| New Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Democrats have so far failed to seal the deal on impeachment Posted: 06 Dec 2019 01:04 PM PST  A majority of registered voters buy Democrats' central argument for impeachment, but Americans remain too polarized and uncertain about key details to back Trump's removal from office in the kind of numbers that could create real momentum, a new poll shows.
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| Nikki Haley claims Dylann Roof 'hijacked' the 'heritage' of the Confederate flag in church massacre Posted: 06 Dec 2019 12:32 PM PST  Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that white supremacist Dylann Roof "hijacked" the Confederate flag by carrying out a mass killing of African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church in 2015.
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| Indian border officials on lookout for fugitive cosmic guru Posted: 07 Dec 2019 02:17 AM PST  Indian border officials and embassies have issued an alert for a fugitive guru accused of rape, the government said, days after the holy man announced the creation of his own "cosmic" country. Swami Nithyananda -- one of many self-styled Indian "godmen" with thousands of followers and a chequered past -- is wanted by police for alleged rape, sexual abuse, and abduction of children. Earlier this week, he announced online that he has created his own new country -- reportedly off Ecuador's coast -- complete with cabinet, golden passports, and even a department of homeland security.
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| GOP Rep. pitches LGBTQ rights bill with religious exemptions Posted: 05 Dec 2019 11:08 PM PST  As Democrats champion anti-discrimination protections for the LGBTQ community and Republicans counter with worries about safeguarding religious freedom, one congressional Republican is offering a proposal on Friday that aims to achieve both goals. The bill that Utah GOP Rep. Chris Stewart plans to unveil would shield LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in employment, housing, education, and other public services — while also carving out exemptions for religious organizations to act based on beliefs that may exclude those of different sexual orientations or gender identities. Stewart's bill counts support from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but it has yet to win a backer among House Democrats who unanimously supported a more expansive LGBTQ rights measure in May.
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| Former Rep. Katie Hill says the wave of harassment she faced after alleged revenge porn leak left her contemplating suicide Posted: 07 Dec 2019 02:30 PM PST  Former Rep. Katie Hill now says that she has "to keep going forward, and be part of the fight to create the change" to protect young women.
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| 50 Great Gadget and Gear Gifts for the Holidays Posted: 06 Dec 2019 10:29 AM PST |
| China Is Building Its Very Own Stealth Bombers: Meet the H-20 and JH-XX Posted: 07 Dec 2019 02:00 AM PST  Meet the H-20 and JH-XX
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| Aung San Suu Kyi to fight genocide charges in the Hague Posted: 07 Dec 2019 04:01 AM PST  Once feted by the West as a human rights heroine, Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to the Hague this week to defend her regime over accusations of genocide against its Rohingya Muslim minority, in one of the most-high profile international legal cases in a generation. Myanmar rejects the allegations which stem from the military's savage ethnic cleansing campaign in Rakhine state in 2017 that forced 740,000 people to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they now live in squalid refugee camps. Ms Suu Kyi, who will personally represent her fledgling democracy when the first hearings kick off on Tuesday at the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands, has vowed to "defend the national interest." In doing so, she will be defending the military who once held her under house arrest for many years to keep her out of power. The Myanmar public have rallied to support Aung San Suu Kyi as she travels to the Hague Credit: Lynn Bo/REX Her decision to brush aside concerns that backing the military's brutality against the Rohingya will further tarnish her now sullied international reputation, has won her plaudits at home for once again championing the cause of her people. Myanmar tour companies have organised discount holiday packages to supporters who wish to attend the hearings, with Myanmar citizens in the Netherlands offering homestays and logistical support. Daw July, responsible for the visa service at one of the companies, said it was trying to sell the tickets as cheaply as possible. "It is a way to show support for Mother Suu," she told the Myanmar Times, using Ms Suu Kyi's local nickname. The lawsuit charging genocide, including mass murder and rape, was lodged by Gambia, a tiny, mainly Muslim West African state backed by the 57-nation Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The case will be fought by a Gambian team led by Abubacarr Tambadou, the British-educated Justice Minister, who spent more than a decade prosecuting cases from Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Rohingya refugees live in squalor and dependent on aid in Bangladesh Credit: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters Mr Tambadou personally pushed for formal OIC support to prosecute Myanmar after visiting the overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar, and listening to harrowing testimonies about rape, murder and children being burned alive. "I saw genocide written all over these stories," he said in an interview with Reuters in Gambia's capital, Banjul. The minister plans to ask the judges to immediately order Myanmar to cease violence against Rohingya civilians and preserve evidence that could help the genocide case. He said he would draw from his experience of living through Gambia's former "brutal dictatorship" as he faces off with the Myanmar delegation. "We know too well how it feels like to be unable to tell your story to the world, to be unable to share your pain in the hope that someone out there will hear and help," he said.
