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Trump Proposes Lowest Refugee Admission Ceiling in Decades
byPatrick Goodenough , CNSNews:
The Trump administration’s proposed ceiling of 45,000 refugees to be resettled in the United States in the new fiscal year is the lowest cap set since the Refugee Act was passed in 1980.
On Wednesday the administration sent to Congress a report on its refugee admission plans for FY 2018. The 45,000 ceiling is a 59 percent drop from the 110,000 cap set by the Obama administration a year ago for FY 2017. (President Trump’s January 27 executive order lowered that to 50,000.)
Since the law signed by President Carter in 1980 raised the annual ceiling from 17,400 to 50,000, the lowest cap until now was 67,000, set by the Reagan administration for FY 1986.
Actual admissions have often fallen below the ceiling set for that year, a pattern especially evident during the years immediately following 9/11.
In FY 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration admitted far fewer refugees than the 70,000 ceiling it set for each year.
In FY 2002, only 27,131 refugees were resettled, 61 percent fewer than the ceiling figure. In FY 2003 admissions rose slightly to 28,403, still 59 percent fewer than the ceiling.
A senior administration official said Wednesday that the aim in FY 2018 would be to admit refugee numbers as close to the ceiling as possible.
Scientists have figured out how to produce a fuel that is cheap AND clean
by Russel Davis, NaturalNews:
Researchers at the Cardiff University in the U.K. recently discovered a cheaper and cleaner way of producing methanol from methane using oxygen from the air.
Methanol was traditionally manufactured by converting methane into hydrogen and carbon monoxide at high temperatures, and then undergoing a second highly pressurized process to reassemble the chemicals in a different order.
However, the research team found that methanol can be produced by using gold nanoparticles to start a chemical reaction between methane, oxygen, and hydrogen peroxide. The chemical process can be accomplished at one stage and at temperatures no higher than 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), the experts noted.
“The current two-stage ‘steam reforming’ process is very energy intensive, as it requires a lot of fuel to achieve high temperatures, but for over a century no-one has been able to come up with a better system. Both methods essentially break a hydrogen bond in a methane molecule and introduce another oxygen atom, but in our process the gold palladium nanoparticles act as a catalyst to bring about this reaction in a single stage,” Professor Stuart Taylor explained.
According to Prof. Taylor, the end product can be used as an alternative to gas. He also noted that the new approach in methanol production may be used in chemical and plastic manufacturing.
Financial Times Columnist Skewers Wall Street Model in the New York Times
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens , wallstreetonparade.com:
Rana Foroohar, an Associate Editor and Global Business Columnist for the Financial Times, penned an OpEd at the New York Times yesterday that was as audacious in its insults to the Times’ richest hometown industry, Wall Street, as it was brilliantly in touch with the abject dysfunction of the U.S. financial system.
Foroohar’s thesis is this: “…there’s a core truth about our financial system that we have yet to comprehend fully: It isn’t serving us, we’re serving it.”
Foroohar describes in specific detail what Wall Street On Parade has long described as Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system. (See our articles describing this system under the menu button above titled “Wealth Transfer Schemes.” You may find two particular articles of interest, here and here.)
Just how high up the chain of command this “service” to Wall Street goes was deftly captured in a Tweet by the President of the United States on Monday of this week. In the midst of a humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, where upwards of 3 million fellow Americans are living with limited access to food and water and without any municipal electric power in the midst of a sweltering heat wave in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, President Trump Tweeted about the “billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks” by Puerto Rico, adding that this debt “sadly, must be dealt with.”
To those of us who instinctively know how Wall Street has its way with Presidents of every stripe, it sounded like Puerto Rico was either going to be extorted in the midst of a humanitarian crisis into sweetening the pot for its creditors on Wall Street or strong-armed into the kinds of privatization schemes that Wall Street has so cleverly inflicted on cash-strapped nations in the past.
