Letter: Voters need to accept the truth | Opinion | goskagit.com – goskagit.com

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Cognitive dissonance. What is it?

It is when a person holds two beliefs that contradict one another. Cognitive dissonance causes feelings of unease and tension, and people attempt to relieve this discomfort in different ways. Examples include explaining things away or rejecting new information that conflicts with their existing beliefs.

Newborns are immune. They have no preconceived notions. They are not swayed by propaganda or fables. They enter life with a clean slate.

As people age, they acquire new information that is either factual or false. Unless they analyze the data that comes their way, they may be duped into believing false evidence appearing real. Opinions and outlooks are thus formed.

Strong personalities are often capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of many otherwise well-intentioned people. Folks hear things that strike discordant chords and thereafter abandon the precepts of the Golden Rule in favor of slick hoopla and myth put forth by silver-tongued orators.

Donald Trump did not become president because he offered rational alternatives to complex yet solvable problems in our nation. His approach was and remains aggressive, belligerent and extremely self-aggrandizing. As an example, any criticisms of the president that appear in the media are simply labeled fake news by the Trump entourage. End of discussion.

And here is where cognitive dissonance appears. Many people who voted for him in 2016 try to explain things away or reject new information that conflicts with their existing beliefs. Doing so is easier than coming to grips with the truth: Voting for him in 2016 was a mistake.

Hopefully, in the quietness of their souls, come Election Day, they will choose to remedy that error.

Richard Austin

Mount Vernon

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Letter: Voters need to accept the truth | Opinion | goskagit.com - goskagit.com

COVID will have lasting effects on employment litigation (with video) – FreightWaves

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Employment attorney Gerald Maatman Jr. of Seyfarth Shaw LLP talks about how to avoid legal pitfalls during the coronavirus pandemic.

Labor and employment attorney Gerald Maatman Jr. is tasked with advising clients on avoiding potential legal pitfalls that may arise in the workplace because of the coronavirus.

However, he admits that nothing in his 40-plus years specializing in labor law has prepared him for the challenges employers face because of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 6 million people in the U.S. and killed more than 196,000 people since January.

I thought I had seen everything and then COVID-19 occurred, said Maatman, senior partner of Chicago-based Seyfarth Shaw LLP, on Thursday at the virtual American Shipper Global Trade Tech summit. Ive worked harder and longer hours to assist employers with all of the challenges and the changing playing field that they find themselves on today. Its been extraordinary times.

Businesses are already starting to see a spate of lawsuits filed by employees who were furloughed or laid off because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Maatman expects the majority of litigation is going to be filed in the first and second quarters of 2021. However, more than 1,000 COVID-19-related lawsuits have been filed across the country since March.

Companies are battening down the hatches and COVID litigation is going to be with us for the next five to seven years, he said. If you think of litigation as a bell jar curve, were just starting on the front end of the upward curve. We have a long way to go to get through it all.

In March, Maatman said his firm created a task force of lawyers from across the country to track all new laws and regulations and lawsuits stemming from COVID-19 claims. The initial one-page spreadsheet has grown to more than 800 pages in the past six months, he said.

What happened is that at the local, state level and federal levels, a series of laws and regulations were passed, Maatman said. If youre a nationwide logistics company, youve got a bit of a patchwork quilt in front of you in terms of all the duties and requirements.

Complying with employee leave laws and responding to workplace safety concerns is an incredible task for any human resources director or business owner amid the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

His firm is advising employers to follow five basic guidelines to avoid potential legal pitfalls stemming from workers complaints during COVID-19.

Remember that any personnel decision you make anything you do in this day and age has to pass the social media test, Maatman said. How does this look to your customers? How does this look to your employees? How does it look to an outsider looking in at your business? So the fundamental HR blocking and tackling of doing the right thing pays incredible dividends in this time of stress.

SUBHEAD: Diffuse the problem before it becomes a bigger issue

Addressing small disputes before they become a bigger problem is key to avoiding class action lawsuits and large payouts.

You want to make sure that an individual lawsuit doesnt turn into a giant lawsuit, Maatman said. Diffusing a problem while its small and before it turns into a big problem has lots to do with saving money and avoiding huge claims.

Employers need an understanding of various laws that shield employers from liability, he said.

While employers in the health care industry or first responders may have the greatest amount of immunity by lawmakers, the rules are different for profit companies and vary by state.

In South Carolina, theres a lot of immunity, but in California, theres virtually no immunity, Maatman said. The only way thats going to be solved is on the federal level.

However, determining if a company has immunity is complicated because of the roadblock between the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress.

I think the best way to make decisions, if youre a company, is assume there is no immunity, he said. Try to make the best, most measured and sound business decisions you can on the theory that those are the best defenses if youre challenged.

Developing a sense of creativity relative to applicable legal standards is crucial for businesses to innovate and adapt amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Plaintiffs attorneys are experiencing cash flow issues right now and tend to settle their cases for less money than before COVID.

A very creative outside-the-box thinking, in my experience, has been the winning formula for these cases, Maatman said. Ive also been able to say, Well settle, but were going to pay it one month at a time over the next 10 months and stage the payments.

The old way of doing business, even in the courthouse, has changed completely, he said.

Theres been a revolution in the way in which cases are brought and defended, Maatman said.

Practicing The Golden Rule is crucial to a companys success during these unprecedented times. This can be achieved by ensuring workers know the rules and that employers interpret the rules consistently and fairly in the workplace, Maatman said.

Would you want to be heard and treated the same way if the tables were turned and you were the recipient of the employers decision? he said. Doing the right thing and doing it in a fair way tends to be, at all times, the best possible defense to these sorts of problems.

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COVID will have lasting effects on employment litigation (with video) - FreightWaves

Excerpt from ‘Sidelines and Bloodlines’ – Introducing … the Wall of Screaming – ESPN

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Dr. Jerry E. McGee enjoyed one of the most decorated careers in the history of college football officiating. From 1972 to 2009, he worked 404 games at the FBS level, including a pair of Rose Bowls, a pair of Army-Navy games and three games that determined the national championship, including his final game between Florida and Oklahoma.

He also raised two boys, my brother, Sam, and I. Now the three McGees have coauthored a book, "Sidelines and Bloodlines: A Father, His Sons, and Our Life in College Football," which is on sale now.

In the following excerpt, exclusive to ESPN.com and presented with permission from Triumph Books, the McGees provide insight into the question that they -- and every sports officiating family -- receive whenever football is played.

"Hey, what's that coach yelling at that ref?"

This excerpt is exclusive to ESPN.com, presented with permission from Triumph Books. For more information or to order a copy, please visit Triumph Books.

After three decades of officiating football in the ACC and Big East, my father, Dr. Jerry E. McGee, has an incredible collection of photographs on display at his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, images of him in action everywhere from the Orange Bowl and Rose Bowl to Death Valley and Notre Dame Stadium.

However, the best photos are of the angry coaches. I call it the Wall of Screaming.

There's Joe Morrison, the man who built South Carolina into something other than an also-ran, who introduced the Gamecocks' black jerseys and their "2001: A Space Odyssey" stadium entrance, on the sideline during the Clemson game of '84. "Old Dependable" is screaming, his jaw unhinged, and appears to be pointing directly at Dad, who appears to be totally ignoring the coach.

The caption that accompanied that photo in the Sunday morning paper read: "Coach Joe Morrison explains his point of view to a less than interested official."

My father, Dr. Jerry E. McGee, aka Dad:

I don't think he's even actually yelling at me, but the camera angle sure makes it look like he is, doesn't it? I don't know. Maybe he was. What I do remember about that game was that I had to get the South Carolina captains for the coin toss, but no one knew who the captains were because Morrison picked them game-by-game. They told me I needed to ask him, and they walked me down to a door under the stadium. I opened it, and there was Joe Morrison, sitting totally alone on a folding chair in the middle of an empty concrete room. There was one light bulb hanging right over him, like a spotlight, and the room was full of smoke. He was sitting there, basically in the dark, chain-smoking like crazy before the game.

"Uh ... Coach, I need to know who your captains are ..."

The most notable photo on the Wall of Screaming was taken in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Oct. 6, 2006, when Duke visited Alabama. Crimson Tide head coach Mike Shula is standing at most two feet off the back of Dad's head, his mouth wide open and his hand extended to underline the point he's so angrily exclaiming. Once again, Dad seems to be purposely ignoring it, looking toward the scoreboard clock as he fills out his penalty card with the details of the foul that Shula is so unhappy about.

Alabama won that game 30-14, the third from last win of Shula's four-year Tuscaloosa tenure. Six weeks later, he was fired. The Tide replaced him with some guy named Nick Saban.

Dad:

When I look at that picture, what I think about is the amount of pressure that these coaches are under. When Mike Shula was unloading on me that night, he probably already knew he was finished. It's a reminder that you never truly know what's going on with a coach behind closed doors.

The reality is that over 404 games of college football officiating, almost all of it on the sideline, I only remember a very few times when a coach truly just flipped out on me. And looking back, like Shula that night, there was almost always something else behind it.

Take, for instance, Jim Young. During Young's 17 years as head coach at Arizona, Purdue and Army, he was universally considered one of the truly good guys of college football. So Dad was shocked on Sept. 27, 1986, when Wake Forest traveled to West Point, and his experience on Young's sideline at Michie Stadium was a cacophony of cuss words. The Black Knights were favored in the game by a couple of touchdowns but instead were trailing the Demon Deacons early en route to a blowout upset loss.

There was bad call at the start of the game, a defensive pass interference flag on the other side of the field. Those officials were too far away to hear Young, so he aimed his anger at the field judge, the ref who was most easily at his disposal. He stalked Dad up and down the sideline, screaming over and over again, "You have already f---ed up this entire game!"

My brother, Sam McGee:

I think that football fans assume that an official is out there just looking for a reason to throw his penalty flag, but the good ones have the complete opposite approach. Typically, if a player draws an unsportsmanlike penalty, or even something like a holding, there's a really good chance the official has already warned them about it at least once. "Keep that up, and we're going to have to flag you."

Anyone who doesn't believe that needs to do what we have always done and really watch how a good sideline official reacts to a coach who has spent a ridiculous amount of time in the game screaming, yelling and complaining. The official will walk away from a coach like that. They will warm him directly. They will even go to other people on the sideline and say, "Hey, someone needs to calm him down before he draws an unsportsmanlike." If he keeps it up after that, there is going to be a penalty. Or if he breaks the golden rule.

Ah yes, the golden rule. When it comes to flagging a coach with a personal foul, the guideline is very simple. You unfurl the yellow napkin only when the rants have become personal. For example: "That's was the stupidest god damn call I've ever seen!" is OK. But "You are the stupidest god damn human being I have ever seen!" is not. If you need a more detailed illustration, please watch the film "Bull Durham" and the scene in which Crash Davis calls the umpire the one name he knows you can never call an umpire because he's trying to get thrown out of the game and perhaps get his teammates to finally become fired up and focused.

Jim Young kept railing, and it was getting worse. Dad went to the Army assistant coaches and asked them to tell their boss to cool off because he didn't want to flag the supposed nicest man in football. They told Dad no way. He was on his own.

Dad:

The clock is ticking down to the end of the first half, and he is just getting louder and louder. I'm watching the clock thinking, "OK, we're going to be saved by the bell here." Then, with about 38 seconds remaining, Young leaned right into my ear and screamed, "You guys are just a bunch of god damn sons of b----es, aren't you?!" I threw my flag. Personal foul, 15 yards.

I went to the white hat, Bob Cooper, and he said, "What in the hell have you done? That's probably the nicest head coach in America."

I said, "Well, I flagged him."

Bob said, "Why? What did he say?"

"He called me a god damn son of a b----."

Bob said, "Well, you are a god damn son of a b----."

I told Bob, "Well, he said you were a god damn son of a b----, too."

Bob said, "Well, then give me that damn football ..." and he marked off the 15-yard penalty.

Nearly a decade later, Dad was back at Michie Stadium for a Rutgers-Army matchup as part of a Big East officiating crew. As that crew held their pregame meeting, in walked Jim Young, now retired as a football coach but still omnipresent in West Point as a living legend. Young introduced himself to the room.

Dad:

When I said my name, he said, "You know, there used to be a McGee who officiated in the ACC." I told him, "Yeah, I know. It was me." He said, "You are the only official who ever flagged me during a game."

I asked him, "Well, did you deserve it?" And Coach Young said, "Oh, hell yes. The only mistake you made was that you didn't flag me five minutes earlier. Sorry about that. I was just trying to do something to wake my team up."

Just like Crash Davis.

For Dad, the most notorious case of "pressurized coach + dealing with problems no one knows about + losing a game you shouldn't = sideline explosion" took place on Halloween 1996. Boston College was visiting Pitt for a coveted Thursday night national showcase game on ESPN. The 4-4 Eagles were 11-point favorites over the scuffling 2-6 Panthers. But BC never got into gear and lost an ugly contest 20-13.