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| 'He'd do it again': Former Obama official says Trump must be impeached Posted: 06 Dec 2019 09:17 AM PST  Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, the author of the new bestseller "Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump," believes the GOP notion that Congress can responsibly let voters decide if President Trump's conduct is impeachable at the ballot box "makes no sense."
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| Blind man executed in US for killing ex-girlfriend Posted: 05 Dec 2019 07:52 PM PST  A blind man was executed by the US state of Tennessee on Thursday for burning his ex-girlfriend to death. Lee Hall, who was previously known as Leroy Hall, chose to be executed by electrocution rather than lethal injection, a choice that Tennessee has offered to those condemned to death before 1999. Hall, 52, was sentenced to death after he was convicted of setting a car on fire with his former girlfriend inside in 1991.
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| Immigration rights groups call on Buttigieg to return donations Posted: 06 Dec 2019 12:42 AM PST  Four immigration rights organizations have written to Buttigieg to ask him to return donations connected to the firm
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| Tesla changed the release dates for the most and least expensive versions of the Cybertruck by a year Posted: 06 Dec 2019 08:09 AM PST  Tesla said the three-motor Cybertruck would enter production in late 2021, while production for the single-motor Cybertruck would begin in late 2022.
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| Official documents shed light on Tokyo's role in 'comfort women': Kyodo Posted: 06 Dec 2019 09:38 PM PST ![Official documents shed light on Tokyo's role in 'comfort women': Kyodo]( "Official documents shed light on Tokyo's role in 'comfort women': Kyodo") The Imperial Japanese Army asked the government to provide one "comfort woman" for every 70 soldiers, Japan's Kyodo news agency said, citing wartime government documents it had reviewed, shedding a fresh light on Tokyo's involvement in the practice. "Comfort women" is a euphemism for the girls and women - many of them Korean - forced into prostitution at Japanese military brothels. The issue has plagued Japan's ties with South Korea for decades.
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| New Jersey journalist re-arrested in Nigeria after brief glimpse of freedom Posted: 07 Dec 2019 12:13 PM PST  Omoyele Sowore, imprisoned in his home country of Nigeria since August, has been freed from government custody, but still has to stand trial.
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| In warning to Netanyahu, House endorses 2-state solution Posted: 06 Dec 2019 04:13 PM PST  The House on Friday threw its weight behind a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, in a warning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he mulls annexing the West Bank.
