Martin because he thought he was an intruder in his Sanford, Florida, neighborhood. But Martin lived in the same neighborhood and was just returning home after a trip to the convenience store to buy an iced tea and candy. The incident caused national outrage over the treatment of black people, especially black boys.

July 22, 2013: Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, gives birth to a baby boy named Prince George, who becomes third in line to the British throne, behind his father and grandfather.

Source: Business Insider

December 5, 2013: Nelson Mandela, South Africa's trailblazing first black president, dies at the age of 95.

Source: Business Insider

February 1, 2014: Dylan Farrow writes an essay describing how her father, director Woody Allen, molested her as a child. Allen was never charged and denies the allegation.

The accusation against Allen wasn't new, but it was the first time that his daughter had spoken publicly to give her side of the story.

February 2, 2014: Academy Award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman dies at the age of 46 from a drug overdose.

Source: The New York Times

February 18, 2014: A 39-year-old Jimmy Fallon starts his tenure as host of "The Tonight Show".

Source: The New York Times

March 2014: Russia invades Ukraine and annexes the Crimea, after Ukraine's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, is toppled in anti-government protests.

Sources: Business Insider, Vox

March 8, 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mysteriously vanishes off radar while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Parts of the Boeing 777 would later wash up on islands off the southeastern coast of Africa, but not the fuselage.

March 25, 2014: Actress Gwyneth Paltrow announces her separation from her Coldplay frontman husband Chris Martin on her blog Goop, saying they have decided to "consciously uncouple".

Source: Harper's Bazaar

April 2014: The Flint water crisis begins as the Michigan city tries to cut costs by getting their water from the Flint River instead of getting it from Detroit.

Doctors would later tell residents to stop using the water after finding high lead levels in children's blood.

March 23, 2014: The World Health Organization reports that there has been an outbreak of Ebola in Guinea, the start of the largest outbreak of the virus in history.

The virus spread as far as the US, after a man infected with the virus flew to Dallas in October and got sick after landing. He later died, and two nurses became infected while treating him but recovered.

There was another scare when a medical aide worker became infected with the virus after returning to New York City from Guinea.

Seven other people were flown to the US to get treatment for the virus, most of whom were medical workers. Of those seven, six survived and one died.

When Guinea was finally Ebola-free in June 2016, more than 28,600 people had contracted the disease, and 11,325 died.

February 1, 2015: The New England Patriots win Super Bowl XLIX thanks to an interception with just seconds left in the game.

With just 25 seconds left in the game, the Seattle Seahawks looked on track to overtake the Patriots.

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119 stories that gripped the world in the 2010s - INSIDER

PUBLISHED: 12:30 26 November 2019

Harriet Marsden

TOPSHOT - Demonstrators from the Black Lives Matter movement march through central London on July 10, 2016, during a demonstration against the killing of black men by police in the US. Police arrested scores of people in demonstrations overnight Saturday to Sunday in several US cities, as racial tensions simmer over the killing of black men by police. / AFP / DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS (Photo credit should read DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images)

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A signifier of awareness of racial and social discrimination, the power of the word 'woke' has been eroded by over-use. HARRIET MARSDEN reports on its roots and where it is heading.

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The BBC's identity correspondent Megha Mohan recently tweeted: "Note to editor; no-one in diverse circles uses the word 'woke' anymore. In fact, it's the clearest indication of the insular nature of their world if they file copy using it in 2019." Or as an ABC foreign affairs reporter, pithily responded: "That word is whiter than frightened milk."

That was almost two years to the day since the modern usage of 'woke' was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, with an updated meaning of "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice".

Has a concept so seemingly global become an indication of insularity? Has a term derived from African American vernacular, disseminated by Black Twitter and popularised by the Black Lives Matter movement become "whiter than frightened milk"? In our current political landscape, the rise of far-right rhetoric and the backlash against progressive social values, is it even desirable to be woke?

The OED dates the term back to 1962, from a glossary of Harlem colloquialisms in a NY Times Magazine article by William Melvin Kelley: "If you're woke, you dig it." The next entry is from a 1972 play Garvey Lives! by Barry Beckham: "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon stay woke."

What is the word's deeper etymology? Kabria Baumgartner, assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire and specialist in 19th century African American literature, says that it reminds her of early black abolitionists who "may well be the progenitors of a version of the idea of wokeness". She cites David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens and Elizabeth Jennings Sr's 1837 speech urging her audience of black women to "awake, and slumber no more".