In the middle of it all, Boston College head coach Dan Henning, a former NFL quarterback, two-time NFL head coach and two-time Super Bowl champion, totally and completely lost it.

Dad:

Honestly, it escalated so quickly that it didn't seem real.

The back judge had a penalty against Boston College for 12 men on the field. We actually had some disagreement on that. I had counted, like I always did, and had 11, but the back judge was adamant, and he was a good official, so the penalty stood. That triggered Henning, and as always, I was the guy who was right there next to him, so I was the one catching hell. At one point, I even tried to explain, "Coach, if you'll notice, there's a flag on the field out there, but my flag is in my pocket." I was trying to let him know: Stop screaming. Certainly stop screaming at me.

For the next little while, he is following me up and down the sideline, just F-bomb after F-bomb, and finally he says, "My job is on the line, and you motherf---ers are out here half-assing the game ..." and then he said something that ended up triggering me. "I don't know where the f--- they found you guys!"

Now I turned around and walked toward him. I said, "Well, I'll tell you where they found me! In a university president's office, where I work Monday to Friday ..."

Dad was in his fifth year as president of Wingate University, a job he would hold for two decades. He continued to respond to Henning.

Dad:

"The question is where they found you. You're losing to Pittsburgh. On national television on Thursday night, with everyone in the country watching. If I was president at Boston College, you'd be looking for a job!"

I shouldn't have said that. And I wish that had been all that I said. I tried to walk away, but he followed me. He said something, and when he walked away, I followed him. It was the only time I just lost the handle. But I was a university president now, and there was a lot of stress in my job, too. Football was supposed to be my stress release, but on a Thursday night, getting screamed at by this guy, who was supposedly known as a good guy, I just couldn't take it anymore gracefully.

Once it finally started to calm down, I looked over, and I saw a kid holding a sideline microphone for ESPN. I said to him, "You didn't get all of that, did you?"

He didn't get all of it, but he absolutely got some of it. Most of the exchange had taken place during a TV timeout, so the nation didn't hear it. But I was two years into my entry-level career at ESPN, and at the Worldwide Leader in Sports, we don't see commercial breaks during games on our air. The satellite feed that is beamed back to our offices is what we call the backhaul, a clean feed that includes everything at the stadium during those breaks when the viewing audience is watching ads or SportsCenter score updates. In the booth that night was play-by-play man Mike Patrick, a man with deep ACC roots, who called many of Dad's earliest TV games on Jefferson-Pilot back in the '80s. The sideline reporter was Dr. Jerry Punch, a coworker I knew very well.

This particular night, I was in the ESPN Charlotte office. The only sound in the building was from BC at Pittsburgh, echoing throughout every room. But then, during this one commercial break, I heard a familiar sound that made me look up from my paperwork. Was that ... Dad? And did he just drop an F-bomb?

2 Related

I heard Doc Punch reporting to the production truck, not to be aired, but just in case it became a bigger problem once they returned from the commercials: "Guys, Coach Henning is really going at it with an official down here. That's the field judge, Dr. Jerry McGee, Ryan McGee's father."

In the closing moments of the game, Henning walked over to Dad. This time he didn't scream. "Jerry, if I offended you, I apologize."

"Me, too, Coach. We both lost our cool, didn't we?"

After the game, when cornered by a very nervous Big East officiating coordinator, Dad refused to divulge the content of his conversation with Henning, saying only that they were having a disagreement over where to get the best steak in Pittsburgh after the game. In fact, he never fully explained what happened until now, not even to Sam or me.

Dad:

I've never gotten into that much because I'm not proud of it. It was not my finest moment. Nor was it Dan Henning's finest moment. He didn't know the kind of stress I was under at my job. And, as we know now, that night we had no clue what a total and complete mess he was in the middle of at Boston College.

The following week, the entire nation knew. That's when Henning announced that he was suspending 13 Boston College football players for gambling. The game before Pitt, the Eagles had been crushed by Syracuse 45-17, and rumors were rampant in the Boston College locker room that some of the players on the team had placed bets on the game -- against their own team. In the days leading up to the Pitt game, Henning held a team meeting to address those rumors and asked anyone who had bet on the Syracuse game to come forward. No one did. But as the night at Pitt turned ugly, so did Henning's mood. In the locker room after the loss, before leaving for the airport, he exploded on his team, promising that he would get the bottom of the gambling chatter. By the end of November, the county district attorney had become a regular in the BC football office, a campus gambling ring had indeed been exposed, eight Eagles were off the team permanently, and Henning would never coach college football again.

Dad:

In the early 2000s, he lived in Charlotte, not far from us. He was offensive coordinator of the Carolina Panthers. I used to wonder what would happen if we ran into each other at the grocery store. We never did.

Sam:

I think, looking back, we understand why Dan Henning was in the frame of mind that he was that night at Pitt. But when he was calling the offense for the Panthers, if they had a bad day, I don't think any of us went out of our way to cut him much slack when it came to criticism.

By the way, there is no photograph of the Dan Henning vs. Jerry McGee exchange on the Wall of Screaming. But there is videotape in the ESPN library. I know -- I checked. Maybe I should have erased it.

See the rest here:

Excerpt from 'Sidelines and Bloodlines' - Introducing ... the Wall of Screaming - ESPN

Transcript of Attorney General’s Remarks as Delivered and Q&A at Hillsdale College – Lawfare

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Below is a transcript of the remarks as delivered by Attorney General William Barr at Hillsdale College on September 16, 2020, including the subsequent question and answer period. The remarks as prepared are available here, and full audio of the event is available here.

Thank you very much. I'm very honored to have been invited to speak at this dinner and I really appreciate your comments. Its been great to get to know you. I've been reading you over the years, and it's a real delight to have spent the evening with you. And Im very pleased to be able to speak to you at this Hillsdale College celebration of our magnificent Constitution, and I'm a great admirer of Hillsdale.

As I was telling Larry, I don't get to make many speeches like this, I'm usually talking about crime rates and that kind of thing. But I wanted to speak at Hillsdale because it's one of the few, maybe a handful of institutions of higher learning where it is actually worthwhile spending the money to get an education. And I mean that sincerely. Sadly, many colleges these days don't even teach the constitution, much less celebrate it.

You know, one out of every four Americans don't know who we fought the revolution against. It's pretty pathetic. And that number is increasing steadily as our educational institutions fail us. But at Hillsdale, you recognized that the principles of the founding are as relevant today and as important today as ever, and vital indeed today to the survival of our great experiment here, freedom. And I appreciate your observance, and all you do for civic education and education period in this country.

Now, when many people think of the virtues of our Constitution, they first mention the Bill of Rights. Of course, that's the talking point of the Constitution. There's a bill of rights, you have rights. And I guess that makes sense. They get the great guarantees of the bill of rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and especially the right to keep and bear arms, just to name a few that are critical safeguards to our liberty.

But as President Reagan used to remind people, the Soviet Union had a constitution and even included some of these lofty sounding rights. Ultimately, however, those promises are just empty words. Because there was no rule of law in that society to enforce them. The rule of law is the linchpin of American freedom, and the critical guarantee of the rule of law comes from the Constitution's structure of separation of powers.

Now, there are many, many elements of the rule of law, and there are many, many safeguards built into our great Constitution. But tonight I want to talk about the separation of powers. The way the framers recognized that by dividing the legislative, executive and judicial powers, each significant, but each limited, would minimize the risk of any form of tyranny. That is the real genius of the Constitution, and it ultimately is more important to securing liberty than the Bill of Rights. After all, the Bill of Rights is a set of amendments to the original Constitution. And I know you all know that the framers did not think it was needed.They didn't need to include it into the Constitution and express an enumeration of rights.

Today, I want to talk about the power that the Constitution allocates to the executive branch, particularly in the area of criminal justice.

The Supreme Court has correctly held that under Article Two of the Constitution, the executive has virtually unchecked discretion to decide whether to prosecute individuals for suspected crimes. We all know that the executive is vested with the responsibility for seeing that the laws are faithfully executed.

The power to execute and enforce law is an executive function all together. And that means discretion is vested in the executive to determine when to exercise the prosecutorial power. The only significant limitation on that discretion comes from other provisions of the Constitution. For example, the United States Attorney could not decide to prosecute only people of a particular race or a particular religion. But aside from that limitation, which thankfully, remains only a hypothetical in our country, the executive has broad discretion to decide whether to bring criminal prosecutions in particular cases.

The key question then is how the executive should exercise its prosecutorial discretion. 80 years ago this spring, one of my predecessors in this job, then-Attorney-General Robert Jackson, gave a famous speech to the conference of United States Attorneys in which he described the proper role and qualities of federal prosecutors. Justice Jackson was one of only a handful of, I think three, maybe, attorneys general who ultimately ended up as a justice on the Supreme Court. Much has changed in the eight decades since Justice Jackson's remarks, but he was a man of uncommon wisdom. And it is appropriate to consider his views today and how they apply in our modern era.

Federal prosecutors possess tremendous power, power that is necessary to enforce our laws and punish wrongdoing, but power that like all power carries inherent potential for abuse. Justice Jackson recognized that, as he put it, the prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. Prosecutors have the power to investigate people, to interview their friends, and they can do so on the basis of mere suspicion of wrongdoing. People facing federal investigations incur ruinous legal costs and often see their lives reduced to rubble before a charge is even filed. Justice Jackson was not exaggerating when he said that while the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficence forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst. Think about the power of a prosecutor: he doesn't have to answer to anything outside the office of the prosecutor and he can destroy peoples lives just by bringing an investigation, destroy their reputation, destroy their livelihood in today's world.

Its not just individuals: think of the corporations -- Anderson, the accounting firm, thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs done away with in an instant because of a prosecutorial decision, and a decision that was largely discretionary, because individuals are initially responsible for the crime. And the question of whether or not you're going to impute that to the corporation and take down the corporation as well as largely a discretionary call by prosecutors. In today's world, going after a corporation or a white collar defendant is like shooting fish in a barrel. There is no contest. You threaten the company with criminal liability and all the collateral effects. No corporation is going to go to trial and fight that and the prosecutors. Its just the question of how much the check is gonna be.

That's all within the control of a prosecutor: the power, as Justice Jackson said, to strike at citizens .The power that the prosecutor has can strike at citizens not with just his individual strength, but with all the force of the government itself. And that has to be carefully calibrated and carefully supervised, because left unchecked, it has the power to inflict far more harm than it prevents.

The most basic check on prosecutorial power is political accountability. It is counterintuitive to say that, as we rightly strive to maintain a political system of criminal justice.

But political accountability is what ultimately ensures our system does its work fairly and with proper recognition of the many interests and values at stake. Government power completely divorced from political accountability is tyranny.

Now Justice Jackson understood this. And as he explained, presidential appointment and Senate confirmation of the United States Attorneys and the senior Department of Justice officials is what legitimizes their exercises of sovereign power. You are required to win an expression of confidence in your character by both the legislative and the executive branches of the government before assuming the possibilities of a federal prosecutor.

Yet in the decades since Justice Jackson's remarks, its become a commonplace to argue that prosecutorial decisions are legitimate only when they are made by the lowest level line prosecutors, the career prosecutors handling any given case. Ironically, some of those same critics see no problem campaigning for highly political elected district attorneys to remake state and local prosecutorial offices in their preferred progressive image, which often involves overriding the considered judgment of the career prosecutors and police officers. But aside from that hypocrisy, the notion that line prosecutors should make the final decisions within the Department of Justice is completely wrong. And it is antithetical to the basic values that undergirds our entire system.

The Justice Department is not a praetorian guard that watches over a society impervious to the ebbs and flows of politics. It is an agency within the executive branch of a democratic republic, a form of government where the power of the state is ultimately reposed in the people acting through their elected president and their elected representatives.

I know I don't include many applause lines in my prepared speeches. Had I known this was going to be a fireside chat, I would have cut this shorter -- but I will give you something to clap about later. Okay.

The men and women who have ultimate authority in the Justice Department are thus the ones on whom our elected officials have conferred that responsibility: by presidential appointment and Senate confirmation. That blessing by the two political branches of government gives these officials democratic legitimacy that career officials do not possess. The same process that produces these officials also holds them accountable. The elected president can fire senior Department of Justice officials at work, and the elected Congress can summon them to explain their decisions to the people's representatives and to the public. And because these officials have the imprimatur of both the President and Congress, they also have the stature to resist these political pressures when necessary, and they can take the heat for what the Department of Justice does or doesn't do.