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| Nancy Pelosi is bungling the impeachment inquiry into Trump Posted: 06 Dec 2019 03:17 AM PST  By rushing the impeachment process – and keeping the focus narrow – Pelosi may be making a grave political miscalculationNancy Pelosi is rushing to conclude the impeachment inquiry against President Trump. On Thursday, just over two months after the inquiry was launched, Pelosi announced she was instructing investigators to draft articles of impeachment. These will be voted on by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives as soon as this month.The impeachment articles seem likely to focus only on the president's attempt to blackmail Ukraine into interfering in the 2016 election, and his subsequent attempts to obstruct investigations into the scheme. "Our democracy is what is at stake," Pelosi said in a news conference, standing before a backdrop of placidly hanging American flags. "The president leaves us no choice but to act, because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election."Another hearing is scheduled in the judiciary committee for this coming Monday, but the timeline is now clear: the House will vote to impeach the president, probably in a party-line vote, sometime in late December or early January. The Republican-controlled Senate will try him in the early months of 2020, and regardless of the evidence, he will almost certainly be acquitted.For months, Pelosi was reluctant to pursue impeachment, and even after being persuaded to open the inquiry, she has seemed weary and anxious of the political stakes of the process. It seems to have been Pelosi who dictated a narrow focus for the inquiry: the House intelligence committee focused only on the Ukraine affair and ignored evidence that emerged even in regards to that case, such as testimony and call records that indicate that the Republican ranking member, Devin Nunes, may have been a part of the very foreign pressure scheme that he was later tasked with investigating. And it seems to have been Pelosi who pushed for a rapid close of the inquiry and quick drafting of impeachment articles, even though a longer fact-finding process in the intelligence committee could have been useful to Democrats both on the investigative and political fronts.Pelosi's motivations appear to be political: fearful of losing her majority and fiercely protective of the more conservative members of her caucus, she has directed the impeachment proceeding to be as small, focused and palatable as possible, so as to placate moderate suburban voters and not to force her conservative members to take many difficult votes.But by rushing impeachment, and focusing it so narrowly on only one of the president's innumerable misdeeds, Pelosi may be making a grave political miscalculation, and wasting a precious opportunity for her party ahead of the 2020 presidential vote.A quick turnaround on impeachment articles will mean, for example, that the House vote to impeach the president – an event of historic significance, which should hold national attention as a low point of Trump's presidency and a vital moment of moral reckoning for the nation – will instead occur over the sleepy holiday season, when distractions are high and Americans' attention is sparse.The Senate trial, probably in January, will disrupt the Democratic presidential primary contest, forcing Senators Booker, Klobuchar, Sanders and Warren to cease campaigning in the crucial month before the Iowa caucuses to return to Washington and sit as jurors. Rushing to draft articles also means that crucial information about the Ukraine scandal will not be made public.While it is abundantly clear that the president committed grave wrongdoing, we still do not know, for instance, the extent of the cooperation with the Ukraine pressure campaign within the Trump administration and among Republican members of Congress – information that would lead to a fuller understanding of the events, and possibly other indictments.The narrow focus of the impeachment inquiry, too, seems to be a lost political opportunity. Polls suggest that in the partisan media landscape, many voters' opinions have already calcified, but it remains likely that a full and public accounting of Trump's copious wrongdoing, broadcast on television and covered in detail by the media, could change minds in a way that an abrupt party-line vote on a narrow and esoteric set of issues might not.Trump's violations of the emoluments clause alone would probably provide enough fodder for hearings that could last well into the summer, a political and media event that might drive home to the American people the extent of his corruption and the gravity of the 2020 vote. Pelosi and her defenders might counter that such a prolonged exercise might give Republicans and Trump defenders reason to label the impeachment inquiry as illegitimate. But they've called it illegitimate anyway.Perhaps more broadly, such a narrow and quick impeachment process risks being not only being politically wasteful for the Democrats, but cowardly as well. In the admittedly warped logic of American political messaging, to impeach Trump for only one of his myriad violations of ethics and law is to imply that all the rest of his behavior is acceptable.The narrow impeachment inquiry, then, risks dangerously lowering the standards for future presidential conduct, and setting a precedent that Trump-style criminality and self-dealing are privileges of the office. The prospect of impeaching Trump for all of his impeachable misdeeds is daunting, simply because there are so many of them. But his misconduct cannot be ignored simply for the sake of political convenience. As Pelosi herself is so fond of saying, "No one is above the law." * Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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| Belarus crowds rally against closer Russia ties Posted: 07 Dec 2019 06:31 AM PST  Roughly 1,000 Belarusians joined an unauthorised demonstration on Saturday against the prospect of a closer union with Russia. Long-time ruler Alexander Lukashenko was meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Russia on Saturday to discuss "key issues in our bilateral relations, including the prospects for deepening integration", according to the Kremlin. Police quickly intervened to oversee the demonstration but made no arrests.
