Since returning to the campaign trail as an advocate for Hillary, Bill Clinton has been harried by renewed interest in his past sexual misconduct as well as Hillary’s alleged role in intimidating his victims into silence.
Roger Stone, author of the New York Times bestselling "The Clinton’s War On Women", claims that he has personal knowledge of previously unknown victims who are preparing to come forward with accusations against the former president.
"I identified 24 women who’ve been assaulted by Bill Clinton," Stone said on The Sean Hannity Show. "Now some of these women are still terrified. Some of them have had IRS audits. Some of them have had their families threatened. But others have come forward."
"Are you saying there's women whose names we don't know that are mentioned in your book or not mentioned in your book that are going to come forward and start telling those stories?" Sean asked.
"Yes, I think it’s very probable," Stone responded. "Not all of them because some of them are still terrified, their families have been threatened, their lives have been threatened."
"Are we talking about affairs, or are we talking about assaults?" asked Hannity.
"We’re talking about assaults," declared Stone. "I don’t want to get out ahead of myself but I think as Broaddrick, and [Kathleen] Willey, and Jones speak out, other women are encouraged who have been assaulted, who have been threatened by Hillary are encouraged by the courage of those three women."
Listen to Roger Stone’s bombshell revelation along with author Ed Klein on The Sean Hannity Show:
For anyone connecting with Netflix over the holidays, it was anything but a merry Christmas. Premiering on Dec. 18, the streaming service's docu-series Making a Murderer plunged viewers deep into one of the strangest and most disturbing true-crime cases in recent memory. In 1985, Steven Avery, a 22-year-old whose family runs an auto salvage yard in Wisconsin, was found guilty of rape and sent to prison. Eighteen years later, he was released when DNA evidence proved he was innocent, as he'd asserted all along.
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But then matters took the first of many dark twists: Two years after his release, just as Avery was about to sue the county and local officials for $36 million, he was arrested for the murder of a local photographer, Teresa Halbach. Avery once more asserted his innocence, but in 2007 he was found guilty of first-degree intentional homicide and is serving life in prison with no chance of parole; Brendan Dassey, Avery's nephew who lived next door to him and allegedly took part in the murder, was also sentenced to life but will be eligible for parole in 2048.
Produced and directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos — two filmmakers with backgrounds in the law and film editing, respectively — Making a Murdererdevotes its first hour to Avery's initial arrest and trial in the Eighties. The next nine episodes follow Avery's arrest in the Halbach murder and the subsequent trial. From the crime itself to suggestions of tampered evidence and repeated shots of bleak Wisconsin winters, Making a Murderer is unrelenting, intense and sometimes infuriating. (Was Avery set up as payback for his lawsuit? Was Dassey's confession coerced?) It's also become the Internet-watercooler series of the moment; Alec Baldwin, Rosie O'Donnell, Ricky Gervais and Rainn Wilson have all recommended it on Twitter.
And the subjects' situations are still fluid. Avery is working on an appeal, and thanks to the series, an online petition from Change.Org for release has generated over 300,000 signatures; a petition to the White House asking for President Obama to pardon Avery and Dassey has reached over 100,000 signatures. Meanwhile, Ricciardi and Demos just announced they were contacted by a juror who claims some jurors felt Avery was framed but that they voted guilty for fear of their "personal safety." ("The person felt burdened for eight years and was hoping some new evidence would come out and lead to a new trial," says Ricciardi.) In the midst of this hubbub,Rolling Stone spoke with Ricciardi and Demos about their left-field sensation.
You've said this all started with a New York Times article about Avery's arrest in 2005. What made you want to investigate further? Ricciardi: In terms of what appealed to us about this story, unfortunately lots of people in America are charged with serious violent crime, including murder. This was not going to be a murder story to us. From reading the initial Times piece, this was a man who we thought, if we embark on this journey with him through the American criminal justice system, we'd go from one extreme of it to another. When we read this was someone exonerated in a DNA case now charged with a new crime, that struck me as unprecedented.
Demos: What we saw in Steven's story was this incredible and valuable window he provided into the system. He had been in the system in the mid-Eighties. It had failed him. He'd been wrongly convicted and here he was back in that system in 2005. It was this opportunity to say, okay, in those 20 years, DNA [testing] and legislative reforms were developed — all these things being heralded as a new and improved system. So let's test that system and see what happens. Are we better off or not?