Line prosecutors, by contrast, are generally part of the permanent bureaucracy. They do not have the political legitimacy to be the public face for tough decisions, and they lack the political bias necessary to publicly defend those decisions. Nor can the public and its representatives hold civil servants accountable in the same way as appointed officials. Indeed, the public's only tool to hold the government accountable is an election, and the bureaucracy is neither elected nor easily replaced by those who are. Moreover, because these officials are installed by the democratic process, that is the appointees, they are the most equipped to make the judgment calls concerning how we should wield our prosecutorial power. As Justice Scalia observed in perhaps his most admired judicial opinion, his dissent in Morrison vs. Olson, almost all investigative and prosecutorial decisions, including the ultimate decision -- whether, after a technical violation of the law has been found, prosecution is warranted -- involve the balancing of innumerable legal and practical considerations. Those considerations do need to be balanced in each and every case. As Justice Scalia also pointed out, it is nice to say, Fat jstitia ruat clum -- Let justice be done though the heavens may fall -- but it doesn't comport with reality.

It would do far more harm than good to abandon all perspective and proportion in an attempt to ensure that every technical violation of criminal law by every person is tracked down, investigated and prosecuted to the nth degree.

Our system works best when leavened by judgment, discretion, proportionality and consideration of alternative sanctions -- all the things that supervisors provide. Cases must be supervised by someone who does not have a narrow focus, but who is broad-gauged and pursuing a general agenda. And that person need not be a prosecutor, but someone who can balance the importance of vigorous prosecution with other competing values. In short, the Attorney General, senior DOJ officials and U.S. attorneys are indeed political, but they are political in a good and necessary sense.

Indeed, aside from the importance of not fully decoupling law enforcement from the constraining and moderating forces of politics, devolving all authority down to the most junior officials does not even make sense as a matter of basic management.

Name one successful organization or institution where the lowest level employees decisions are deemed sacrosanct. There aren't any. Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori Preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency. Good leaders at the Department of Justice -- as any organization needs to -- trust and support their subordinates, but that does not mean blindly deferring to whatever those subordinates want to do.

One of the more annoying things that I hear and face and you know, this has been going on for decades, is this strange idea that political officials interfere in investigations or in cases.

I'm saying, What do you mean by interfere? Under the law, all prosecutorial power is vested in the Attorney General. And these people are agents of the Attorney General. And as I said, FBI agents, Whose agent do you think you are? I don't say this in a pompous way. But that is the chain of authority and legitimacy in the Department of Justice. And I say, Well, what exactly am I interfering with? When you boil it right down, its the will of the most junior member of the organization. He has some idea that he wants to do something, and what makes that sacrosanct? What makes the judgment of the next layer up or the next layer up or the next layer up -- each layer, by the way, fanning out and having broader and broader experience, much more experience and a broader portfolio portfolio and a broader perspective -- what makes the line attorney who's handling a particular case, their judgment so sacrosanct? The idea is, I guess, well, they're not political, and therefore their judgments won't be political.

But from my experience in the department in two different eras, career employees are not apolitical necessarily. Some are. Some are very political and can check their politics at the door, and others can't, and can be partisan. But they're not apolitical necessarily. They're human beings like everybody else, and they're very, usually less experienced individuals than their supervisors.

So this is what presidents, the Congress and the public expect. When something goes wrong in the Department of Justice, the buck has to stop somewhere, and that's at the top. The statute I referenced was 28 USC section 509, which couldn't be plainer: All functions of other offices of the Department of Justice and all functions of agencies and employees of the Department of Justice are vested in the Attorney General.

And because the Attorney General's ultimately politically accountable for every decision that the department makes, I and my predecessors have had an obligation to ensure that we make the correct decision. The Attorney General, the assistant attorneys general, the US Attorneys are not figureheads. We're supervisors. Our job is to supervise and anything less is an abdication.

Active engagement in our cases by senior officials is also essential to the rule of law.

The essence of the rule of law is that whatever rule you apply in one case must be the same rule you would apply in a similar case. Treating each person equally before the law includes how the department enforces the law. We should not prosecute someone for wire fraud in Manhattan using a legal theory we would not equally pursue in Madison or in Montgomery, or allow prosecutors in one division to bring charges using a theory that a group of prosecutors in another division down the hall would not deploy against someone who's engaged in indistinguishable conduct.

We must strive for consistency. And that is yet another reason why centralized senior leadership exists: to harmonize the disparate views of our many prosecutors in a consistent policy for the department.

I was being interviewed by a member of the press for a radio interview. And I got one of these questions like, Why are you interfering in some case over here or some case over there? And I said, Well, why do you think we have one Attorney General? I said, We have 93 districts -- 50 states, 93 districts. Why don't you think each U.S. attorney should be a law unto themselves? Why do you think we have one Attorney General? For uniformity of law. For having consistency in the application of law. For having someone who has the entire perspective of the playing field. And the cameramen were all nodding their heads. This made sense, this made sense.

Jackson said, We must proceed in all districts with that uniformity of policy which is necessary to the prestige of federal law. But I think there's more involved than prestige. Uniformity is what protects us. At the end of the day, our system is really the crystallization of the golden rule in a political system. And that's ultimately what protects us, which is, I'm not willing to do to somebody else, what I'm not willing to have done to me. That is ultimately the foundation of our freedom, okay?

We see that in the legislative branch. Think about it constitutionally here, since I'm talking about the constitution tonight.

The legislature in the United States, our national federal legislature, can't make one law that applies to New York and another to California. Now, there are a lot of reasons for that, think about it. Because then you could have little factions in the country, you know, buying favor and building a majority to adopt rules that don't apply to everyone the same. But it's also because you can't have the rest of the country say, we're gonna go to war and by the way, the draft law only applies to New York.

The Constitution requires a uniformity across the nation, so that's legislative. When you make a rule legislatively, it has to apply to everybody. But it also applies in the enforcement of the law. The same uniformity is required, because that is the ultimate guarantor of freedom.

All the supervision in the world won't be enough, though, without a strong culture across the Department of fairness and commitment to even-handed justice. That's what Justice Jackson described as the spirit of fair play and decency that should animate the federal prosecutor.

Sounds quaint today, doesn't it? In his memorable turn of phrase, even when the government technically loses its case, it has really won if justice has been done. We want our prosecutors to be aggressive and tenacious in their pursuit of justice, but we also want to ensure that justice is ultimately administered dispassionately.

So one thing I'll say is that the job of the prosecutor is to try the case and attempt to achieve a conviction of guilt. But that's when the job of the prosecutor is over. In some cases, we may express our views as to what the sentence should be, but the sentencing belongs to the judge -- the judicial function. And thats after the prosecutor wins the case. We like that competitiveness. We like that spirit and aggressiveness, but once the case is won, passions must cool. And justice in the sentencing phase has to be fair, and that's why the sentence is given by the neutral judge.

We're all human, and like any person, a prosecutor can become overly invested in a particular goal. Prosecutors who devote months and years of their lives to investigating a particular target may become deeply invested in their case and assured of the rightness of their cause.

But when a prosecution becomes my prosecution, particularly if the investigation is highly public, or has been acrimonious, or if the prosecutor is confident early on that the target has committed a serious crime, there's always a temptation to will a prosecution, a charge into existence. Even when the facts of the law, or the fair handed administration of justice do not support bringing the charge.

This risk is inevitable and cannot be avoided simply by hiring as prosecutors only moral

people with righteous motivations. I am reminded of a passage by CS Lewis: It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep. His cupidity may at some point be satiated. But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

They may be more likely to go to heaven, I don't know, but at the same time likelier to make hell on earth. There's yet another reason for having layers of supervision. Individual prosecutors can sometimes become headhunters. It's all too often. They're consumed with taking down their target, subjecting their decisions to review by detached supervisors to ensure the involvement of dispassionate decision makers. This was, of course, the central problem with the independent counsel statute that Justice Scalia criticized in Morrison vs. Olson. Creating an unaccountable headhunter was not some unfortunate byproduct of that statute. It was the stated purpose of the statute.

That was what Justice Scalia meant by his famous line, this wolf comes as a wolf. As we went as he went on to explain, how frightening it must be to have your own independent counsel and staff appointed, with nothing else to do but investigate you until investigation is no longer worthwhile -- with whether it is worthwhile or not, depending upon what such judgments are usually hinged on, competing responsibilities, and to have that counsel and staff decide, with no basis for comparison, whether what you have done is bad enough, willful enough, and provable enough, to warrant an indictment. How admirable the constitutional system that provides the means to avoid such a distortion. And how unfortunate the judicial decision that has permitted it.

Now that was a problem that took care of itself. It was a statute that Democrats applauded until it applied to Bill Clinton. We did away with it in H.W. Bush's administration, took the heat, [were] castigated by all the media for killing the independent counsel statute. And then during the transition, Bernie Nussbaum, who lasted about two seconds as a White House Counsel -- a fancy New York lawyer came down, and he was part of the transition, and he came in and he said, Do you have any advice? This was while I was in my last days as Attorney General and I said, Well, I think you should allow the independent counsel to die its natural death here. We took the heat for it. We did what had to be done. Don't resuscitate it. As a Republican, nothing would please me more. But as an American, its a bad statute. And he said, Well, we are committed to the most moral and ethical administration in history and we're gonna reenact it. So they did, and the rest is history.

By the way, if you want a little kick, go to C-Span. I think they took my name off of it. But if you put in, you know, special independent counsel statute, Nadler, you'll see a hearing from like 1995 or six or whenever the lightwater thing was going on, with Nadler leading the committee [talking] about how terrible the independent counsel statute was, and how terrible Ken Starr was. Its great actually, if you have time to look at it, because you know, all the arguments that were made here today nowadays were laid out before. The role of the players was. He said, Mr. Barr, I admire you, you're very consistent on this question. So anyway. [laughs]

Now, I said headhunters, and that's because as Jackson said, if the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick the cases that need to be prosecuted.

Any erosion and prosecutorial detachment is extraordinarily perilous, for as he said, it is in this realm in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal. And the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to the prosecutor himself.

And that's what we frequently say. I'd like to be able to stand here and say, we don't see headhunting in the Department of Justice, and that would not be truthful. I see it every day. And it's a temptation that the power of prosecution is a heady power. And it is a temptation sometimes to go after people rather than crimes.We see that every night, you know. This country is in serious problems with all the problems, with real problems, we face in international affairs and domestically, when most of our news coverage -- or what passes for news coverage -- are bloviating talking heads discussing whether some action in Washington, some action taken by an official, constitutes some esoteric crime. And, you know, looking through statute books to see if we could, you know, say that this is a crime? Because disagreement no longer is enough -- political disagreement and political debate. Now, you have to call your adversary a criminal. And instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail. So we're becoming sort of like an Eastern European country, where if you're not in power, you're in jail or you're a member of the press.

Now one of the areas that I think there's a problem is the way we interpret statutes these days, and we have to recalibrate that if we're ever going to restore the rule of law. Clarity in the law is indispensable to the rule of law..

If a law is malleable, then it can be applied differently in different cases, and that is the breakdown of law. Now one of the most irritating developments over the last 50 or 60 years is equity driving law out of the marketplace. If you go and read Supreme Court decisions, the Supreme Court thinks it's being oh so . And this has been going on, as I say, going on for decades instead of articulating a law, a rule, they say it's the totality of circumstances and its equity. What is the conscience of the fifth vote on the Supreme Court? They can't articulate the rule. Its that very discipline of being able to universalize the principle that you're applying in a case that ensures the rule of law and that ensures that the person is being treated fairly. And it is that process of universalizing it that says, I'm only going to apply to this person what I'm willing to do to every other similarly situated person and be able to articulate the rule, and we've completely lost that in our law.

That's why lawyers are so infuriating beyond their normal, you know, irritating nature, which is they can't tell the client what the law is. Yeah, well, you could go this way, it could go that way. And that's because their law has broken down, and it's broken down because the justices don't feel they have to go through that discipline anymore. The nature of judicial power is being debased.

Equity has its uses and its place, but it can't be constitutional law. And these are some of the points that are similarly made by Justice Scalia in his article about the rule of law being the law of rules. And in recent years, the Department of Justice has sometimes acted like a trade association for prosecutors -- more like that than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible rules. In case after case, we've advanced and defended hyper- aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong, and we have to stop doing it. Now.

I couldn't believe it, you know, Id get in and I'd see some statute and people would say, Well, how are we going to interpret this statute? This court over here said this should be limited to such and such, are we going to acquiesce in that and adopt that as our interpretation? And normally the answer you would get in the Department of Justice is, Well, that sort of ties us down. Of course, that's the whole point of the law. That sort of ties us down, we want our prosecutors to have the broadest possible discretion. We can't buy into that. Let's leave it loosey goosey.

And I said, Well, no, I mean, we have to say what the law is. And that decision was a good interpretation of the law. And it should be adopted. The fact that it hems us in and we can't just use this law, you know, as a utility knife is a good thing.