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| Bloomberg says he shouldn't have called Booker 'well-spoken' Posted: 06 Dec 2019 12:03 PM PST  The New Jersey senator said he was "taken aback" by the former New York mayor's language.
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| Mexicans fleeing violence form new encampment on border Posted: 06 Dec 2019 11:49 AM PST  An exodus of migrants fleeing drug cartel violence and corruption in Mexico has mired hundreds of immigrants in ramshackle tent camps across the border from El Paso and brought new chaos to a system of wait lists for asylum seekers to get into the U.S. Migrant tent camps have been growing in size at several border crossings in Ciudad Juarez, driven by a surge in asylum seekers from regions in southern Mexico gripped by cartel violence. One camp in Juarez is populated by about 250 Mexican asylum seekers, who are living in increasingly cold conditions as they wait for U.S. authorities to let them in to the country.
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| AOC blasts Trump policy, says her family used food stamps Posted: 06 Dec 2019 07:23 AM PST  Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., slammed the Trump administration on Thursday over new changes to the food stamps program that will cause nearly 700,000 people to lose access to benefits.
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| Not just Greta: Young people worldwide take charge on climate Posted: 06 Dec 2019 04:41 AM PST  From India to Haiti, Senegal to Japan – these four young leaders are motivated by both climate science and hope for their future.
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| 13 Mythical Creatures, Ranked Posted: 07 Dec 2019 04:01 AM PST |
| Biden Says He Would Consider Giving Ambassadorships to Donors Posted: 06 Dec 2019 08:29 PM PST  (Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden said Friday he would not rule out appointing donors as ambassadors, but wouldn't make decisions about those roles based on someone's financial contributions."Nobody in fact will be appointed by me based on anything they contributed," he told a group of reporters aboard his "No Malarkey" bus in Decorah, Iowa."But, for example, you have some of the people who are out there that are prepared to in fact, that are fully qualified — head of everything from being the ambassador to NATO to be the ambassador to France or any other country — who may or may not have contributed, but that will not be any basis upon which I in fact would appoint anybody."Other Democratic presidential candidates, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have criticized the longstanding practice of appointing donors to governmental positions. Warren, who has sworn off high-dollar fundraisers, has vowed to not nominate wealthy contributors as ambassadors.In a wide-ranging 20-minute interview, Biden also defended his response to an Iowa voter who confronted him Wednesday over his son's work in Ukraine, which has come into sharp focus during the U.S. House impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump. He said he wanted to keep the focus on Trump, but reacted because the man made accusations that were false.Biden said his son did nothing wrong and referred to a statement by Hunter Biden that he exercised "poor judgment" in joining the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings."My son speaks for himself," the former vice president said. "He's a 47-year-old man. He didn't do anything wrong."Joe Biden, who is at the end of an eight-day bus tour across Iowa, again spoke about the need for bipartisan cooperation. He emphasized the vital role that the two-party system plays in American democracy, and the importance of having a robust Republican Party."I'm really worried that no party should have too much power," he said. "You need a countervailing force."He added: "You can't have such a dominant influence that then you start to abuse power. Every party abuses power if they have too much power."Biden also touted his ability to help other Democrats get elected, as he argued why he is best suited to bring about gains for party candidates as the presidential nominee.Biden, who often cites polls in swing states that show him defeating Trump, said the requests from candidates in swing districts for him to campaign on their behalf in the midterms is evidence of his appeal."I don't have to go out and look at a poll," he said. "Just go into those states. You can feel it. You can taste it."(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)To contact the reporter on this story: Tyler Pager in Decorah, Iowa at tpager1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Russia's Su-57 Would Be A Game-Changer If It Wasn't So Expensive Posted: 07 Dec 2019 07:00 AM PST  Moscow can't afford it.