What prompted you to move to northeast Wisconsin for nearly two years to make it? Demos: We read the article around Thanksgiving [of] 2005 and our first day of filming was December 6. We lived in New York but at that time Laura's sister and brother-in-law lived in Chicago, so we rented a car, drove out to Wisconsin and rented a camera. The first shoot was Steven's preliminary hearing, which you see in Episode Three. That was to test the waters and see if it was worth a week of our time.
We came back to New York but it was so clear there was something going on, so by January [2006] we'd sublet our apartment and rented an apartment in Manitowoc County. A few months later, we were packing up to go back to New York to our day jobs and raise money to come back for the trial in September, and we got a call saying, "Have you heard there's going to be a press conference?" It was about Brendan [and his alleged confession about participating in the rape and murder of Halbach]. That changed everything. It made the story much more expansive. We literally unpacked our boxes and tried to figure out how we could borrow more money from our student loans to stay there.
Directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos behind the scenes on the Netflix original documentary series "Making A Murderer". Danielle Ricciardi/Netflix
What was your access to Avery? Ricciardi: Steven was in custody the entire time we were filming. We were limited to telephone conversations with him. Before we arrived he had given some on-camera interviews to the local media. Steven was appointed counsel in the process and I believe his lawyer advised him to stop giving on-camera interviews, especially once in custody. We asked early on if we could bring a camera to visits and we were told "No."
How did you get access to prison phone calls, videotaped confessionals and other engrossing material? Ricciardi: Wisconsin has an expansive public records law. Any materials generated by state or county officials are part of the public domain.
Demos: For all the recorded calls from the county jail or detention center, there are stacks and stacks of CDs of recorded calls in the case files. Getting them wasn't a problem as it was going through them.
"[From] what I've listened to of Serial, she's on a journey to understand what may have happened. That's not what we were doing."—Laura Ricciardi
Did you presume Avery was innocent — and did you have moments during the trial when you thought, "Hmmm … maybe not?" Demos: It was never our interest whether he did it or not; it wasn't what it was about. Our job wasn't about any type of investigation of did he do it or not?
Ricciardi: Some people have made comparisons to Serial and The Jinx. [From] what I've listened to of Serial, she's on a journey to understand what may have happened. That's not what we were doing. Ours was much more macro. We were taking a procedural look at the system. We have no stake in the outcome of the trial; we have no stake in whether Steven is innocent or guilty. What a risk we would have taken as filmmakers to devote all our resource and time to a case if it was going to hinge in a particular outcome. What we were documenting was the procedure that led to the verdicts.
Demos: What the prosecution is doing to get a conviction is of greater importance. Does our system leave us in a place where we can rely on the verdict or not?
As viewers, we have plenty of "whoa!" moments here, as when the defense team finds a clearly tampered-with vial of blood. What were those moments for you as filmmakers? Demos: Certainly the Brendan revelation. I don't think we saw that coming at all. That was the first press conference we attended, and that clearly changed things. When we first saw the video with Brendan — his defense investigator virtually interrogating his own client to get a statement out of him — we said, "Wait ... who's this? What cop is this?" It took a long time for us to realize this was his own defense investigator. There were definitely revelation moments and seeing things connect.
It's interesting that the defense team wasn't allowed to bring up other possible suspects during the trial. Demos: The defense said if it was given the opportunity, they'd like to argue it wasn't Steven Avery but it may have been this person or that person. And the judge said, basically, "You haven't met your burden of proof and I'm not going to allow you to mention any of those people by name. But you can name Brendan."
Steven Avery looks around a courtroom in the Calumet County Courthouse before the verdict was read in his murder trial Sunday, March 18, 2007, in Chilton, Wis. Jeffrey Phelps/AP
Did you ever hear those names? Ricciardi: No. The judge ordered the defense motion sealed. After the verdict, the judge unsealed the motion. It should be part of the case file now.
Class — and how it shaped Steven's standing — is also an underlying theme in the movie. Ricciardi: What we learned along the way is that the Averys were perceived very much to be the "other" in that community. For the most part they kept to themselves. Steven had a number of priors and he would get into trouble when he essentially went out into the community and made bad choices. The Avery family was perceived to be, for lack of a better word, white trash. There was this desire as we understood it for the community to separate itself from the Averys. And that played a role.