Often accused of being grammatically incorrect, the term is drawn from "signifyin' discourse" - the phenomenon of African American vernacular English (AAVE) speakers playfully reworking words. In this case, the concept "don't sleep" - i.e. don't miss the point - acquires a quirk of ambiguous tense to become "stay woke".

Andr Brock, a professor of black digital studies at Georgia Institute of Technology, remembers first hearing the term in the early 2000s, "thanks to a cultural touchstone of black online culture: the OkayPlayer (OKP) website", which featured many neo-soul artists: A contemporary soul revival that built on 1970s soul stars (Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan) to emerge alongside 1990s hip hop and R'n'B. One of the pioneers of the musical sound was the singer/songwriter, Erykah Badu.

Dr Brock, 51, explains that there were a number of social injustice moments in the 2000s when OKP was at its height, but that the site's format didn't lend itself to a larger community of activists. Instead, he says, blogs were instrumental for responding to injustices.

In 2006, six black teenagers were convicted of battery for beating up a white student after months of racial tension at Jena High School, Louisiana, where they all studied.

The following year, a 14-year-old black freshman named Shaquanda Cotton pushed a hall monitor at her Texas high school, and was sentenced to seven years in prison for "assault on a public servant". The outcry over the harsh - and, many believed, discriminatory - convictions for these black children spread across the blogosphere. This, says Dr Brock, "left impressions on a new generation of activists who became aware of the power of black online spaces to mobilise movements".

The foundations were laid for a new network of black identity - and a viral moment. In 2008, Erykah Badu released her song Master Teacher, describing a racially equal utopia, with the refrain: "I stay woke" - in other words, that is nothing but a dream. The track would provide the spark, while Twitter was the kindling for newly 'woke'.

'Stay woke' soon became shorthand for paying attention to wider structural social injustice. Badu tweeted the phrase in support of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk feminist rebels who were facing jail time for their protest performance.

By 2012, blogs had largely been replaced by Facebook while Twitter had become a space for black digital practitioners to share culture and information - known as Black Twitter.

"The concentration of black identity on a network like Twitter, which afforded a type of ritual catharsis about everyday pleasures and problems, powered a phase shift of the network from entertainment to social activism," Dr Brock explains. "Woke is a terse, powerful term to symbolise this shift, which means it worked quite well for Twitter's limited 140-character content format."

One enthusiast for the new medium was a black 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin. He tweeted thousands of times about rap music and street culture, interspersed with teenage jokes and complaints about school.

In February 2012, Martin was walking home from the 7-11, where he'd bought sweets and juice. He was spotted by a volunteer neighbourhood watchman George Zimmerman, who called the police to report Martin for seeming "suspicious".

The police told Zimmerman not to follow Martin, as they were on their way. But Zimmerman and Martin ended up in a fight, and Zimmerman shot Martin dead. That month, the name Trayvon was tweeted more than two million times. And the next summer, when Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter, a tsunami of fury and frustration cascaded outwards from its Florida epicentre. The BlackLivesMatter movement was born.

The hashtag "stay woke" became its rallying cry: a promise to be vigilant of racial oppression, and a warning to keep safe from police brutality. BLM activists started a recruitment website called StayWoke.org. By the time Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson in 2014, 'woke' was firmly embedded.

"But like all black discourse terms," Dr Brock explains, "it was time limited. The mainstream picked up on 'woke' right about the time when Black Twitter was done with it and twisted it to their own ends."

Woke became part of a long history of words derived from African American slang to be adopted, or appropriated, by "non-black folk, organisations and corporations intent on virtue-signalling their allegiance to movements like Black Lives Matter", says Michael Arceneaux, a writer and essayist on race. As with other AAVE words - such as 'bred', 'bae', 'on fleek', and later 'lit' and 'shade' - many used the term without acknowledgement, or even awareness, of its origins.

Arceneaux, 35, points out that the word became inextricably linked with millennials even though it was popularised by Badu, a Gen X-er. By the end of 2015, Buzzfeed had published an article extolling the "woke bae" actor Matt McGorry (John Bennett in Orange is the New Black), because he was a "vocal feminist" who "weighed in on the Black Lives Matter movement frequently". Because he had posted topless pictures protesting Instagram's female nipple ban, and a photo holding a Jim Crow laws book and wearing a BLM bracelet.