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| Abandoned baby giraffe befriended by dog in Africa dies Posted: 06 Dec 2019 05:35 AM PST  A baby giraffe that was befriended by a dog after he was abandoned in the wild has died, a South African animal orphanage said Friday. "Our team is heartbroken," the orphanage said. Jazz the giraffe collapsed after hemorrhaging in the brain, The Rhino Orphanage said in a Facebook post.
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| 3 Guard members killed in Minnesota Black Hawk crash identified Posted: 07 Dec 2019 10:09 AM PST  Killed were Chief Warrant Officer 2 James A. Rogers Jr., age 28; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Charles P. Nord, 30; and Sgt. Kort M. Plantenberg, 28.
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| The acting Navy secretary promises he'll fix the Ford aircraft carrier because he's tired of it being a 'whipping boy for why the Navy can't do anything right' Posted: 07 Dec 2019 06:30 AM PST  Explaining that the president is "very concerned" about the Ford, Modly said that he is making fixing this flattop a top priority for the Navy.
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| Fossil fuel groups 'destroying' climate talks: NGOs Posted: 06 Dec 2019 06:07 PM PST  Oil and gas groups were accused Saturday of seeking to influence climate talks in Madrid by paying millions in sponsorship and sending dozens of lobbyists to delay what scientists say is a necessary and rapid cut in fossil fuel use. A day after tens of thousands marched in the Spanish capital demanding climate action, seven environmental groups raised concerns to AFP over the role of fossil fuel representatives at the COP25 summit. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to limit global warming to "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and as close to 1.5C as possible.
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| Susan Collins facing massive ad buy attacking tax vote Posted: 06 Dec 2019 01:35 PM PST ![Susan Collins facing massive ad buy attacking tax vote]( "Susan Collins facing massive ad buy attacking tax vote") The outside group Maine Momentum is attacking Collins over her 2017 vote.
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| Saudi airman in U.S. for training suspected in deadly shooting at Florida naval base Posted: 06 Dec 2019 05:44 AM PST  A Saudi Air Force second lieutenant killed three people and wounded eight others on Friday in an unexplained shooting rampage at a U.S. Navy base in Florida where he was training, U.S. officials told Reuters. Sheriff's deputies responding to the early-morning incident shot and killed the gunman, who was armed with a handgun at the U.S. Naval Station in Pensacola, Navy and local law enforcement officials said. The shooting, which played out over two floors in a classroom building at the base, marked the second deadly shooting at a U.S. military installation this week, following a similar incident at the joint Air Force and Naval base at Pearl Harbor on Wednesday.
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| Video shows people scaling US border wall in seconds - despite Trump insisting it 'can't be climbed' Posted: 06 Dec 2019 12:47 PM PST  Donald Trump has praised construction of newly constructed wall along the US-Mexico border, which the president has insisted "can't be climbed".But a viral video has proved that the wall can easily be scaled with a ladder.
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| If Russia Invaded Europe, Britian Would Need to Bring Back This 1 Weapon Posted: 06 Dec 2019 07:00 PM PST  Hint: It's a certain type of bomb.
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| Iowa worker who took bathroom photos may have many victims Posted: 06 Dec 2019 09:17 AM PST  A settlement between the state of Iowa and three of its Department of Revenue workers whose genitals were secretly photographed by a male colleague while they were going to the bathroom won't bring the matter to a close, as files found on the fired employee's work computer show he may have victimized dozens of other men. The State Appeal Board voted Monday to settle the 2017 lawsuit brought by Daniel Wagner, Lloyd Lofton and Joshua Bates for $900,000. The men, who will each pocket $185,290, said coworker Kenneth Kerr stalked them at work and that supervisors failed to act when they complained about it.