You didn't interview Ken Kratz, the former Calumet County District Attorney who prosecuted the case. Why not? Ricciardi: We reached out to Ken Kratz multiple times. I first wrote a letter to him in September 2006. I talked about how our project depended on a diversity of insight and we wanted to talk to lawyers on both sides and anyone who would talk to what was relevant to the story. Ultimately he declined as did the Halbach family.
"The takeaway is that the American criminal justice system is in peril. We as American people should have concerns about that system."—Laura Ricciardi
Demos: There's nothing in the letter, in our behavior and I would argue in the final product that supports Kratz's sense that this is a defense advocacy piece.
Kratz (as well as a local sheriff) has since told the media that certain pieces of damning evidence didn't make the movie, and Kratz has said it "really presents misinformation." How do you respond? Demos: We tried to include as much of the trial as we thought viewers would tolerate. We tried to choose what Kratz himself was claiming was his strongest evidence. He had a press conference saying that because Steven's DNA is on the key and his blood is in [Halbach's] car, there was no question who killed Teresa Halbach. So we had to include the key and the blood. We got the list of priority evidence from Kratz himself and tried to put all that in. As storytellers it's in our interest to show conflict. It was choosing the state's strongest evidence and the defense's response to it. By the end of the trial what did you learn Ricciardi: The takeaway is that the American criminal justice system is in peril. We as American people should have concerns about that system. The system had clearly failed Steven in 1985. He had 16 or more alibi witnesses, not all family members. There was so much evidence pointing away from guilt in that case and yet he was still convicted. We wanted to understand how that could happen. Why aren't there more safeguards in our system to protect against someone who had been wrongly convicted? How was that borne out in the Halbach trial?Ricciardi: There were certain individuals who had stakes in the outcome of this trial besides Steven Avery. Demos: This is a small community. Steven was suing the county for $36 million. The annual budget of the county is $80 million. It was a lot easier to think that junkyard man who had been in prison maybe was the bad guy and everything will go back to normal and the county doesn't have to go bankrupt.
When did you last speak with Avery, and did he mention the reaction to the series? Ricciardi: We last spoke with him right after Christmas. He said he received 40 letters, 30 in one day. It's difficult to speak to him. The calls are monitored and recorded. We had concerns about his safety because we've been told the Department of Corrections is not interested in inmates becoming celebrities. So we haven't talked with him about the public response to the series. It was mostly about his family visiting him at Christmas, which is rare; it was the first time that happened since he was imprisoned.
What do you make of all the on-line chatter about defense lawyer Dean Strang as a "sex symbol"? Demos: [Laughs] I didn't see that one coming. Ricciardi: I don't know how his wife feels about that. It's nice to be able to laugh about something like that.
Four days into the armed occupation of a wildlife reserve in Oregon’s rugged backcountry, and something’s still missing.
The police.
While local authorities and federal agents have kept an extraordinarily low profile as the dissatisfied ranchers and activists remain holed up in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, one recently retired FBI commander said he’d be shocked if law enforcement hasn’t monitored the every move of the occupiers.
Greg Vecchi, former chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, said the agency is almost certainly preparing a worst-case scenario to take the occupied wildlife refuge headquarters by force, and that – following the procedures he was familiar with – had likely constructed a set of buildings that resemble the ones in Oregon and have practiced for a coordinated tactical assault.
“They have found a building or quickly put together a mock-up of the building and they’re practicing, putting role players in there to represent the people inside,” said Vecchi, who retired in 2014 and wrote his doctoral dissertation on hostage situations.
“They’re dropping helicopters, working flashbangs, coming in with [armored personnel carriers], so that if it happens, it’s kind of like the Navy SEALs did with Osama bin Laden,” he said. “Practice, practice, practice.”
But a tactical assault is an option of last resort and federal agents in recent years have taken a seemingly placid, wait ‘em out approach to potential showdowns like the one in Oregon. The more measured tactical plan was shaped by the pushback to the deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas.
The downside is that authorities sometimes come away appearing to be weak -- activists get away with breaking the law, escape fines and other potential punishments
But authorities said avoiding the loss of life is the aim of a more reserved approach.
“We have enough firepower, we have enough guns, we have enough equipment and tech to take back what they’ve got,” said retired FBI agent James Wedick. “It’s better not to show up with an overwhelming appearance of force and cause something to happen.
“The approach,” he said, “is to de-escalate.”
In cases similar to what’s unfolded in Oregon’s rugged backcountry, Vecchi said the FBI sets up what agents call physical and verbal perimeters – out of sight, but observing the moves of the subjects of a siege.