In May 2016, woke was enshrined in cringeworthy 'youth' culture when MTV included it in a listicle of 10 slang words to know. The same month the BlackLivesMatter TV docu-film, Stay Woke had its debut, the term had been diluted to the point where it became a pseudonym for white liberal trendiness.

It was June 2016 when woke jumped its own shark. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of self-described neutral platform Twitter, was interviewed alongside BLM activist DeRay McKesson, wearing a Twitter-branded #StayWoke T-shirt. A marriage of appropriation and proto-corporate 'woke-washing': the CEO of a platform so integral to the term's activist development told the crowd that they would all receive the branded garment for free. Twitter as a company, it must be said, was anything but diverse.

Black cultural critics began to call out competitive, self-congratulatory wokeness, and white 'awareness' of inequality in place of any real action - Maya Binyam even coined the "Woke Olympics", while Charles Pulliam-Moore wrote that the term had become a derogatory jab at the very idea of staying woke. Desus Nice's tweets used #staywoke in relation to over-the-top conspiracy theories. Donald Glover's alter-ego Childish Gambino released the song Redbone in November 2016, ironically employing "stay woke" to call out infidelity. That song, also ironically, coincided with a massive spike in Google searches for the phrase.

Many on the right began to use 'woke' to disparage white liberals expressing sympathy with issues facing non-white people, and to bolster their own claims of grievance. Fraser Myers wrote admiringly for Spiked of the "anti-woke brigade". Woke had become the new "politically correct" - a term used lazily and pejoratively by anti-progressives.

Arwa Mahdawi, a Guardian US columnist, compares the trajectory with the word "triggered".

So-called 'trigger warnings', she says, were diluted by excessive and often unnecessary usage on the left, and so weaponised by the right, used to mock "snowflake millennials" and "lib tards".

Mahdawi, who has a background in advertising and brand strategy, says that she would now only use the term when describing 'woke-washing': Companies transparently allying themselves with social justice issues to court a younger demographic. Pepsi or Gillette adverts spring to mind.

By the time the word was added to the OED in 2017, then, it had already lived a full lifespan of meaning. But in fact, this was necessary for it to be chosen at all. Fiona McPherson, a senior editor on the OED new words team, explains a new word must have demonstrated "a little bit more staying power", ideally about 10 years.

"That's because we're telling the story of the word, so that's usually enough to show that a word has made an impact, that it isn't just one of those words that everybody's using for five minutes and then nobody's ever heard of again."

Woke is a key example, she says, that encapsulates the most interesting part of her job: a word which seems very 'now' has often come into play far earlier than you might think. But it needed something like Erykah Badu to popularise it, Twitter to disseminate it and an ensuing decade of appropriation to have demonstrated staying power.

In the context of our mayfly modern vernacular - the increasing burn rate of hip words as we communicate so much faster and frequently - it is theoretically possible for a word to have lived and died before it makes it to the dictionary at all, McPherson says. But it is simply too early to say whether the word woke has reached the end of its lifespan.

Dr Baumgartner says that, while the term has lost some of its cachet, she is hesitant to retire a term that "speaks to the necessity of deep social and political consciousness". If we historicise the term properly, she insists, we don't have to stop using it.

"Yes, the term has been co-opted, misused, and parodied but it can be reclaimed or our language can evolve. Either way, being active and conscious of oppression, inequality, and injustice are as important now, globally, as ever.

"If we retire or even shelve the term woke, the core remains."

This story was first published by Tortoise, a different newsroom dedicated to a slower, wiser news. Try Tortoise for a month for free at http://www.tortoisemedia.com/activate/tne-guest and use the code TNEGUEST.

The New European is proud of its journalism and we hope you are proud of it too. We believe our voice is important - both in representing the pro-EU perspective and also to help rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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Whither 'woke': What does the future hold for word that became a weapon? - The New European

An unhappy coincidence Thursday morning was, for me, the perfect metaphor for the mass (media) hysteria engendered by the televised impeachment hearings the nation was burdened with last week.

Although Chairman Adam Schiff had only scheduled hearings before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday and Friday, the programming department at CNN apparently decided to maximize their ratings by touting Special Coverage of the impeachment on Thursday as well. At least, that was the message that had been sent to YouTube TV, whose channel guide promoted Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage on CNN from early morning till mid-afternoon on Thursday.