But that's not the perspective generally and institutionally recently in the Department of Justice. We should want a fair system with clear rules that people can understand. It does not serve the ends of justice to advocate for fuzzy and manipulable criminal prohibitions and maximize the options of the prosecutor. Preventing that sort of pro-prosecutor uncertainty is what the ancient rule of lenity is all about. Sure, you know what that is, which is if there's fakeness in a law, you interpreted in the most lenient way possible from the standpoint of the defendant, and that rule should likewise inform what we do at the Department of Justice. When we think about the substance of the criminal law, advocating for clear and defined prohibitions will sometimes mean that we cannot bring charges against someone whom we believed is engaged in bad conduct. But that is what it means to be a government of laws and not men. We cannot let our desire to get bad people turn into the functional equivalent of the Mad Emperor Caligula who inscribed criminal laws in tiny script, atop a tall pillar where no one could read it.

To be clear, what I'm describing is not the Al Capone situation, where you have someone who has committed multiple crimes and you decide to prosecute that person for only the clearest violation. I am talking about taking vague statutory language and then applying it to a criminal criminal target in a novel way that is, at minimum, hardly clear from the statutory text. This is inherently unfair because criminal prosecutions are backward-looking. We charge people with crimes based on past conduct. If it was unknown or unclear that the conduct was illegal when the person engaged in it, that raises real questions about whether it is fair to prosecute the person criminally for it.

Examples of the department defending these sorts of extreme positions are unfortunately numerous, as are the rejections of those arguments by the Supreme Court. These include arguments as varied as the department's insisting that a Philadelphia woman violated the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, implementing the Convention on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. She did this by putting chemicals on her neighbor's door knob, as part of an acrimonious love triangle involving the woman's husband. The Court unanimously rejected that argument in Bond vs. United States.

Or they argued that a fisherman violated the anti-shredding provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley law when he threw undersized grouper over the side of his boat, which the Supreme Court rejected in Yates vs. United States. Or more recently, arguing that aides to the governor of New Jersey fraudulently obtained property from the government when they realigned the lanes on the George Washington Bridge to create a traffic jam, which the Supreme Court unanimously rejected in Kelly vs. United States.

There are many other examples. In fact, you know, it's interesting when people say that the Trump administration is lawless. And I usually am kind of scratching my head saying, you know, we, we litigate all our stuff, we win a lot of it. We go through the process -- what exactly is the lawless panic? The fact is that the Obama administration had the worst record in the Supreme Court of any recent administration losing cases. Our administration so far has been doing above average in terms of winning in the Supreme Court. So, you know, I wouldn't say we were lawless.

But again, the Obama administration had some of the people who were in Muellers office writing their briefs in the Supreme Court, so maybe that explains something. Yeah, very aggressive positions very, you know, sort of aggressive and we're gonna prosecute these people and so forth. And then they're not crowing so much after they get whipped in the Supreme Court.

Anyway, taking a capacious approach to criminal law is not only unfair to the criminal and bad for the department, it's corrosive of our political system. If criminal statutes are endlessly manipulable, and everything becomes a potential crime, rather than watch policy experts debate the merits and demerits of a particular policy choice, we see pundits speculating about whether things can be prosecuted. This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct, conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment up to and including being locked away. These tools are not built to resolve political disputes. And it would be a bad development for us to go the way of these third world countries where political parties routinely prosecute their opponents for various ill defined crimes against the state. This is not the stuff of a mature democracy.

We abet this culture of criminalization when we are not disciplined about what charges we will bring, what legal theories we will adopt, rather than root out true crimes, while leaving ethically dubious conduct to the voters.

Our prosecutors have all too often, and they insert themselves in the political process based on the flimsiest of legal theories. We have seen this time and time again, with prosecutors bringing ill-conceived charges against prominent political figures, or launching debilitating investigations that thrust the Department of Justice into the middle of the political process and preempt the ability of the people to decide.

This criminalization of politics will only worsen until we change the culture of concocting new legal theories to criminalize all manner of questionable conduct. Smart, ambitious lawyers have sought to amass glory by prosecuting prominent public figures since the Roman Republic. It is utterly unsurprising that prosecutors continue to do so today, to the extent the Justice Department leaders will permit it. As long as I'm Attorney General Im not going to permit it.

In short, it is important for prosecutors at the Department of Justice to understand that their mission above all others is to do justice. And that means following the letter of the law and the spirit of fairness. Sometimes that will mean investing months or years in an investigation and then concluding it is without criminal charges. Our job is to be just as dogged in preventing injustice as we are in pursuing wrongdoing. On this score, as in many, Justice Jackson said it best, and I'll close with his words: The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive, and as impossible to define as those which mark gentlemen, and those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power. And the citizens safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes. And who, above all, approaches his task with humility.

Thank you.

-- - -- - - ----- - - - -- -

Questioner: So thank you, General, that was spectacular. Also profound, I think. So I have the first question. I've got a few from the audience, and the minute your duties require you to go home and rest, you may do so. Partly what you just said was a process of a transfer of authority from elected people to civil servants. Do you see that going on in other parts of the government?

Barr: The Department of Justice -- I love the Department of Justice. I love the people in the Department of Justice. But as I say, the legitimacy in our system comes from political supervision and political accountability.

Questioner: Should the Supreme Court have the exclusive power to interpret the constitution?

Barr: Yes. I think President Jackson was correct that each branch has in the first instance the responsibility to interpret the constitution and what they think the constitution means. And so if the President believes that he has the power to do something under the Constitution, he should be able to exercise that power. And if the Court disagrees and orders him not to, then he's lost the case.

Questioner: What's your favorite song to play on the bagpipes?

Barr: I don't know. Too many, there are too many songs there. It's not songs. They're called tunes.

Questioner: Scotland the Brave.

Barr: Well, that's a very common one. That's the one that you see on the video playing Scotland the brave. I miss playing the bagpipes. Once when I was Attorney General last time, you know, Scalia called the chambers and said to my assistant, do you think the Attorney General would like to take a quick walk with me around the mall? And I said, Justice Scalia, whether he realizes or not, it's a federal offense to threaten the life of a federal official. I say the same thing about playing the bagpipes these days. People ask me to play the bagpipes. I say you know, it's an offense to threaten the life of emergency vehicles standing by.

Questioner: I think the definition of a gentleman is somebody who knows how to play the bagpipes and does not

Barr: Ive played since I was eight years old. And, you know, my parents being academicians and growing up on the Upper West Side in Bella Abzugs district in New York, we lived in Columbia University Housing, which was great housing overlooking the Hudson River. But they said, Billy, it's time that you learn an instrument: violin, piano? I said, bagpipes.

Questioner: What if somebody wonders if ballot harvesting is constitutional, and also how do we go about in this day and age guaranteeing the propriety of our elections?

Barr: I was once head of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is sort of a legal beagle office. I can't off the top of my head give you authoritative answers on some of these questions. I will just say generally, I'm very concerned.

Let me draw a distinction between what may pass muster under some recent case law at the Supreme Court and what really is in accord with the constitutional scheme and the basic principles. And sometimes you have to go back to basic principles to understand what some of the provisions of the Constitution should mean. As I've said, the whole idea of an election is to have a single expression of will by everybody at the same time based on the same information. That's what an election is. So we have Election Day, and now we have an election season. And not only that, it's a season that has like, extra innings. So it's becoming absurd. Decisions made weeks apart are not the body politic making a sober decision about the state of affairs at one time. We're losing the whole idea of what an election is.

And when people try to play games like, Do you have any empirical evidence that you know, mail-in ballots are, you know Common sense. We haven't had it on the scale that's being proposed now. So I don't have empirical evidence other than the fact that we've always had voting fraud. And there, you know, there always will be people who attempt to do that. I don't have empirical evidence that on this scale, you know, these problems were materialized. But what I say to people is, Why do we vote today the way we do? Think about it? Why do people show up at one place where they have a list of people who are eligible to vote, you show who you are, you go behind a curtain? Why do you go behind the curtain? Secret ballot. No one else is allowed there. Why is that a rule? Coercion, undue influence. Why a secret ballot? Many reasons. You can't sell or buy votes easily if there's a secret ballot. You don't succumb as much to undue influence or pressure.

That is all blown away -- the lessons of the English system before us and the American system, and how the vote evolved and how we tried to perfect it and protect its integrity for all this time are just swept away by mail-in voting. You don't have anonymity -- your name is connected to that vote, and you open the floodgates to coercion. And so I don't think harvesting should be permitted, personally. Some states have passed down under the Constitution, the state sets the rules and theyre permitting harvesting of ballots. But it's a potential abuse.

Questioner: Ill go back to your main argument and that is, the authority of the Attorney General comes through the president from the people. And so do you sense a growing spirit of managing the people, managing how they vote, managing what they can do by the government?

Barr: Our constitution was meant for a discerning, informed, virtuous people. And you have to raise the question of whether we still have that in our country. We certainly have forces that are attempting to cultivate a dependent people. And it's, you know, it's the same old game. What's our bread and circuses today? It's all distraction. You know, as Pascal said, it's all about distracting people from anything that's important and principle and what's happening. That's why so many people don't pay attention. They're distracted. They're distracted by, you know, all the stimulation of their senses that go on, and that goes part and parcel with creating dependence. So you have more and more people that just don't care.

You know, I was mortified. I saw today that most people don't know what the Holocaust is about in the United States, some poll or something. I couldn't believe it. Now, I thought they taught holocausts or concentration camps very well in school, because when I was giving a memorial day speech one year, I did some research. And most high school students, if you ask them, What do you know about World War Two? Well, first they don't know who fought in World War Two. But then they say what they know about World War Two is about the concentration camps. And that we used nuclear weapons against Japan. Those are the two things. So I said, at least you learned about the concentration camps. Yes, the internment of the Japanese."

Questioner: Yeah, you should visit some high schools today. If Muller's team destroyed information, who's responsible? And what I think they're talking about is wiping phones. Who's responsible? What consequences can there be?

Barr: Well, I don't want to get into that particular thing. The appropriate people in the department are taking a look at that. And we'll see. We'll see where that goes.

Questioner: What are the constitutional hurdles for forbidding a church from meeting during COVID-19?

Barr: The rule right now is articulated by the Supreme Court. Some people might disagree with that, in the sense that it doesn't go far enough in protecting religion, but the current standard is that you can place restrictions on the exercise of religion as long as you don't discriminate against religion and apply the same restrictions on everybody else that is similarly situated. You cant allow people to go to theaters and get together in commercial establishments or other kinds of activities and then prohibit churches from doing it. And some of the states were going that far. So that's the basic hurdle you have to get over.

I know you're from Michigan, and therefore you're particularly sensitive to the caprice of the governor's regulations. I am very amused, because the press gets all huffy, huffy and puffy about you know, Bill Barr believes in strong executive power, ooh, you know, he's a, he's a fascist or something like that. But they couldn't be happier with the Governors. What kind of power are they exercising? Executive power. In many states, there are no statutes, or the legislators bowed out of the picture. Theyre just letting the governors do what they want to do.

What I've said is, yes, executive power by its very nature does come and should fill the void right at the beginning of any crisis like this. In some crises like war, you do need a strong component of executive leadership. But once the emergency nature of it starts to abate, the legislature should give a little bit more guidance -- like yeah, you can do this for 30 days and then come back to us. If we don't like what we're doing, well exercise a little more control over it. But there has been very little of that. And most of the governors do what bureaucrats always do, which is they act, you know, they defy common sense. And a lot of what they do is they treat free citizens as babies that can't take responsibility for themselves and others. So I was saying, well, one, you know, we have to give businesspeople an opportunity. Tell them which rule of masks you have this month. Tell the business people what the rules are, and then let them try to adapt their business to that. Then you'll have ingenuity and people will at least have the freedom to try to earn a living. But putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.

We supported this case. We did get a lot of the states to ease up on the churches and you know, we'd write letters to the governors and the governors would comply. But my view was, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that an artificial cap of 10 doesn't make any sense when you're talking about St. Patrick's Cathedral compared to a small country church. And so one of the rules under the Constitution is you have to sort of calibrate whatever burden you're going to place on religion, you're gonna have to take account of the circumstances and make it as narrow as possible to achieve your end. And so we said, how about just a percentage of the fire marshal occupancy standard? The Supreme Supreme Court, five, four vote wouldn't go along with that because they wanted to say that you have to give a lot of latitude to governors in these crises. I agree, you should give a lot of latitude but we have epidemics and pandemics -- this is a very serious one, a grave one. But they come and just because something is a medical crisis, it doesn't give a complete blank check to executive rule.

Questioner: That leads me to wonder: I read that there have been north of 75,000 suicides during the shutdown. And what mechanism is there or should there be in the government to take care of all these ancillary effects?