The wildlife refuge of 19 buildings about 30 miles outside Burns, Ore., was occupied Saturday by a group of activists who arrived to protest the incarceration of father-and-son ranchers who’d already spent time behind bars before a judge determined their sentences were too short.
To determine the number of people inside the compound, Vecchi said the FBI is likely using thermal imaging cameras to detect heat signatures, and will have its role-players mimicking the locations and movements of the people inside.
Crisis on a national scale draws the attention of the FBI’s Critical Incidents Response Group, which is itself a response to the deadly militia sieges of the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, the FBI had two primary teams to deal with a crisis: hostage negotiators and tactical assault teams. A natural tension existed between the groups, based on their preferred approach to ending a crisis.
When the Branch Davidians shot and killed ATF agents inside the Mount Carmel Center ranch near Waco in February 1993, the FBI arrived as if an occupying force. That, said Vecchi, was a mistake when confronting a group of extremists already deeply suspicious of the federal government.
The Waco siege ended when the FBI pumped tear gas into the building, the Branch Davidians fired on them and a massive blaze consumed the ranch, killing most of the people inside, children included.
In the aftermath of the disastrous siege, the tension between the negotiation and tactical groups’ commanders became the dominant story. Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh reorganized the bureau’s approach to crises and combined the two groups, demanding a more coordinated approach.
The first victory for Freeh’s vision was in Montana in 1996, when a group known as the Freemen held off authorities for 81 days. The siege ended peacefully.
One of the keys to that surrender, Vecchi said, was a third-party intermediary. The Freemen refused to deal with the FBI, so the agency turned to a local sheriff to help bring things to an end.
“They coached that sheriff on how to negotiate, and the [Freemen] viewed the negotiator as credible,” Vecchi said. “There was no reason to do anything else.”
In Oregon, Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward has already established himself as an opponent of the occupation, asking the people inside the refuge to pack up and go home to their families.
Retired FBI agent Dennis Franks, now living in Houston, said as he watched the situation in Oregon unfold on television that he silently thanked the bureau’s new approach. Franks was a member of the tactical assault team during the Waco siege – albeit not on the day of the deadly final assault.
He was there when the FBI established a massive perimeter, with agents from Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio responding. The overwhelming show of force was comforting after the killing of ATF agents, but the situation didn’t sit right with him.
“I had this feeling it wouldn’t go well,” he said.
The FBI cut off supplies to the group – something no agency has proposed yet in Oregon – and played loud music to try and urge them out, a 1990s tactic that also has fallen out of favor.
“Mistakes were made that were learned from,” Franks said. “And particularly in this type of situation, with anti-government protesters, showing up in massive force would only further their cause and the hysteria of people who have adopted that belief.”
COMMENTS
Oregon refuge standoff opens another front in old ‘Sagebrush Rebellion’
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The standoff at an Oregon wildlife refuge is the latest, edgiest skirmish in a decades-old conflict over federal control of Western lands. It’s been a war, not always bloodless, that’s been fought in courts, on Capitol Hill and far out on the range.
Decades ago, the conflict was dubbed the “Sagebrush Rebellion.” In the 1990s, conservatives provocatively cited a “War on the West.” And with the federal government owning more than one-third of the land in states such as California, Idaho and Washington, future clashes are all but certain.
“There are problems with the federal bureaucracies, and people are going to chafe at changes in management practices,” Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in an interview Wednesday. “That’s been going on forever.”
But DeFazio, a liberal who has nonetheless repeatedly sought compromise on vexing Western land disputes, also noted a flip side of federal ownership not always acknowledged by some vocal conservative activists: However frustrating, federal ownership brings benefits, too.
“We are subsidizing grazing,” DeFazio noted as an example. “People are paying only a tiny fraction of what they would pay to use private land.”
There’s ongoing frictions. In Oregon, we’ve been having timber wars my entire time in Congress. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.
Nationwide, the federal government owns 640 million acres, or about 28 percent of the country’s land mass. It is not, however, evenly distributed, and consequently, neither is the political heat. North Carolina and Florida, for instance, have only 12 percent and 8 percent of their land held by the federal government.
By contrast, 45 percent of California is federally owned, while half of Idaho and 53 percent of Oregon belong to such federal agencies as the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. In other words, the sagebrush that fuels rebellion is a distinctly Western crop.