No doubt, the hosts at CNN (under the tutelage of Never Trump boss Jeff Zucker) were prepared to give their last full measure of devotion to a cause that was conceived in hatred, and dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump is unworthy of the presidency and must be impeached, so help us God.

But on that Thursday morning, a true tragedy intervened in the form of a mass shooting at a high school in Santa Clarita, Calif. Therefore, for YouTube TV viewers at least, we were treated to the spectacle of CNN circling the shooting scene like carrion-hunting vultures under the banner of Impeachment Inquiry: Special Coverage.

The shooting, and more particularly CNNs fascination with it, reminded us (if we needed reminding) that cable news is built on a business plan of sensationalism, shock and outrage. It also resulted in a palimpsest of comments by CNN host Anderson Cooper and others that were equally applicable to the shooting and to the impeachment coverage that it had replaced.

There is a numbness to this, I think, in some orders quarters? as well, Cooper intoned solemnly. Its a horrific numbness of people looking up at a TV screen, seeing this yet again, and it just seems like it goes on and on and on.

He was talking about the school shooting, and yet his words could just as easily have been about the reaction that many voters have to the latest incarnation of a Democratic impeachment push that has been underway literally since the day after the 2016 election.

Now, we must be careful not to compare the actual tragedy of an act of violence such as a school shooting with the potential destruction of the civil order through an act of political sabotage. They have nothing in common except that both are fodder for our rubber-necking news media, and that is the warning I want to impart.

We already know from the Project Veritas undercover investigation of CNN that the news channels president, Jeff Zucker, has a blatant anti-Trump bias, which he has passed on to his employees.

In recordings [ http://bit.ly/2KzmGVR ]of daily phone calls captured by the Project Veritas whistleblower, Zucker directed staffers to push the impeachment narrative above all else.

Were moving towards impeachment, Zucker said. We are at an incredibly important time in history and in this country. And this is the story, OK? And I dont want to be distracted by other things. This is it. And I want to be fully committed to it and not take our eyes off this ball.

I want to stay with this, our top, top our own reporters, our own political analysts, the top, the top [unintelligible] we have. Okay, so make sure were doing that. All these moves are moves towards impeachment. So, dont dont lose sight of what the biggest story is.

Dont worry, Jeff. Your troops got the message, and despite the one day of attention to a tragedy in California, everything returned to normal Friday morning just after daybreak when the latest shocking testimony from Trump haters proved that, well, some people hate Trump.

Of course, its not just CNN that is hyping impeachment. All the cable news channels and, to some extent, the traditional networks are cashing in on the impeachment hysteria. MSNBCs Chris Matthews was on to something when he compared the impeachment hearings to the O.J. Simpson murder trial. He was talking about how people took sides very quickly, but from the point of view of television news coverage, we also have to see that O.J. and Trump are similar for another reason they are both good for ratings.

The O.J. trial provided a template for sensationalism that has now lasted for nearly a quarter-century. And even when there isnt a legitimate news angle, the cable networks are perfectly willing to invent one for the sake of keeping a story alive for weeks or, if at all possible, months.

Examples abound, and sadly they often are the most divisive stories possible, thus accounting for the high ratings as viewers keep coming back to feed their bias. Thus, you had the lengthy coverage of the death of Trayvon Martin, with rank speculation as to the guilt of George Zimmerman, who was ultimately acquitted after claiming self-defense. You had the daily dose of stripper Stormy Daniels for what seemed like months until her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, got so busy defending himself over various charges that he could no longer take time to harass the president over his alleged sexual indiscretions.

In both of those cases, as well as many others, the media fans the flames of doubt, distrust and deceit to ensure that the stories become the focus of endless debate. They are classic instances of what Rush Limbaugh calls drive-by media attention, where news reporters arouse passions with dubious reporting and then move on to other stories only after leaving chaos behind in their wake.

Many of the most divisive stories, including the Democratic assault on the presidency, have legitimate angles, of course, but they are also ratings catnip to cable news channels, which lose all sense of proportion when handed a story that has elements of sex, death or violence. The exception seems to be the case of alleged pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which ABC did a hard pass on in 2015 even though reporter Amy Robach said she had the story nailed down years before Epstein allegedly committed suicide in a New York jail cell.