Barr: Here's my problem. I have great respect for the medical profession. But the scariest day in a lawyer's life is when he realizes the medical profession is really pretty much the same as the legal profession. They're human beings. They put their pants on one leg at a time. Theyre right sometimes, theyre wrong other times. There's some good doctors, there's some bad doctors. But just like lawyers, doctors are specialists. They will view a broad social problem and issue through a set of blinders in a sense. So, you know, your doctor might say to you, Bill, if you want to live 20 years longer, you should just do this, this, this, this and this. And he might be right. But I don't want to pay those costs to live 20 years longer. I'd rather take my chances. Now, I understand there are externalities here, and you can't threaten other people's lives. But the point is that you have to balance that against a lot of other factors. The point you made is exactly what was not done, but was self evident to anyone who had the power of logic. Which is, yes, doctor, you might be right. But just think of all the collateral consequences and the costs of that. And that is not science, okay? It is the generalist and the representatives of the entire community that should be making these balancing acts. It is not dictated by science. So all this nonsense about how something is dictated by science is nonsense.

Suicides are just the tip of the iceberg. The overdoses are out of control, they're getting back up again. After the first time in decades, this administration actually started flattening it out and bringing it down a little on opioids -- theyre going back up again. And now, with cheap methamphetamine swamping the country, and forms of opioid that are extremely deadly -- fentanyl, synthetic opioids -- we now have the overdose deaths going up. We have domestic violence getting out of control. I'm sure that the shutting down of the economy and telling everyone to stay in their house has contributed to violent crime going up in many of our cities. The interruption of education, especially for disadvantaged children in the inner city, is devastating.These costs are massive.

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Transcript of Attorney General's Remarks as Delivered and Q&A at Hillsdale College - Lawfare

Can we keep calm and carry on, asks Sheffield minister – The Star

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People of all ages are included in the rule of six in England

Im the minister of a large church community who live across Sheffield and we are desperate to meet each other again.

We can get together in church with masks on, and our livestreams of our services are fantastic. However, there is nothing like the richness of old and new friends gathering and talking in the same room.

Right now, it cant be done.

This week as the sun shone, I felt more like banging my head against the wall and giving up, not keeping calm and carrying on.

As track-and-trace and the rule of six take force, it will mean a major test of the strength of Sheffields community spirit.

Its easy to blame the young for refusing to distance. Or the Government.

Its a big ask for everybody to keep to the rules after our patience has been tried.

But more significantly, why would we?

Were being asked to be selfless, to put others above ourselves.

As Jesus puts it in the Bible, to love your neighbour as yourself.

I remember learning Jesus Golden Rule in RE lessons at school, treat people the same way you want them to treat you (Matthew 7).

Now the whole nation is being called to new levels of self-control and consideration for the sake of the most vulnerable in our communities.

I feel lifes challenges are best kept in perspective.

A friend of mine works in medical development in Afghanistan and tells me the entire nation has no more than 50 ventilators in their hospitals.

In countries with minimal medical care when peoples family and friends get very sick with Covid, they will probably die, and thats a fact of life they live with everyday.

We can prevent unnecessary suffering, and that motivates me to follow the guidelines.

So this week Ill be trying harder to keep calm, and carry on.

The Reverend Nick Allan is a minister at The Well Church, Ecclesall Road, Sharrow.

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Can we keep calm and carry on, asks Sheffield minister - The Star

Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi review a homage to the whodunnit – The Guardian

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No other genre of literature has been subject to as many strict rules as detective fiction in its golden age of the 1920s and 30s. Crime author Ronald Knox established 10 commandments for its mechanics and insisted that it should present a mystery whose elements are clearly presented at an early stage in the proceedings. Jorge Luis Borges and WH Auden came up with their own formulae, the latter with an elaborate Aristotelian analysis in his essay The Guilty Vicarage.

The world of the classical whodunnit is one of order, repression and good manners, which is why it was so successful among the English middle classes as a place to explore shocking subconscious desires. And there is plenty pater les bourgeois in Alex Pavesis first novel Eight Detectives. A set of seven golden age-style mysteries with an abundance of brutal slayings in genteel surroundings are rendered in a heightened pastiche of the form. These are nested within a greater narrative where their fictional author, Grant McAllister, discusses his own set of rules for the detective story with an editor, which leads to an eighth murder mystery.

This metafictional conceit has much potential, but Pavesi doesnt quite pull it off. Much is made of his authors theories, but they seem rather banal and offer no real or relevant challenges to the protagonists. And Pavesi himself breaks the golden rule of the form by concealing much crucial information until the last minute.

As homage, the stories are entertaining enough, and at times capture the deadpan surreality of the early 20th-century whodunnit. Victims are dispatched by absurdly gruesome methods at one point a detachable fork tine proves fatal. But Pavesi lacks that delicate precision needed to construct a true mystery as accomplished as any classics of the period. The golden age was characterised by a formal elegance, in a mathematical as well as literary sense: the denouement should be like a balanced equation with the reader able to follow the workings of the puzzle. Instead we are led into a series of confused twists that dont seem to rely on any clues given to us early on, so we are effectively locked out of the game. In their day the masters of the form could produce exquisite labyrinths to astound and engage the reader in equal measure. Eight Detectives is a bit of a clumsy maze in comparison.

Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi is published by Michael Joseph (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi review a homage to the whodunnit - The Guardian

Learn to understand statistics and you can better understand the world, Tim Harford says – iNews

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If you know Tim Harford as the man on the radio who debunks numbers on the BBCs popular show More or Less, well, it turns out hed rather you didnt. He would rather not need to debunk any numbers, full stop. But right now he would settle for listeners doing some of his work for him.

You see, the economist is on a mission to stop people being so scared and suspicious of statistics, which are really just figures with a story attached.

The world is a really interesting place and I wanted people to be able to to think more clearly about [it]. And statistics are a really important tool for doing that, he adds. His new book is called How To Make The World Add Up. The trick, he says, is to be curious but not overly cynical. Statistics arent always trying to fool us, however much it might feel like that, especially when government spin doctors get involved.

My golden rule is be open minded and ask questions, adds Harford, a father of three. He originally made his name explaining the economic rationale behind everything that we do in his first book, The Undercover Economist. I want people to feel that we all have it in us to think more clearly and evaluate the statistical claims that get made. Often people dont realise how simple it is.

In true Harford fashion, his ninth book opens not with a story about numbers but about one of historys greatest art forgeries. It involves fake Vermeers, the Nazis and the worlds leading scholar on Dutch paintings.

I wanted to make the point that a lot of the judgements we make are not about numbers at all, Harford says, via Zoom from his Oxford home.

Take Harfords own reasoning about whether to go ahead with his familys pre-booked summer holiday to Germany. Sure, he crunched the numbers, figuring they had a lower chance of succumbing to Covid-19 there than in the UK. He also considered the chances someone on the plane would be infected (pretty low) and the evidence the virus might spread on the plane (could happen; pretty unlikely).

But the numbers werent ultimately what pushed him to proceed with their plans, he concedes. We went to Germany because friends who are doctors said, Weve done our bit, were going to Greece for a week. At that point, we thought, Okay, if you can do it, we can do it too. Theres no logic behind that. Thats just an emotional response.

The broader point stands: people should think about their emotional reaction to statistical claims.

What we believe is all about what we feel and who we think we are, rather than about the facts. I can give you all the technical advice in the world, but if youre guided by your gut instinct, its not going to help. Im sounding like Yoda with a calculator!

Harford read PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford, and has worked for Royal Dutch Shell and the World Bank. He first fell for statistics as a teenager, when he read a seminal book on the subject, How to Lie with Statistics, written in 1954 by a US journalist named Darrell Huff. But these days hed rather people appreciated statistics for the good they can do.

Take the pandemic. Without the scramble to gather data on the virus since January, the world would still be flying blind, Harford says. The least we can do as ordinary citizens is show some interest in the figures, he adds.

Its a pretty thin silver lining to a very dark cloud. But I do think the last six months has taught us that this stuff matters. The decisions we are making are hugely influenced by the statistics we gather. The better the statistics, the better the decisions.

And right now, with the testing crisis and track-and-trace failure, the micro data isnt good enough to make the right call about a second lockdown, he adds.

Thanks to More or Less, which vastly increased its audience after moving to a prominent 9am weekday slot during lockdown, Harford gets MPs calling him before going into committee meetings, begging for help understanding the latest data. But he finds it slightly depressing that the show got the most attention for holding the government to account for the way it was misleading people about the number of tests being done. Im trying to think about what [numbers are] true, but were having to spend so much attention debunking a claim and showing whats not true.

Holiday dilemmas aside, Im curious how he applies statistics to his own life. Or, to cut to basics, how worried he is about rising infection rates? Im trying to be very cautious and at the same time Im trying not to be anxious. Im still very worried about contributing to the spread of the virus. Im not worried about myself. Which seems about as good a use of statistics as anyone can hope for right now.

How To Make The World Add Up by Tim Harford(The Bridge Street Press, 20) is out now

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Learn to understand statistics and you can better understand the world, Tim Harford says - iNews

What Is Vimeo? A guide to the platform’s tiers and features – Business Insider – Business Insider

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Launched in 2004 by a group of filmmakers, Vimeo is an online video streaming and editing site built with artists and creatives in mind. Whether you're a certified auteur or just starting to dip your toes in the content creation realm, Vimeo has something to offer everyone one.

Around 80 million users and nearly 1 million paying subscribers can upload, host, and share their original and custom video content daily. With a sleek and artsy front-facing aesthetic, Vimeo focuses on customizing the video editing and sharing experience, unlike any of its competitors.

The video platform offers multiple storage, management, post-production, collaboration, marketing, and monetization tools. Users can upload their content from any device or even a cloud storage platform, password-protect videos, make bulk changes to embed settings and licensing, exchange time-coded notes, select custom end screens, determine domain and geo-restrictions, and more. Viewers can use the player's speed controls, download content, or watch it in 4K Ultra HD.

The kind of features you and your viewers have access to depends on your membership level.

For those who are new to Vimeo, here's a rundown of the platform's perks by tier, from the ones available to all using their "freemium" model to their exclusive offerings for paid subscribers.

If you're not yet a serious content creator, Vimeo Free is probably your best bet.

Despite its more limited offerings, you're given 500 MB of storage per week toward uploading videos. Basic members can also make their uploads password-protected a feature YouTube doesn't grant.

At just $7 a month, you're allocated more weekly storage, capped at 5 GB storage per week. Unlike the free plan, Plus members are also granted unlimited bandwidth in the Vimeo player, 4K & HDR support, and no ads on your video. You're also given the ability to embed your videos anywhere and customize the player's elements and your video's end screen.

Vimeo lets you know the day and time your weekly upload limit resets by hovering your cursor in your screen's bottom-left corner, over the "i" symbol. Melanie Weir/Business Insider

Additional privacy offerings include private link sharing and video file transfer permission, which lets you and your collaborators privately and securely share and download your videos at various video qualities. If you want to share your videos natively across social platforms, Plus members can do that on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can also embed your videos as a single playlist on your website.

This tier also gives you access to an analytics dashboard where you can see how people play, like, reshare, and post your video, in addition to receiving custom reports on those social sharing stats.

Rounding out the options designed to be used by individuals is Vimeo Pro. Although the service will run you $20 a month, your viewers will thank you you get to present the pristine-quality video to your audience.

This tier includes all the features and tools of Vimeo Plus, with even more helpful tools and features. At this tier, you can create and publish unlimited videos up to 20 GB per week, also with no caps on bandwidth. It also comes with unlimited access to stock photos, videos, and licensed music. When it comes to video customization, you can add your logo and video chapters to your page, offer playback speed control for viewers and get third-party player support.

Some of Vimeo Pro's most significant advantages lie in its collaboration options. Not only can you host private team projects, but have up to three team members upload, manage, and collaborate directly through your account, with you setting their various levels of permission. Review and approval tools let you privately share your work review pages, get time-coded feedback, track approvals, and keep old versions organized.

Those looking for more analytics support are in luck, as the Pro tier offers engagement and duration grapes to track how your videos perform over time. You can also see their location, what devices they're watching on, and how they find your content.

A few other upgrades include selling your videos directly to fans worldwide and distributing your video on streaming apps like Roku and Amazon Fire.

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What Is Vimeo? A guide to the platform's tiers and features - Business Insider - Business Insider

Weekly Update, September 17: Mental health resources, spring planning, registration and withdrawal dates, testing, and student conduct – Illinois…

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This weeks update includes information about mental health resources, spring planning, registration and withdrawal dates, testing, and student conduct. Visit the Universitys Coronavirus website for the most up-to-date information and guidance. Questions can be emailed to coronavirus@ilstu.edu.

In August, the CDC released a study confirming that young adults, racial and ethnic minorities, essential workers, and unpaid caregivers for adults reported having experienced disproportionately worse mental health outcomes in association with COVID-19.