“I have seen what happens when overzealous bureaucrats and agencies go beyond the law to clamp down on people,” Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said on the House floor Tuesday. “I have seen what courts have done, and I have seen the time for Congress to act, and it has not.”
Walden represents Harney County, the high desert region in eastern Oregon thrust into the national spotlight on Sunday when armed anti-government protesters occupied an empty building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The armed protesters, calling themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, still occupy the building in an emergency now being responded to by the FBI. The protesters spun off from peaceful demonstrators who had rallied to support two Harney County ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond.
The Hammonds, who are father and son, have been ordered back to prison to serve longer terms following their conviction on arson charges.
“I know the Hammonds. I’ve known them, probably, for close to 20 years,” Walden said. “They are longtime, responsible ranchers.”
The Hammonds’ beef with the federal government is a complicated one, with conflicting accounts related by both sides, but in brief it encapsulates the benefits and the burdens of Western reliance on federal land.
Since the time when the phrase “Sagebrush Rebellion” was first coined, Westerners have complained that onerous federal rules and regulations have needlessly fenced them in.
EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM
Politically, the Western discontent empowered lawmakers such as Republican Richard Pombo, a young rancher from California’s San Joaquin Valley first elected in 1992, who rode the wave all the way to eventual chairmanship of the House Resources Committee.
Tellingly, Pombo titled a book he co-authored “This Land Is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property.”
Equally telling, perhaps, was his eventual political fate. In 2006, with the deep financial support of environmental groups who opposed Pombo’s positions, Democrat Jerry McNerney toppled Pombo and has held the Stockton-based seat ever since.
EDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM
Westwide grazing rights, timber harvesting, hard-rock mining, and water storage and deliveries all have been underwritten by the federal government’s low fees, cheap roads, absence of mining royalties and subsidized irrigation contract rates.
Through early 2013, for instance, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management charged some 21,000 livestock operators nationwide only $1.35 per animal unit month for using the public land. This was less than had been charged in 1993, and was considerably less than was charged on state or private lands.
“Generally, livestock producers who use federal lands want to keep fees low, while conservation groups and others believe fees should be increased,” the Congressional Research Service noted in a 2012 report.
EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE
But when the Clinton administration tried, with its first budget proposal in 1993, to raise grazing fees and boost payments from hard-rock mining, among other Western revisions, it got clobbered.
The all-electric vehicle has four arms with eight propellers at the end allowing it to travel up to 60mphEhang says the 184 is autonomous, so all the passenger has to do is enter their final destination into an appFAA regulators have not approved the drone for human use in the US, but Ehang is hopeful they will do soonCost is yet to be revealed and the company claims a commercial version of the craft will be available this year
A Chinese drone maker has revealed a giant quadcopter big enough to fit a passenger.
EHang claims to be building the world's first 'Autonomous Aerial Vehicle' for transporting people.
Unveiled at CES in Las Vegas and called the 184, the all-electric vehicle has four arms with a total of eight propellers at the end.
'You know how it feels to sit in a Ferrari? This is 10 times better,' George Yan, co-founder of Ehang said in an interview with DailyMail.com.
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EHang is building the world's first 'Autonomous Aerial Vehicle' for transporting people. Unveiled at CES in Las Veges, the 184 flies itself
The company says the 184 is autonomous, so all the passenger has to do is enter in their destination in the smartphone app, sit back, and let the drone take over.
There's no option to take control of the 184 remotely. The cockpit is empty, apart from a stand to place a smartphone or tablet and a cup holder.
'I think in all of us there is that little kid in all of us that says I want to fly,' said Yan. 'I don’t want to get a pilot license after five or 10 hours of flying, I want to do it right away. We’re making that dream happen.'
'Everything is calculated in the backend to pick the most optimal route for you, so there is no collision with the other drones flying,' said Yan.
'On the drone itself we have built pretty sophisticated back up services so if another system fails then another will take over.'
In the event of an emergency, passengers can also elect to halt flight and simply hover in the air.
The EHang 184, which was named for ‘one’ passenger, ‘eight’ propellers, and ‘four’ arms. When it's not in use, it can be folded up so that it can be stored away more easily.
EHang said the vehicle is primarily designed for traveling short-to-medium distances — around 10 miles — and will fly at around 60 miles per hour.