Oh, yeah, theres one other story that the cable news networks dont seem to want to touch the remarkable coincidence of Vice President Joe Bidens involvement in the internal affairs of Ukraine at the same time his son Hunter was cashing in big-time by serving remotely on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Thats off limits. So is the name of the Ukraine whistleblower who worked with Biden in the White House, even though the law doesnt protect his anonymity. The whistleblower is a vital fact witness to just what happened between 2015 and 2019, which involved the entrapment of candidate Trump and led to the coming impeachment of President Trump. A fearless free press would stop at nothing to get that story.

Too bad we dont have a fearless free press.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His books including The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake? are available at his Amazon storefront. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter @HeartlandDiary.

Read more:
Drive-By Media Cash In on Impeachment Hysteria - Fairfield Sun Times

The Democrats who want to be president can't quite figure out how to talk about the most popular figure in their party. Former President Barack Obama still casts a long shadow over the 2020 primary campaign: Preserving Obama's legacy is the heart of former Vice President Joe Biden's pitch to voters - which has allowed his rivals to mark him as complacent. More left-leaning candidates, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, say the next president needs to do more to push for health care reforms and combat income inequality - but lately, she's struggling to sell her proposals. Former Obama Cabinet Secretary Julin Castro has ripped his ex-boss' record on immigration and deportation. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg raced to have a reporter correct a story that misquoted him citing "failures of the Obama era." Picking and choosing which parts of Obama's tenure to embrace, and how much, has become a delicate game in the primary season.

And now Obama himself is working to cool down what he sees as an overheated political climate. In October, at a panel discussion for his foundation, he warned against the pitfalls of "woke" online cancel culture, telling a gathering of young activists that "if all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far." This month, at a gathering of influential Democrats, he cautioned the 2020 contenders against pushing too far, too fast on policy: "This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement."

That distinction helps explain why so many of the candidates' proposals seem so far to the left of Obama. The former president was skeptical of sweeping change, bullish on markets, sanguine about the use of military force, high on individual responsibility and faithful to a set of old-school personal values. Compare that with the agenda of his would-be successors: Medicare for all, free college, a wealth tax, universal basic income.

Given the political climate, it's no surprise to see the party's base clamoring for something more dramatic. But the contrast between Obama's steady appraoch and the seeming radicalism of his Democratic heirs can't simply be chalked up to changing times. It's because the former president, going back at least to his 2004 Senate race, hasn't really occupied the left side of the ideological political spectrum. He wasn't a Republican, obviously: He never professed a desire to starve the federal government, and he opposed the Iraq War that Republicans overwhelmingly supported. But to the dismay of many on the left, and the continuing disbelief of many on the right, Obama never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before him.

There's a simple reason for that: Barack Obama is a conservative.

No, he isn't a Republican. He never professed a desire to starve the federal government, and he opposed the Iraq War that Republicans overwhelmingly supported. But he was, and remains, skeptical of sweeping change, bullish on markets, sanguine about the use of military force, high on individual responsibility and faithful to a set of old-school personal values. To the dismay of many on the left, and to the continuing disbelief of many on the right, Obama never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before him.

Obama's perspectives don't line up with every position now seen as right-of-center: He joined the Paris climate accords, he signed Dodd-Frank financial-sector regulation and he's pro-choice. But even on that issue, in one of the first times he outlined his stance on abortion to a national constituency, Obama explained that as the father of daughters, "if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby" - a framing that outraged anti-choice advocates, but also hinted at a patriarchal sensibility. He flip-flopped to supporting same-sex marriage, but with an emphasis on marriage.

His constant search for consensus, for ways to bring Blue America and Red America together, could lead him to policies that used Republican means to achieve more liberal ends.

The underlying concept for Obama's signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, with its individual mandate, was devised by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and was first implemented at the state level by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), then governor of Massachusetts. Obama wanted to protect Americans from the catastrophic effects of a prolonged recession, so he agreed, in his last meaningful vote as a senator, to a bailout of banks - and, as president, prioritized recovery over punishing banks and bankers for their roleinthe financial crisis. Until the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012, Obama studiously avoided any push for gun control. Indeed, in 2010, he signed laws that loosened restrictions on bringing firearms to national parks and on Amtrak. Though cast as a "dithering" peacenik, he stuck with his thesis that the imperative "to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan" and prosecuted a drone war in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

But Obama's approach to politics was marked by a circumspection that went even deeper than policies. As he recently said, "the average American doesn't think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it." To be conservative, as philosopher-guru Michael Oakeshott, a conservative hero, once put it, "is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."