Director of Student Counseling Services Sandy Colbs reminded students that mental health resources are available to them through Student Counseling Services. Thinking about our students well-being means thinking about mental as well as physical health, said Colbs. I urge students experiencing anxiety or other mental health challenges to take part in programs, counseling, and initiatives. We are here for you.

Some resources include:

It is normal to feel overwhelmed by the many impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, which has created additional stress for many people and their families. In addition to resources specifically for students, there is a wealth of information on the Student Counseling Services website regarding approaches that can assist anyone with finding new, creative, and effective coping resources. In addition, Human Resources provides a variety of resources specifically for employees such as those provided through CMS/Magellan and information provided on the Redbirds Keep Thriving Faculty/Staff website.

Spring Planning

Provost Aondover Tarhule said, There is much anticipation for decisions about spring 2021, which is understandable. Planning for the spring term is progressing. A team of faculty and staff have been charged with exploring a variety of topics related to spring such as, but not limited to, virtual instruction and the spring academic calendar. In addition, a survey will be sent to gather feedback from students, faculty, and staff about the options under consideration.

Registration and Withdrawal Dates

Registration for winter and spring semester will open October 19. This is a week later than usual in order to give students more time to meet with their advisors. Registration appointments will be posted inMy.IllinoisState.eduon October 1. Keep in mind that the modality of each course has not been finalized. Changes may be made based on the number of positive on-campus cases, testing, and public health guidance. The date to withdraw (WX) from a course and the University has been extended to October 6 for first half semester courses, November 20 for full semester courses, and December 1 for second half semester courses.

Testing

The University will soon require testing of students living in on-campus housing. More information will be provided to residential students as the process is finalized in the coming days. Currently, about 30 percent of students living in on-campus housing have participated in on-campus testing. The University has the capacity to expand testing in this way as the number of tests conducted at on-campus testing sites have decreased in the last week after higher than anticipated numbers of tests were completed in the first weeks of the semester. Expanding the Universitys ability to test and requiring students to test has always been part of our testing plan, said Professor of Chemistry and University Testing Coordinator John Baur. We faced some logistical challenges as a result of last-minute changes beyond our control to our testing program, but we are in a good position to move forward with requiring testing of various student groups, such as on-campus students, in the very near future.

Plans to put in place saliva-based testing developed by the University of Illinois are also moving forward. We are very fortunate to be in a city with a university, that has a lot of the resources needed by the U of I sites, such as labs and research capabilities, said Vice President for Finance and Planning Dan Stephens, who is working on agreements with the U of I.

Asymptomatic testing for students provided by Reditus Laboratories continues at two on-campus testing sites, currently located in the Brown Ballroom in the Bone Student Center and the former fire station at 602 N. Adelaide St., from 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Students experiencing symptoms should call Student Health Services at (309) 438-7676 for an initial screening and to make an appointment to be tested.

Testing is also available for students, faculty, and staff at the Interstate Center testing site. Students testing at this site should share positive test results with Student Health Services by uploading them to the Secure Patient Health Portal. Sharing test results will ensure students have proper documentation for classes, housing, and/or employment.

See more about testing and testing results in the September 10 update.

Student Conduct

In the wake of an incident last week that reportedly drew students to off-campus gatherings in violation of Town of Normal ordinances, Illinois State Universitys Vice President for Student Affairs Levester Johnson reported nearly 100 students have been issued letters of possible Student Code of Conduct violations. We have received information from students and other community members specifically about people who allegedly were involved in that incident, said Johnson. We have worked with the Normal Police Department and the Illinois State University Police Department in this investigation. We appreciate the collaborative approach between the Town and the University in addressing this issue. Johnson said repercussions for those found responsible could range from educational training to suspension.

Johnson stated no names of students will be released as that would be a violation of privacy laws.

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Weekly Update, September 17: Mental health resources, spring planning, registration and withdrawal dates, testing, and student conduct - Illinois...

Trick or treat – THE WEEK

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ON SEPTEMBER 6, Kerala Health Minister K.K. Shailaja reportedly endorsed a study which said that homoeopathic prophylactics were effective against Covid-19. It said that only a few of those who had taken the prophylactic contracted Covid-19 and they, too, recovered soon. The study was carried out in Covid-hotspot Pathanamthitta district, where Arsenicum Album 30C was distributed among 90 per cent of residents. The study aimed to assess the efficacy of the said homoeopathy medicine as an immunity booster. Shailaja later clarified that she neither said that homoeopathy medicines could be used to treat Covid-19 nor stated that the study had been scientifically proven. But by then, the damage was doneit had created a rift in the state medical community.

AYUSH treatments have often been questioned over their safety and efficacy, especially given the lack of robust, empirical studies in their defence.

While the state unit of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) opposed Shailajas initial statement, homoeopathy practitioners came out in her support. The row has put the spotlight on the debate over the efficacy of alternative medicine to allopathic medicine in the fight against Covid-19, especially at a time when cases are rising and restrictions are being relaxed to open up the economy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had repeatedly asked people to follow advisories issued by the ministry of AYUSH, which suggested a range of home remedies to boost immunity, including consumption of turmeric, honey, ginger and other concoctions. AYUSH treatments have often been questioned over their safety and efficacy, especially given the lack of robust, empirical studies in their defence.

On August 15, the ministry launched a three-month campaign, aimed at increasing awareness about affordable and easy practices that can be adopted for enhancing immunity and preventing any disease. Yet, more than six months after the first case of Covid-19 hit the country, acceptance for AYUSH practices, at best, remains divided on the ground.

For instance, Dr Amol Rawande, a homoeopath based in Nanded in rural Maharashtra, believes that homoeopathy can help fight Covid-19. He said that he had prescribed homoeopathic medicines to more than 400 Covid-positive patients. In the case of a mild to moderate symptomatic patient, Ferrum Phos 6X, Bryonia Alba and Veratrum Viride help in preventing the onset of a cytokine storm, a severe immune reaction, he said. I believe homoeopathy is apt to fight Covid-19 as it works with the immune system, which is most at risk from the virus.

But back in Mumbai, Dr L.M. Parashar, ENT surgeon at Apollo Spectra Hospital, had a different tale to tell. Before lockdown, about two to three per cent of OPD patients were suffering from mouth ulcers. Post lockdown, there has been an increase in patients with symptoms such as redness of the mouth, burning sensation and itching, he said. This is because people are constantly drinking homemade concoctions, made without proper ingredients, instead of water, he reasoned. This has led to the rawness of oral mucosa, he said. The point is not to completely ignore or reject alternative medicine, but to consume it correctly and in conjunction with the correct diet and lifestyle, which people are not doing.

The problem with accepting the efficacy of AYUSH remedies, said paediatrician Dr Amol Annadate, was that none of the claims had been proved. There are no trials conducted either for ayurvedic kadhas or homoeopathic medicines like Arsenicum Album 30C, said Annadate, who also owns and runs an ayurveda medical college in Aurangabad. But the role of AYUSH essentially comes into the picture either as pre-Covid [precautions] or at the recovery stage, which can take between two to three months. These are not used as treatments for Covid-19 under any circumstances. He does believe that homoeopathy can help in reducing mortality rate. But there should still be trials to prove it, he said. My ayurvedic consultants are definitely prescribing ayurvedic solutions to patients.

Even as modern medicine continues to be the mainstay of Covid-19 treatment, experts call for an integrated medical approach between the different disciplines so as to better manage the impact of the disease in the long term. Annadate, however, questioned the credibility of the task force set up in May to plan and suggest treatment for asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients through the use of ayurveda, unani, homoeopathy and yoga. They havent conducted trials that can prove their efficacy. Scientific evidence is the only thing that will shut up the naysayers, he said.

Dr Gaurang Joshi, director of Atharva Multispecialty Ayurveda Hospital in Gujarats Rajkot, recently tweeted that his hospital has been successfully running online OPD for Covid-19 patients and providing ayurveda treatment at their home. He added that more than 50 patients had turned Covid-negative with their pure ayurveda treatment with home quarantine. I totally stand by my conviction that ayurveda can treat Covid-19, he asserted.

But Dr P. Gopi Kumar, state secretary, IMA Kerala, questioned the scientific validation of the alternative medicines proposed to treat Covid-19 or even serve as immunity boosters. The ministry gave directions for the use of Arsenicum Album 30C as an immunity booster without citing any evidence whatsoever, he said. In a pandemic like this when millions are getting infected and undergoing serious complications, no such drug must be used for which one has no idea about its credibility, authenticity and side effects. So, all these immunity-boosting concoctions and drugs cited by the AYUSH ministry and the state health minister are definitely questionable.

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Trick or treat - THE WEEK

QAnon conspiracy theory gaining ground in UK, analysis shows – The Guardian

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A conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against an elite who engage in ritual child abuse is growing across UK social media, Guardian analysis has found.

The QAnon conspiracy theory is propelled by an unlikely coalition of spirituality and wellness groups, vigilante paedophile hunter networks, pre-existing conspiracy forums, local news pages, pro-Brexit campaigners and the far right.

The Guardian tracked five slogans associated with QAnon shared by UK-run Facebook pages over the past year, and found interactions on posts containing these keywords increased fivefold between April and August, the last full month for which data was available.

The unfounded conspiracy theory also draws on predecessor conspiracy theory Pizzagate, which was prevalent during the 2016 US presidential elections, as well as much older antisemitic conspiracies.

In April, there were 18,000 interactions on posts from UK pages containing the keywords, according to analytics tool CrowdTangle. By August this year, engagement had increased significantly with 96,000 reactions, comments and shares. Offline, a nascent street movement linked to QAnon, has organised at least 15 protests across England, Scotland and Wales.

The conspiracy theory is spreading widely among groups who would not usually be associated with the far right.

The Guardian categorised the 273 UK-run pages that had posted QAnon content, and found that pages dedicated to alternative medicine, spirituality and mysticism accounted for the highest proportion of engagement, with 68,000 interactions during the past year.

Gregory Davis, a researcher at Hope not Hate, a charity that monitors extremist groups, said: Its concerning to see [QAnon] diversifying in terms of how its spread and what parts of it are being emphasised.

Whats happening with this diversification is that many groups [are] taking up different elements of it and introducing elements. The danger is that this makes it even less disprovable.

A Facebook page linked to a business selling essential oils and courses in numerology, spiritual guidance and meditation, which has more than a million followers on Facebook, received the second-highest number of interactions of any page measured.

One of these posts was a viral video describing a conspiracy theory about a toy doll, which the original poster alleged showed the head of a Satanic Luciferian monster when dipped in cold water. It had 11 million views at the time of writing. Conspiracies about toys containing secret messages are common among QAnon believers.

The analysis also found QAnon is merging with pre-existing conspiracy theory pages.

There were more than 40 pages promoting other conspiracies, including chemtrails, flat Earth and anti-vax pages, which had recently posted content associated with QAnon, receiving 40,000 interactions during this period.

Vigilante paedophile hunter groups, whose members sometimes pose as children online to entrap potential sexual predators, were also influential in spreading the conspiracy. The Guardian found 12 paedophile hunter groups shared QAnon material, receiving 13,000 interactions over the period.

The analysis also found 10 pro-Brexit pages and 28 far-right pages had shared QAnon content, receiving 26,000 interactions. One pro-Brexit news account often received thousands of interactions on its QAnon posts, which included false claims about Trump rescuing children from underground tunnels and an introductory video to QAnon for its sometimes confused British followers. A further nine pages analysed were specifically devoted to sharing QAnon news.

A number of QAnon-related posts found a less obvious home on local community Facebook pages, with 23 groups dedicated to a local area in the UK sharing material related to the theory.

Offline, a street movement with links to QAnon has hosted protests in 12 towns and cities across the UK. Most of the events have been organised by Freedom for the Children UK, a Facebook group that has about 12,000 members and was inspired by a US organisation of the same name.

Several of the organisers of the Freedom for the Children events have expressed beliefs in QAnon, according to a report by Hope not Hate..

A spokesperson for Facebook said: This analysis does not reflect either the actions were taking or the policies we have in place to keep people safe on our platform. We remove posts that incite violence; and we recently expanded our policies to specifically address organisations and movements like QAnon

We have since removed 790 groups and 100 pages, and placed restrictions on over 10,000 Instagram accounts.

The effects of Facebooks crackdown, which happened in August, would not be reflected in the Guardian analysis.

Davis said: We always welcome action from Facebook. Recently, theyve removed a lot of harmful content, but its frustrating to see that so much of it is still there. Facebook deleted a few of the major accounts, but its still incredibly easy to find [QAnon content] on there

Its hard to put into words how dangerous this narrative is.

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QAnon conspiracy theory gaining ground in UK, analysis shows - The Guardian

Censured Galway priest throws in the towel – Connacht Tribune Group

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There has already been a phenomenal upsurge in the use of holistic treatments to deal with a whole host of common ailments but a Galway herbalist and educator has now taken this to the next level.