'I think in all of us there is that little kid in all of us that says I want to fly,' said founder George Yan. 'I don’t want to get a pilot license after five or 10 hours of flying, I want to do it right away. We’re making that dream happen'
EHang claims to be building the world's first 'Autonomous Aerial Vehicle' for transporting people. 'You know how it feels to sit in a Ferrari? This is 10 times better,' said George Yan, co-founder of Ehang in an interview with DailyMail.com
EHang said the vehicle is primarily designed for traveling short-to-medium distances — around 10 miles — and will fly at 60 miles per hour
It takes off and lands vertically, subsequently eliminating the need for runways.
'Mass-adoption of the 184 has the potential to streamline congested traffic and dramatically reduce the kinds of accidents associated with any human-operated vehicle,' the firm claims.
'It's been a lifetime goal of mine to make flight faster, easier and more convenient than ever. The 184 provides a viable solution to the many challenges the transportation industry faces in a safe and energy efficient way,' said EHang CEO Huazhi Hu.
'I truly believe that EHang will make a global impact across dozens of industries beyond personal travel.
'The 184 is evocative of a future we've always dreamed of and is primed to alter the very fundamentals of the way we get around.'
The 184 has been in development for 2 and a half years, and the company is aiming to release a commercial version later this year, depending on safety tests and future drone regulations.
As well as having to work in the confines of UAV laws, there is also the issue of trust. Would anyone ever trust a drone to fly them to a destination?
'If you roll the timeline back to 100 years you will see that when we went from horse and carriage to vehicles people had the same concerns of whether you could trust it to take you from A to B,' said Yan.
'If you look out the cars out there and unmanned vehicles, you can understand that we can make these technology breakthrough.
You just have to start somewhere.'
THE DRONE TAXI: WHAT FLYING IN THE 184 WIL BE LIKE
The fully ready-to-fly 184 is a manned drone capable of automatically carrying a passenger through the air, simply by entering a destination into its accompanying smartphone app.
The 184 uses multiple independent flight control systems to automatically navigate passengers from point A to point B.
These systems combine real-time data collected from sensors throughout the flight and automatically plot the fastest and safest route to carry passengers to their destinations.
The EHang 184 has built in reinforcements for all flight systems, so that in the unlikely event that a component does fail, multiple backups are already in place to seamlessly take over.
The fully ready-to-fly 184 is a manned drone capable of automatically carrying a passenger through the air, simply by entering a destination into its accompanying smartphone app
The 184 uses multiple independent flight control systems to automatically navigate passengers from point A to point B.
EHang’s independently developed Fail-Safe System ensures that if any components malfunction, or if there’s damage while the AAV is in-flight (i.e. from a bird), the aircraft will immediately begin taking the necessary precautions to ensure safety.
The 184’s Fail-Safe System automatically evaluates the damage and determines whether the AAV will need to land to ensure its passenger’s safety.
The EHang 184 AAV flight control systems have multiple sets of sensors that provide the drone a constant stream of real-time data.
The 184’s communication system was also designed with a safety guarantee: every system is encrypted, and each AAV comes with an independent key.
In the event of an emergency, passengers can elect to halt flight and simply hover in the air with just one click.
'The fully ready-to-fly 184 is a manned drone capable of automatically carrying a passenger through the air, simply by entering a destination into its accompanying smartphone app,' the firm says
EHang will also have a command center that employs people to make sure everything is safe — sort of like an air traffic controller at an airport.
The command center will monitor every 184 in the air 24/7 and the company plans integrate with existing air traffic controller operations.
The command center would, for example, make sure that a 184 doesn't take off in extreme weather conditions.
No official launch date has been set, but the company said commercialization will begin in a few months. EHang will first launch in the China and set up a command center there, where it will employ around 300 people, but the US isn't far behind.
The company will begin working on getting a certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration soon.
No official launch date has been set, but the company said commercialization will begin in a few months. EHang will first launch in the China and set up a command center there, where it will employ around 300 people, but the US isn't far behind
The EHang 184, was named for ‘one’ passenger, ‘eight’ propellers, and ‘four’ arms. When not in use, it can be folded up (right)
President/CEO Hu Huazhi of EHang unveils the 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle at CES Las Vegas from the Las Vegas Convention Center
Global markets are facing a crisis and investors need to be very cautious, billionaire George Soros told an economic forum in Sri Lanka on Thursday.
China is struggling to find a new growth model and its currency devaluation is transferring problems to the rest of the world, Soros said in Colombo. A return to positive interest rates is a challenge for the developing world, he said, adding that the current environment has similarities to 2008.