Obama believes, fundamentally, that the American model works - but, crucially, that it hasn't been allowed to work for everyone. He believes that in some cases, it's the government's role to help expand the American dream to individuals and communities to whom that dream has been denied. And in others, he believes Americans can achieve the dream if only they show the will to surmount obstacles on their own.

His second inaugural address was a thoroughly conservative document, underscoring equality of opportunity, as opposed to equality of outcome. Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich's reaction at the time was: "95 percent of the speech I thought was classically American, emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things together."

In his first year in office, he gave a back-to-school address that Republicans panned in advance as big-brotherism, even its though its central idea turned out to be: "At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life - what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home - none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school."

He once argued that in certain circumstances, government programs created welfare dependency, saying that "as somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I've seen it where people weren't encouraged to work, weren't encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time their motivation started to diminish."

In remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Obama went out of his way to lecture that, in the civil rights era, "what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself." You'd never hear that sentiment expressed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for whom structural inequality explains nearly every American ill.

He was unapologetic about his identity as a role model for black men, in particular, and his grounding in African American intellectual and political traditions. And he repeatedly stressed that not all inequities in American society are attributable to discrimination, racial or otherwise. Striking that balance was precisely what granted Obama currency with the black electorate, which votes overwhelmingly for Democrats and is the core of the party's base, but frequently skews moderate to conservative, ideologically.

He embraced respectability politics as a way to communicate the sameness of a first family of color: The many Norman Rockwell-worthy photo-ops - the Obamas' 2009 family portrait, done by Annie Leibovitz, a study in wholesome family living; their annual vacations on Martha's Vineyard, summer haven of the black elite; dialing back his storied "cool," as when he displayed his stiff dance moves during an appearance "Ellen," laying claim to the mantle of the everyman dad. When asked what he thought about Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift's 2009 MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech to shower praise on Beyonc, Obama offered no mitigating analysis, saying simply, "He's a jackass."

In his 2014 immigration reform speech, he leaned on Exodus 23:9.

Obama called out racism in the criminal justice system. He met with Black Lives Matter activists, and his Justice Department used consent decrees to rein in police departments. For this, he was often portrayed as a cop-hater in right-wing media; former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke, a Fox News fixture, called him "the most anti-cop president I have ever seen." But the president routinely extolled law enforcement, including at the 2015 convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, when he said: "I reject any narrative that seeks to divide police and communities that they serve. I reject a storyline that says when it comes to public safety there's an 'us' and a 'them.'"

After George Zimmerman's acquittal, Obama - who had said "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago" - defended the system, emphasizing that "we are a nation of laws and a jury has spoken."

For most of his presidency, Obama governed with a Republican Congress dedicated to preventing his reelection or thwarting his agenda. Any efforts would have to entail compromise. Still, he made bargains that the rhetoric of current Democratic candidates would seem to foreclose. In 2010, Obama and Republicans traded a two-year extension of former president George W. Bush's top marginal income tax cut, along with a payroll tax holiday and an extension of unemployment benefits, that paved the way for a repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. At the time the left fumed, but in that deal Obama benefitted from both the quid and the quo. He later also agreed to the Budget Control Act of 2011, known as "sequestration," that brought down year-to-year deficits by slashing federal spendingin exchange for GOP votes to raise the debt ceiling.

Obama was a believer in big government, but his views show many similarities with to those of Republican presidents like Theodore Roosevelt, who fought corporate monopolies and later led the Progressive Party; Dwight D. Eisenhower, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Federal Aid Highway Act, creating the interstate highway system; and establishment archetype George H.W. Bush, a veteran of Congress, the U.N., the CIA and the vice presidency who broke his "no new taxes" pledge, rescued savings and loans and declared an import ban on semi-automatic rifles. His conservatism also lines up with the late senator Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), a co-sponsor of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 who was the last black man to serve in the Senate prior to Obama.

Obama did advance priorities that progressives cheered: He tripled the number of women on the Supreme Court. On the environment, he implemented aggressive rules to limit coal-based power and ozone and mercury emissions. He supported anti-discrimination laws for LGBT employees and introduced rules that would protect some younger, undocumented immigrants from deportation. (He achieved many of these policies through executive fiat, meaning they are - or have already been - easily reversed.) But none of these changes revolutionized governance or structurally reordered American life.