Because Tuam-based Patrick Murphy owner and founder of the Herbal Academy believes that that anyone can learn to make and use herbal remedies at home, for their own wellbeing and that of their families and clients.

Which is the ethos behind the Herbal Academy as an institute of alternative medicine for the general public, delivering a variety of courses completely online to allow for remote learning.

The courses offered at the academy, designed by Patrick, were produced during the lockdown months and now the work is ready to be presented to the public.

The Herbal Academy itself was developed to use a unique blend of Western Herbal Medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine to learn how to create a range of holistic treatments for common ailments.

And, as Patrick points out, all of this can be safely used alongside medical treatments, if necessary.

His philosophy in his work is to cleanse, nourish and heal and that is woven through the course material, which he has written and which is accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.

Its the latest career evolution for Patrick Murphy, who as the Skin Herbalist, provided his first herbal remedies to his patients back in 1995 with good results.

Then as different ailments emerged in his patients, he would accommodate them by using new herbal formulas, again with marked success. These formulas worked well with subsequent patients that they became standard.

His true philosophy is getting to the root cause of the disorder, helping him to create healing tonic herbals. These herbs help the body overcome disease by strengthening through cleansing and nourishing.

Patricks ultimate vision is to cleanse and nourish so the body can heal, using wild crafted, organic herbs.

The Herbal Academy itself has a comprehensive mission statement.

It aims to empower energy, wellbeing, and confidence, physically and mentally by imparting knowledge of healing, nourishing, and cleansing the body using natural, organic, earth-sourced sustainable herbs and supplements that focus on treating the root causes of ailments rather than just the symptoms.

The Academy offers three courses the Foundation Course; Herbal Home Remedies, and Colour Therapy.

Material on the Foundation Course is aimed to provide the basics in herbalism, that students can recognize and devise effective herbal treatments for themselves and others and to educate themselves in how to use herbal remedies for first aid use and how to use alongside mainstream medical treatments.

Participants will also gain the knowledge of distinguishing between supplements and their properties as well as learning to make their own effective herbal treatments for a range of common ailments including common colds, IBS and various skin conditions.

Those studying Herbal Home Remedies will learn of the herbal remedies available to treat an array of situations such as insomnia, infections, rashes, coughs, digestive issues, stings/bites, bruises, and joint problems amongst many others.

Students will learn to prepare these remedies using a range of fruits, spices, oils, and herbs-all ingredients that are completely natural and have been used and relied on for centuries to promote wellbeing and vitality.

Colour Therapy is used as part of medical practice for hundreds of years, colour therapy is an important element in the holistic approach to complimentary health practice.

In this course, people will identify and understand the need for certain colour themes in their lives and how to use it for healing, good health, relaxation and protection as well as learning how to use this therapy to compliment other therapies such as acupuncture, reflexology and aromatherapy.

The Herbal Academy is delivered completely through online learning. No prior experience is necessary, says Patrick Murphy.

The courses can be accessed on the website instantly and offers a payment plan to spread the cost if needed. Upon completion, students will receive accredited certificates for each course.

We have a special limited time offer in place from now until September 30 if you order the Foundation Herbal Medicine Course, you get the Colour Therapy and Healing for free.

Patrick also has his own herbal dispensary, stocking herbal remedies from highly reputable organic herbal suppliers. Mainly organic, bio dynamic and fresh herb tinctures are stocked.

Dried herbs which are always organic where possible, as well as pessaries, capsules and specifically made up creams, are also dispensed, when required.

Patrick helps people with common ailments such as arthritis, asthma, acne, eczema, Fibromyalgia, ME, constipation, digestive problems, heartburn, acid reflux, back pain, menopause and more.

For more information on his online courses, visit the website http://www.theherbalacademy.ie/ or contact Patrick via info@theherbalacademy.ie or phone 093-27033.

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Censured Galway priest throws in the towel - Connacht Tribune Group

A journalist’s death stunned a small Island nation and ignited a fight for truth and justice – NBC News

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VALLETTA, Malta The ritual played out every evening in the capital of this Mediterranean island nation: As the sky darkened, street cleaners swept away candles, photographs and handwritten messages to a slain reporter.

Determined to keep alive the memory of anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia for more than a year, Ann Demarco, 60, replaced the objects at the makeshift memorial opposite the citys law courts. It was a small act of resistance to honor a journalist who inspired Maltese women to speak up, said Demarco, a law firm office administrator.

Caruana Galizia was 53 when a powerful bomb blew up her car on Oct. 16, 2017, in what her supporters say was a political killing linked to her reporting on the Panama Papers, the massive 2016 leak of financial documents about secret offshore accounts around the world.

She still inspires people here because of her reporting on criminal and government corruption on her blog, Running Commentary, which reportedly attracted some 400,000 readers in a country of fewer than half a million people.

In 2016, in the aftermath of the Panama Papers leak, Caruana Galizia exposed the offshore holdings of two prominent players in then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscats government. Neither has been charged in connection with the allegations.

The three men accused of triggering the car bomb Vincent Muscat (no relation to Joseph), Alfred Degiorgio and George Degiorgio are in prison awaiting trial on murder charges. High-profile businessman Yorgen Fenech also stands accused of commissioning Caruana Galizias killing. All four deny the charges.

Since her death, Caruana Galizia has come to symbolize the battle over press freedom and journalism around the world. Friends, family and a consortium of dozens of journalists worldwide have collectively fought to keep pressure on the Maltese authorities.

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.

The make-shift memorial to her was part of the fight against a government seen as trying to sweep Daphne's assassination under the carpet, said Demarco, who was an avid reader of Caruana Galizia.

I think they were hoping to wear us down, she said. Unfortunately, they were dealing with a group of stubborn women.

Despite the pending trial, press freedom campaigners remained concerned about those accused of killing journalists across the world escaping prosecution.

Impunity is rife, said Tom Gibson, a lead advocate for the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. It means that other killers in the future can carry out similar crimes, because they know that they wont be prosecuted.

Currently, 9 out of 10 murders of journalists are never solved, Gibson added.

In 2019, at least 250 journalists were jailed worldwide for the fourth straight year, according to the committee.

Caruana Galizia was killed in broad daylight, near her house in Bidnija, near the capital, Valletta. Her son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, also an investigative journalist, had been working from home that day. His mother had left for a trip to the bank, rushing back having forgetting her checkbook. Bye, bye, now Im really going, Matthew Caruana Galizia remembered her saying.

Minutes later, there was the sound of an explosion. I knew what it was immediately, Matthew Caruana Galizia said. He ran out the house barefoot and was greeted by a horrific scene his mothers car, a Peugeot 108, had blown up and veered into a field.

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In that moment when I was standing in front of the burning car, I knew that were going to be fighting for the rest of our lives, Matthew Caruana Galizia said.

Daphne Caruana Galizias death shocked European Union officials. Were not just talking about the murder of a journalist. We're not just talking about corruption and fraud, said Sophie in t Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, who led a mission to Malta to monitor the inquiry into the death, speaking to NBC News in August.

We also see more and more evidence of massive conflict of interest of senior figures in and around the [Maltese] government.

Europol, Europes law enforcement agency, now has a permanent presence in Malta, she said. "The Maltese police have to know that Europol is looking over their shoulder every step of the way, in t Veld added.

Prime Minister Robert Abela, who took office in January after Joseph Muscats resignation, eventually told the street cleaners in Valletta to stop the daily clearing and leave Caruana Galizias memorial alone a small victory for Demarco and her supporters.

I believe in the power of journalism and I'm proud of what my mom did, Matthew Caruana Galizia said. I really hope that we can encourage people to fight even when the worst injustice has happened.

Get up on your feet and fight back.

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A journalist's death stunned a small Island nation and ignited a fight for truth and justice - NBC News

Wish Upon a Food Truck Festival kicks off Saturday on City Island – ABC27

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Posted: Sep 18, 2020 / 04:37 AM EDT / Updated: Sep 18, 2020 / 07:39 AM EDT

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) More than 25 food trucks will be on Harrisburgs City Island for the Wish Upon a Food Truck Festival Saturday.

The sixth annual event runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The festivals proceeds are made through tips. Money raised goes to the Make a Wish Foundation.

The local chapter is aiming to make enough to grant three childrens wishes, which costs $30,000.

Each of our food trucks will have tip jars and well also have donation stations where you can donate online, said Emily Reading, the event organizer.

In addition to food trucks, there will be vendors on site, and activities, like a scavenger hunt for kids.

Local bands and dancers will be performing too.

Organizers say theyre prioritizing safety during the pandemic.

The number of food trucks has been scaled back this year.

City Island has been split into five zones, so organizers can make sure no zone goes beyond the Governors 250-person outdoor gathering limit.

Were going to have our social distancing practices in places, said Reading. Well have some roping and our little six-foot dots so that we know how to stand and traffic flow throughout the island.

During the pandemic, some wishes are being granted virtually.

Just a few days ago, a girl in Harrisburg was given a shopping spree. The fire department went to her home and gave her gift cards, so she could do a lot of online shopping.

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Wish Upon a Food Truck Festival kicks off Saturday on City Island - ABC27

Ice Age Cave Bear Found Preserved in Permafrost on Siberian Island – Smithsonian Magazine

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Scientists at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia, announced on Saturday the discovery of a well-preserved cave bear on the New Siberian island of Bolshyoy Lyakhovsky, Anna Liesowska reports for the Siberian Times.

The adult bear lived its life sometime in the last Ice Age, at the same time as large animals like woolly mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. When the bear died, permafrost preserved its soft tissues, organs and fur, making it the best-preserved example of a cave bear found yet. Most cave bear remains discovered so far have been odd bones and skulls.

Coincidentally, a preserved cave bear cub was recently found on the Russian mainland, the university says in a statement. Using the two discoveries, scientists hope to learn more about cave bears lives.

The whole, adult bear carcass is the first and only find of its kind, paleontologist Lena Grigorieva says in the university statement. It is completely preserved, with all internal organs in place, including even its nose. This find is of great importance for the whole world.

Reindeer herders working on the island discovered the ancient bear carcass and reported it to the university, which specializes in studying preserved Ice Age mammals.

The team identified it as a cave bear, a species of bear thats now extinct. Its last common ancestor with modern bears lived about 1.2 to 1.4 million years ago, according to a study published in the journal Current Biology in 2001, George Dvorsky reports for Gizmodo. Cave bears could weigh up to 1,540 pounds, which is larger than most polar bears. The cave bear carcass found on Bolshyoy Lyakhovsky probably lived between 22,000 and 39,500 years ago, and the researchers hope to narrow that window with further research.

The cave bear adult and cub are the latest additions to a growing list of preserved Ice Age carcasses emerging from the permafrost. Experts expect more preserved animals to appear as permafrost melting accelerates because of climate change.

Researchers have uncovered woolly mammoths on the Lyakhovsky islands, and last year, scientists found a 40,000-year-old wolfs head, Aylin Woodward reports for Business Insider. The wolf head still had its fur, teeth, brain and facial tissue.

This year, scientists at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University analyzed the DNA of Ice Age lion cubs discovered in Yakutsk, per Gizmodo. Similar ancient DNA analysis revealed that woolly rhinos that lived during the Ice Age were likely driven extinct not by humans, as previously thought, but by a warming climate, Alex Fox reported for Smithsonian magazine in August.

The cave bear carcass presents several opportunities for new research into Ice Age ecosystems. Analysis of its teeth might reveal details about its diet and the territory it grew up on; analysis of the contents of its stomach will show whether the bear ate plants, animals or both; and ancient DNA analysis could illuminate its evolutionary history.

The research is planned on as large a scale as in the study of the famous Malolyakhovsky mammoth, which researchers attempting to clone, Grigorieva says in the statement.

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Ice Age Cave Bear Found Preserved in Permafrost on Siberian Island - Smithsonian Magazine

Staten Island mom becomes a TikTok star with her videos about food, parenting advice – silive.com

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- If youre into food videos on TikTok, AmandaLee Fago has probably found her way to your for you page at least once.

The 32-year-old Graniteville mother and healthcare worker has gained a huge following on the app for her food videos, her parenting stories and her body positivity content.

I kinda got famous on accident, said Fago, who has amassed 1.4 million followers. I honestly joined TikTok because I was at a point in my life with my son when he had a lot of medical health issues and I was just looking for a vice just for a moment to take my mind off things.

At the time, she had taken a leave from her job to care for her son, who needed a knee osteotomy to correct a deformity.

When I came across TikTok and saw all these funny videos, I thought to myself, I can do this,'" Fago said. Im funny and I can eat, ya know? So I just started doing it. It became an outlet for me to channel my pain into humor."

Soon enough, her videos were getting more than 300,000 views.