Global currency, stock and commodity markets are under fire in the first week of the new year, with a sinking yuan adding to concern about the strength of China’s economy as it shifts away from investment and manufacturing toward consumption and services. Almost $2.5 trillion was wiped from the value of global equities this year through Wednesday, and losses deepened in Asia on Thursday as a plunge in Chinese equities halted trade for the rest of the day.
“China has a major adjustment problem,” Soros said. “I would say it amounts to a crisis. When I look at the financial markets there is a serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.”
Soros has warned of a 2008-like catastrophe before. On a panel in Washington in September 2011, he said the Greece-born European debt crunch was “more serious than the crisis of 2008.”
Soros, whose hedge-fund firm gained about 20 percent a year on average from 1969 to 2011, has a net worth of about $27.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He began his career in New York City in the 1950s and gained a reputation for his investing prowess in 1992 by netting $1 billion with a bet that the U.K. would be forced to devalue the pound.
Measures of volatility are surging this year. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, known as the fear gauge or the VIX, is up 13 percent. The Nikkei Stock Average Volatility Index, which measures the cost of protection on Japanese shares, has climbed 43 percent in 2016 and a Merrill Lynch index of anticipated price swings in Treasury bonds rose 5.7 percent.
China’s Communist Party has pledged to increase the yuan’s convertibility by 2020 and to gradually dismantle capital controls. Weakness in the world’s second-largest economy remains even after the People’s Bank of China has cut interest rates to record lows and authorities pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy. Data this week reinforced a sluggish manufacturing sector.
The Federal government has been seeking to expandit’s power for years, and President Obama has insisted that because he was a professor of Constitutional law he somehow is more equipped and capable to teach us how this country should run and why we must obey whatever he says.
He therefore jammed Obamacare through Congress with not one Republican supporter, and then somehow conned the Supreme Court into affirming that U.S. citizens MUST purchase insurance or be fined. This is typical of the lawless Obamaadministration, and we have truly become a banana republic, though that is not how the Constitution is written.
See the excellent video on page 2 regarding Constitutional limitations that are being violated.
There is a new rebellion happening in Oregon and it has to do with ownership of property and exercise of power. The Federalgovernments seems to think that the citizens only own property leave of the government, and in essence that is true.
If a person buys a piece of property and pays property taxes on it, that is a form of rent paid to the government, and the government can seize that property and push the rightful owner off of that land if the taxes are not paid. How then does someone own a piece of property if the government can demand rent and evict if that rent or tax is not paid? It is stunning when seen this in the broad context, and true students of the Consititution will recognize the con that we have all bought in to.
The latest land and power battle is over father and son ranchers in Oregon by the name of Hammond who are going to jail on an arson charge this week. In 2002 and 2006, these ranchers decided to clear some brush and overgrowth on their ranch landby conducting a controlled burn, a very common activity in large areas such as their ranch in Oregon. The fire accidentally spread onto federal lands but was put out by the ranchers without any help from the feds. However, the Federalgovernment still charged the ranchers with arson and are determined to jail them for 5 years each. Incidentally, the Federal land is flourishing, is now less of a wild fire hazard, and no properties were damaged in the incident.
The Constitutional attorney in the following video cites the Hammond case, but then goes on to instruct us on why it is only a small part of the huge overreach of the Federal government, as shown by the Constitutional limitations that the Federalgovernment has been ignoring.
Oregon Case is Tip of the Ice Berg
The following video should be seen by every person who is concerned with the power of the federal government in each of our lives. It clearly shows that we are being swamped by policies, procedures, and actions that are clearly unconstitutional, and that our way of government, as established by the founding fathers, is slipping away.
This video should be shown to every high school civics class in the nation. Unfortunately, the schools are now under the federal Department of Education, so you can bet it will be the last thing the kids are shown. But it is a clarion call to help educate us regarding the reach of the Federal government.
Steven Avery is escorted to the Manitowoc County Courthouse for his sentencing Friday, June 1, 2007, in Manitowoc, Wis. Dan Powers/AP
Directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos behind the scenes on the Netflix original documentary series "Making A Murderer". Danielle Ricciardi/Netflix
Steven Avery looks around a courtroom in the Calumet County Courthouse before the verdict was read in his murder trial Sunday, March 18, 2007, in Chilton, Wis. Jeffrey Phelps/AP