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| Carjackers’ Plan Foiled Because They Can't Drive Stick Posted: 06 Dec 2019 01:30 PM PST  In case you needed another reason to buy a car with a manual transmission.
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| Another 1,000 truck drivers lost their jobs in November, a chilling sign for the economy Posted: 06 Dec 2019 03:36 PM PST  The trucking industry slashed 1,000 jobs in November, according to the most recent employment report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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| POWER RANKING: Here's who has the best chance of becoming the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Posted: 06 Dec 2019 06:18 AM PST  We've combined Insider polling and results of Morning Consult's daily survey to create a weekly power ranking of the potential 2020 candidates.
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| World's oceans are losing oxygen at a dangerous rate, study says Posted: 07 Dec 2019 03:29 AM PST  Scientists warn that ocean deoxygenation will have widespread global effects on marine ecosystems and the people that rely on them.
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| Indian police investigated over killings of rape suspects Posted: 07 Dec 2019 05:25 AM PST  A top Indian rights group on Saturday launched an investigation into the police shooting of four rape-murder suspects after accusations they were gunned down in cold blood to assuage public anger. The launch of the investigation by the National Human Rights Commission comes as India also reeled from the death of another woman on Friday, set on fire on her way to a sexual assault court hearing in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
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| Saudi Arabia 'greatly angered' by Pensacola Navy base shooting, Trump says Posted: 06 Dec 2019 12:52 PM PST  Trump received a call from King Salman of Saudi Arabia to express his condolences over the attack that left four dead. The suspect was a Saudi national.
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| How World War III Begins in 2029 (A U.S.-China Battle Over Taiwan?) Posted: 07 Dec 2019 12:00 AM PST  That's what one fictional article that went viral last week suggests. Could it come true?
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| UPDATE 2-Four dead in shooting near Mexico's presidential residence Posted: 07 Dec 2019 03:19 PM PST ![UPDATE 2-Four dead in shooting near Mexico's presidential residence]( "UPDATE 2-Four dead in shooting near Mexico's presidential residence") Four people were killed and two injured in a shooting on Saturday near Mexico's National Palace, the presidential residence in the capital's historic downtown, officials said. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was traveling outside of Mexico City on Saturday. Preliminary reports indicated an armed man entered a building on a small street near the palace looking to relieve himself, Mexico City police said.
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| How robocalls became America's most prevalent crime Posted: 07 Dec 2019 03:35 AM PST ![How robocalls became America's most prevalent crime]( "How robocalls became America's most prevalent crime") Today, half of all phone calls are automated scams. Is there any way to stop this incessant bombardment? Here's everything you need to know:Why so many robocalls? Automated telephone calls might be America's most prevalent form of lawbreaking, with more than 180 million such calls every day. A 2009 law that banned unsolicited, prerecorded telemarketing has failed to stem the explosion of calls seeking to steal information or scare people into scams. In 2017, about 4 percent of U.S. phone calls were spam. But now, thanks to cheap software allowing crooks to blast millions of calls from disguised numbers, roughly 50 percent of all calls are junk. Just the time wasted dealing with robocalls costs Americans $3 billion per year, the FCC estimates, on top of untold billions lost from businesses that depend on real phone calls; 70 percent of Americans don't answer calls from unfamiliar numbers anymore, according to Consumer Reports. October was the worst month on record, with an estimated 5.7 billion robocalls. Hunting robocallers is like playing Whack-a-Mole, said Janice Kopec, a staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. "We shut down an operation, and another one springs up almost instantaneously."How do robocallers work? Two inventions are behind the robocall scourge. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) dialing — the technology used by apps like Skype — lets scammers place millions of calls a day, costing just $0.006 per minute if a call is answered. The other breakthrough is "neighborhood spoofing," which disguises robocalls to appear on caller ID with the same area code as the number being dialed, instead of an 800 number or distant area code. By one estimate, 90 percent of scam calls from abroad now show up as U.S. numbers. Robocalls home in on targets by asking consumers to press a button if they'd like to stop receiving calls, which actually lets callers identify "live" numbers. Some robocalls simply trick people into agreeing to speak with a human telemarketer about a legitimate, if inadvisable, product such as a car warranty or timeshare. In "enterprise spoofing," hackers use personal information stolen through big data breaches to impersonate a big, familiar company and ask customers for Social Security numbers or birth dates to make identity theft easier.What are common scams? Many Americans have been called by a fake Social Security Administration representative, who claims that the recipient's Social Security number is compromised, asks for the number, and then uses it to commit identity theft. (In reality, the IRS and SSA don't make unrequested telephone calls.) Other scams offer 0 percent interest rates or predatory health-care deals, timing these calls for tax season and ObamaCare sign-up periods.Does anyone fall for them? Only a small number of people do, but a lousy yield is still highly profitable. For all the millions of New Yorkers who hung up on the Social Security scam this year, by October, 523 suckers had lost $5.8 million, police said. Robocalls are often menacing, threatening prison or deportation; these tactics intimidate some vulnerable seniors and immigrants into cooperating. Nina Belis, a New York nurse in her 60s, was told on the phone last year that her Social Security number had been stolen and she needed to transfer her assets to the government to protect them, or face arrest. "I was terrified, of course," she said. The scammer posed as an FBI agent, and over the course of two weeks coached her on withdrawing and transferring her retirement funds, costing her $337,105.Are robocalls policed? The FTC blocked more than a billion illegal robocalls in June, but meaningful enforcement can still seem hopeless. Robocallers now place calls from a huge volume of numbers to avoid detection. Since 2009, when the legal ban on most robocalls went into effect, the FTC has brought just 33 cases, ordering defendants to pay nearly $300 million to victims. Perpetrators often claimed they were broke, and they paid just $18 million in relief. Only a sweeping reform of phone industry rules will solve the problem, says FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. "Going after a single bad actor is like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon," she said. "And right now we're all wet."Can robocalls be stopped? Adding your number to the federal Do Not Call registry is moderately effective for avoiding traditional telemarketers but useless for escaping fraudulent robocalls. There are several commercial products, such as YouMail, Hiya, and RoboKiller, designed to work like spam blockers; Nomorobo, for example, automatically blocks calls from numbers on its blacklist. But since all these tools have failed to stem the tsunami of junk calls, the House and Senate have passed their own bills, and agreed last month to reconcile them into joint legislation that would require phone companies to verify incoming calls and block robocalls without charging consumers. The bill, which will go to President Trump in January, also expands the FCC's prosecutorial leeway and authorizes penalties of up to $10,000 for each robocall that intentionally defies telemarketing rules. Will it help? Yes, says bill co-sponsor Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) — but only to an extent. "All of these scams are different," Pallone says, "and there is no silver bullet to fix them all."The king of the robocall Adrian Abramovich lived in one of Miami's gated oceanside communities in a house filled with art and posters from Scarface and Goodfellas. The house doubled as the office from which Abramovich, an Argentine immigrant, allegedly made 96,758,223 illegal robocalls over three months in 2016. The FCC claims his scheme used "neighbor spoofing" to make the calls appear to be originating near their targets. They purported to be from companies such as Marriott, Expedia, and TripAdvisor offering "exclusive" vacation deals. If people pressed "1," they were transferred to Mexican call centers that pitched totally unrelated packages like timeshares. The FCC fined Abramovich a record $120 million last year, which he claimed he couldn't possibly pay, and the Senate subpoenaed him. "The efficiency and the magnitude of your robocall campaign is truly historic," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told him. "Do you understand why it irritates people?" Abramovich insisted he was a legitimate businessman, claiming he, too, was a robocall victim. "I receive four or five robocalls a day," he said. "I never answer the phone."More stories from theweek.com Trump's pathological obsession with being laughed at The most important day of the impeachment inquiry Jerry Falwell Jr.'s false gospel of memes
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