The scramble that Obama can still cause reflects the dissonance he's generated for a decade: The center-left adores him, but to the far left he's a sellout. He's being rethought on the center-right, but remains the bte noire of the far right, which morphed from the (putatively) government-hating tea party wing to a strong-man-loving Republican core.

That's due, in part, to an enduring misunderstanding of what he represented.

Notwithstanding the change-we-can-believe-in marketing that propelled his political rise, Obama's aim was never to turn things upside down. Favoring "the familiar to the unknown" was Obama's disposition, but also his project: Expanding a traditional slate of priorities - the familiar American dream, not a reconceived one - to Americans for whom it had been previously denied. Part of that project was building, gradually, at moments almost reverently, on his predecessors' foundation.

That's left Republicans lurching in President Trump's direction. And forces Democrats to sort out who they are; and how to fuse Obama's appeal with an agenda that reaches further than he ever tried - or saw the need to.

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Both left and right still misunderstand the politics of Barack Obama, conservative - Thehour.com

For many years to come, George Zimmerman will forever be synonymous for the issues of race and gun control in America, thanks to the events that preceded and followed his fatal shooting of a black teenage boy who was notably unarmed at the time. Read on to find out more about his early beginnings, the shooting incident, and life afterwards.

On the 5th of October, 1983, in Manassas, Virginia, George Michael Zimmerman was born as the third of four children to Gladys Cristina (nee Mesa) and Robert Zimmerman Sr. His mother is Peruvian while his father, who served 22 years in the United States military, is an American of German descent.

Zimmerman was raised in a devoutCatholic home. From the age of 7 to 17, he served as an altar boy while first attending All Saints Catholic School before later transferring to the public Osbourn High School.In 2001, George Zimmerman graduated from high school and moved to a suburb of Orlando, Florida called Lake Mary. To make ends meet, he got a job at an insurance agency which led him to take night classes to obtain a license to sell insurance. A few years later, Zimmerman opened a satellite office of Allstate Insurance which folded under a year. He then went on to work at a car dealership and then a mortgage audit firm before marrying cosmetologist Shellie Dean in 2007. The pair went ahead to rent a townhouse in a gated community at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida in 2009 as Zimmerman enrolled at Seminole State College to acquire an associate degree in Criminal Justice.

A few months after Zimmerman graduated from Seminole in December 2011, he fatally shot a 17-year-old unarmed African-American boy named Trayvon Martin. According to Zimmerman, who was at the time, the neighborhood watch coordinator, he saw Martin and deemed him to be a suspicious person. Because of this, he called the police, however, before the police could arrive at the scene, an altercation occurred between the pair that led to Martin being shot in the chest.

Zimmerman, who sustained injuries during the incident, told police officers that he killed Martin in self-defense, which under Floridas Stand Your Ground statute was not an offense. After questioning him for about five hours, the police released Zimmerman, saying they could not find any evidence to refute his claim. His release made headlines all across the United States and caused an uproar in the African-American community as protests sprung up in different cities across the country, prompting comments from the U.S. Justice Department and President Barack Obama. After further deliberation, Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a special prosecutor who, six weeks later, charged George Zimmerman with the murder of Trayvon Martin.

George Zimmermans trial began on the 10th of June, 2013. It lasted for about 33 days, until the 13th of July, 2013, to be exact, after which a jury acquitted him of second-degree murder and manslaughter. This verdict did not stand well with the public as the anger shifted from Zimmerman to the Stand Your Ground statute which allows for people to protect themselves with lethal force, especially when the other party might not have been armed, as was the case with Trayvon Martin.

Following the court rulings, the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) began their own investigation on Zimmerman on civil rights charges, however, three years later, it concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to prove a hate crime occurred and that Zimmerman was not going to be prosecuted.

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George Zimmerman is very much alive and free. Since his trial ended, he has been involved in a few run-ins with the law, mostly due to domestic violence issues. In other cases, he was the supposed target of other people who had identified him for killing Martin. One of such persons was Matthew Apperson who went as far as shooting at Zimmerman. This led to Apperson being sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempted murder and aggravated assault with a firearm.

In 2018, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with stalking. He had, on multiple times, contacted a private investigator working with Michael Gasparro and Jay-Z on the documentary series Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story which looked at racial tension in the United States as well as a few aspects of the case.

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George Zimmerman Trial: is He Dead, in Jail or on Probation ...