One particular video that put her on the TikTok map showed her making a bottle for her son, who was 15 months old at the time. She said a lot of the comments were negative because it was controversial to give your 1-year-old child a bottle.

I didnt feed too much into the negativity, Fago said. Instead, I focused on making fun videos and once I started doing the eating videos, thats when I started taking it really seriously.

Food videos combining vegetables, cheeses and spices are a popular trend on TikTok, made famous by user Janelle Rohner and food blogger My Nguyen. A bell pepper sandwich trend -- featuring a fully gutted bell pepper with cream cheese and Everything But The Bagel seasoning -- went viral on the app, sparking thousands of videos reviewing and recreating the meal. (Not everyone is a fan, however. Renowned chef Gordon Ramsey called it an idiot sandwich.)

Fagos twist on the trend has garnered millions of likes. Recently, she posted her own recipe for bell pepper egg salad boats.

The bell pepper and cream cheese trend was good, but honestly its not enough for me, she said. The egg salad boats have been more of my thing. Its a snack Ive always enjoyed and I wanted to share it on this app so maybe other people will try it and add it to their lives.

One of Fagos typical food videos includes topping her mother-in-law Filomenas chicken cutlets with a variety of sauces and eating them with her hands. Her go-to topping is Tajin seasoning, blending chili, lime and sea salt.

A lot of people tell me they had never even tried Tajin until they started watching my TikTok," Fago said. I eat it on everything, I cant stop. I make recipes with it, I put it on my chicken. I really try as many foods as I can with it.

Fago said she personally sticks to a low-carb diet, but does not want to push that on her platform because she wants to keep her content fun and does not want to fall down a rabbit hole of diet trends on the app.

I would never promote a diet; I promote choosing a lifestyle that fits you," she said. I know what works for me because Ive gotten bloodwork done and discussed it with medical professionals. But I want my followers to stick with what works for them.

SUPPORTING LOCAL BUSINESSES, BODY POSITIVITY

The reaction Fago has received from her videos has been overwhelmingly supportive with fellow moms in similar situations with their children thanking her for her perspective and positivity.

Fago also wants her channel to promote small businesses and body positivity.

These businesses are run by other moms that are just trying to make it through this pandemic, she said. Im trying to help everybody out during this time. But, of course, I try the products out myself first before recommending them to other people."

While Fago has taken the time to publicly thank her supporters for sharing her videos and leaving positive comments, she is beginning to see TikTok cross over into her real life.

People have been ordering food to my house and stuff, Fago said. "I dont know if this is normal because Ive never dealt with this before. I didnt understand how big TikTok really was.

While some of these instances have been a little scary, Fago lists a P.O box in her TikTok bio for followers to send her mail and allow businesses to send her information to promote themselves.

I never want to stop supporting small businesses and using whatever platform I have to help others, she said. I know what its like to be a mom and try everything you can to support your family so if I can help someone do that, this whole thing is worth it.

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Staten Island mom becomes a TikTok star with her videos about food, parenting advice - silive.com

Hunters fight off reported grizzly bear near Island Park – East Idaho News

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ISLAND PARK A hunter survived a bear attack near Island Park Friday after using bear spray on the animal.

The Idaho Department of Fish and Game reports the archery hunter, who has not been named, was in a remote area of the Caribou-Targhee National Forest south of Two Top Mountain looking for elk. The victim and his hunting partner ran into the bear while moving through thick brush. Then bear attacked them.

Both hunters were carrying bear spray and were able to successfully deploy it during the attack, according to a department news release. But the victim was knocked down to the ground in the process of spraying the bear.

The hunting partner continued to deploy the bear spray, shortening the attack and eventually scaring off the bear. The hunters said it was a grizzly, but Fish and Game officials have been unable to confirm that.

The hunters walked out of the area to call for help and the victim was taken to Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg for treatment. IDFG spokesman James Brower says the victim only received minor injuries from the bears claws.

Fish and Game say they are placing signs on nearby roads about the attack to warn of bear activity in the area.

Officials remind anyone traveling in bear country to be prepared and carry bear spray.

The hunters were in a remote area just south of Two Top Moutain near Island Park. | Google Maps

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Hunters fight off reported grizzly bear near Island Park - East Idaho News

Going green: Governors Island could soon house climate center – The Real Deal

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A rendering of the Climate Solutions Center with Trust for Governors Island CEO Clare Newman and Mayor de Blasio (Rendering via WXY architecture + urban design/bloomimages; Governors Island; Getty)

Governors Island could become a major hub for the citys efforts to fight climate change under a proposal for a new, 4.2 million-square-foot mixed-use development.

The Trust for Governors Island, the nonprofit that manages the island, unveiled the wide-ranging plan this week which includes the development of office space, hotels and dormitories. The proposal calls for taking over 33 acres on the islands southern end that were designated for future construction under a 2010 master plan for the park.

If realized, the center would serve as a space for climate change experts researchers, students, and more to gather and conduct research, ideally under the banner of one anchor institution. That could lead to the development of more commercial space, as well as provide opportunities for the public to learn more about climate and environmental issues.

The trust says it could create as many as 8,000 jobs and inject $1 billion into New York Citys economy.

But the proposals success hinges on a planned rezoning of Governors Island, which would allow for a variety of building types, including offices, dorms and hotels. The rezoning process began more than two years ago but hasnt made much progress since. Opponents of the rezoning also worry that the changes will take away from the islands character.

In 2019, Michael Samuelian, the then-president of the Trust, was pushed out of his role by former deputy mayor Alicia Glen, who heads up its board.

In recent years, Governors Island has quietly become one of the citys most popular summer destinations, even though access to the island is limited to ferries from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Year-round tenants of the island include the New York Harbor School, the Billion Oyster Project and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Councils newly expanded Arts Center at Governors Island.

In a press release announcing the climate center plans, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city is proud to continue the growth of Governors Island as a resource to fight climate change, create jobs, and showcase the citys worldwide research and scientific talent.

Akiko Matsuda

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Going green: Governors Island could soon house climate center - The Real Deal

Island Coast High School student arrested for texting threats to teacher – Wink News

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An Island Coast High School student was arrested after texting threats to a teacher, the second student of that school to be arrested in as many weeks.

Joshua Zelaya-Sandoval, 18, sent a text message in which he threatened to cause a teacher bodily harm. The high school administration was informed about the text and notified the school resource officer.

After an investigation, Zelaya-Sandoval was arrested and is now charged with sending written threats to cause bodily harm.

This is the second student to be arrested this school year who has threatened violence towards teachers, school administrators, or their school.

A 14-year-old virtual student of Island Coast High School was arrested Sept. 10 after he sent threatening messages to three teachers on two separate occasions via their Zoom classrooms, Cape Coral police said.

Zelaya-Sandoval was released from jail after posting bail bond of $10,000.

Below is the message sent from the school to parents:

Good afternoon Island Coast families, this is Principal Michelle Cort-Mora.

In our commitment to student safety and security, I wanted to let you know one of our students was arrested today for allegedly making a threat against a teacher.

The message was sent after school hours, but we immediately notified law enforcement. We will discipline to the fullest extent per the Student Code of Conduct.

Please know that the safety of our students and staff is always our highest priority. We are thankful for the staff who reported this incident.

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Island Coast High School student arrested for texting threats to teacher - Wink News

Dream Honeymoons: Get Thee to an Island – My New Orleans

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When travel returns and you feel safe craft your own honeymoon fairytale with a stay at these far flung island escapes. Whether you wish to rekindle the flame, woo the crush or ask for her hand, these seaside hideaways will fuel the rapture. From lovey-dovey dining locales on the beach to starry-eyed suites with sunset views, luxury isle retreats inspire poetry. Read on to take a gambol a deux.

Anantara Banana Island, Qatar

Dazzle with a stay in Qatars first-ever villas to hover over the water. Ideal for active couples, the facilities at opulent Banana Island a 25-minute ferry ride from Doha beg to be enjoyed. Learn to scuba dive in a practice pool, and then take your newfound talents into the turquoise depths of the Arabian Sea. Strut your stuff atop a stand-up paddleboard, surf in the two-lane surfing pool where waves are adapted to your skill level, bowl, smash some balls across the tennis net or tee off on the 9-hole golf course. A dedicated wellness center, the first of its kind in the Middle East, offers yoga and fitness advice and a top-level spa has his and her hammansamong other delights. But, maybe all youll really want is to dream languorously on your deck, sipping tea, as the waves plunk a tune that signifies pure relaxation? With Arabian touches wooden filigree, ornate lamps, plush fabrics and canopied beds the resort draws from the glamorous spirit of the region. Dont miss a private dinner on the stargazing platform, where the night sky competes with the glimmer of Dohas distinctive, futuristic skyline.

Four Seasons Bora Bora

Four Seasons, Bora Bora, French Polynesia

Yes, paradise exists and, its name is Bora Bora. The most extolled and stunning island (arguably) in the world, Bora Bora comprises a series of motus that surround Mount Otemanu, an otherworldly volcano that pierces the center of a pellucid lagoon. Occupying its own small isle, the all-suite, newly renovated Four Seasons reigns with over-the-water- bungalows connected to undulating pontoons. Book one of the four Otemanu Overwater Bungalows which cap the piers and have direct views of the majestic volcano. From your room, dive into water as vivid with blues as Van Goghs palette; or, gaze at it from your private pool or indoor bathtub, overlooking the vista. Paramours will relish the resorts romance offerings, which include such things as a private island dinner, a romance Paparazzo to photograph you, a flower filled bath, and a couples massage that utilizes the famed Tahitian monoi oil.

Marry (or renew vows) in a Tahitian ceremony beneath the tiki torches, where beating drums and fire dancers leave indelible memories. Follow with breakfast in bed, delivered by canoe.

Oberoi Mauritius

Oberoi, Mauritius

Afloat in the Indian Ocean, 1,250 miles east of Africa, Mauritius is a collage of dramatic scenery and a fusion of cultures. Thick with promise, it emanates the exotic. Delve into that at the Oberoi, which spreads across 20-acres on the isles northwestern coast. Opt for a Royal Villa, low-lying, rust-colored and topped with a sugar-cane roof. You may never leave your rooms private, garden enclave, which boasts a personal pool and a gazebo for secluded dining. Expect to find frangipani blossoms everywhere in your sunken bathtub (filled with just the right temperature of warm, scented water), atop your pillows, even in heart-shaped designs on the floor. Spend afternoons swimming in Turtle Bay or taking advantage of the Oberois touching senses complimentary programs, which range from cooking classes to guided hikes among the garden-like property. The spa offers classic Ayurvedic treatments, such as shirodara, as well as indigenously inspired ones like the Creole coffee-mint wrap, created from local ingredients.

Intercontinental Hayman Island | Will Salkeld Photography

InterContinental Hayman Island, Australia

Caviar munched in a gauzy pool-side cabana. A massage bed floating in the sea. Beach-side suites which offer the sound of crashing waves as your personal symphony. Dinner with pressed-linen tablecloths, crystal and silver amid a leafy rainforest. Vistas of the Coral Sea, the water gleaming in hues of lapis lazuli. Youll get all of the above at the newly refurbished InterContinental Hayman Island, a barefoot sophisticates port of call. Off the coast of Queensland, as the northernmost point of the Whitsunday Archipelago, this public island has just one hotel. Stay here and you may feel like he who lords over the bounty of the Great Barrier Reef. Using all-natural Amalas high potency, organic beauty products in the spa, sourcing culinary ingredients as locally as possible, and participating in a breeding program for the endangered Proserpine Rock Wallaby, the resort takes its eco-friendly moniker seriously. Cuddle as you gaze at the transforming canvas of the sea from their arrival helicopter, hold hands while snorkeling Blue Pearl Bay, and snuggle as you race through the waves on the resorts complimentary catamaran.

Bulgari Resort, Bali

Indian and Arab traders left their legacy in Bali, a mystical island province in distant Indonesia. With emerald-green rice paddies, verdant jungles and ethereal volcanic peaks at the islands heart, Bali is framed by crescents of sugary sand, raucous cobalt-colored waves and jagged, black lava promontories. Temples and monkeys abound. Be coddled with Balis infinite charms at the Bulgari Resort, situated atop a cliff on territories that once served as the Balinese royal familys hunting grounds. An idyllic setting for an exclusive wedding, the resort is walled with white coral and manifests classic Balinese exteriors with coconut thatched, sloped rooftops, carved-wood and hand-cut local stone. Inside, each suite channels sleek, urbane Milan thanks to the propertys Italian-based designers. Flirt as you dip your feet in your private plunge pool and swoon over the panorama. Both an Italian and Indonesian Restaurant tempt according to mood. An ESPA provides muscle melting treatments on site. Staff can arrange visits to Ubud, of Eat, Pray, Love fame and the social hotbed of Jimbaran Bay is just 20 minutes to the north.

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Dream Honeymoons: Get Thee to an Island - My New Orleans