Nearly six years since the FBI raid, I meet Alex in a cafe near the Kiev railway station in Moscow. He is now officially Alexander Vavilov; his brother is Timofei Vavilov, though many of their friends still use their old surname, Foley. Alex is 21, his still-boyish looks offset by a serious manner and businesslike clothes: black V-neck over a crisp white shirt. A gentle North American lilt and the careful aspiration of final consonants give him the unplaceable accent of those who have been schooled internationally – in Paris, Singapore and the US. These days, he speaks enough Russian to order lunch, but is by no means fluent. He is studying in a European city and is here to visit his parents; Tim works in finance in Asia. (In the interests of privacy, both brothers have asked me not to reveal details about their working lives.)

Since 2010, they have made a conscious decision to avoid the media. They have agreed to talk to me now, Alex explains, because they are fighting a legal battle to win back their Canadian citizenship, stripped from them six years ago. They believe it is unfair and illegal that they are expected to answer for the sins of their parents, and have decided to tell their story for the first time.
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Alex and Tim’s father was born Andrei Olegovich Bezrukov, in Krasnoyarsk region, in the heart of Siberia. Since his return to Moscow in 2010, he has given just a handful of interviews to Russian media outlets, mainly concerning the more recent work he has done as a geopolitical analyst. Details of his past, or that of his wife, Elena Vavilova, are scarce.

Alex tells me what he knows about his parents’ recruitment, based on the little they have told him: “They got recruited into it together, as a couple. They were promising, young, smart people, they were asked if they wanted to help their country and they said yes. They went through years of training and preparing.”
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The programme was the only one of its kind in international espionage. (Many assumed it had been stopped, until the 2010 FBI swoop.) Many intelligence agencies use agents operating without diplomatic cover; some have recruited second-generation immigrants already living abroad, but the Russians have been the only ones to train agents to pretend to be foreigners. Canada was a common place for the illegals to go, to build up their “legend” of being an ordinary western citizen before being deployed to target countries, often the US or Britain. During Soviet times, the illegals had two main functions: to aid in communications between embassy KGB officers and their US sources (an illegal would be less likely to be put under surveillance than a diplomat); and to be sleeper cells for a potential “special period” – a war between the US and the Soviet Union. The illegals could then spring into action.

If she’s elected president, Hillary Clinton intends to equip the White House with a situation room just for climate change, inspired by the Map Room where Franklin D. Roosevelt managed World War II, her campaign chairman, former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, said Friday.
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Clinton got the idea, Podesta said, “after walking many many many times through the ground floor of the residence through the Map Room.”

In 1942, Roosevelt remodeled a ground-floor room that was either a ladies reception room, according to the FDR library, or a trophy room, where gifts were received, according to White House Curator Bill Allman, into a situation room equipped with communications equipment and maps where the president could track the progress of the war.

“That gives you some sense of the imagination, the scale of ambition that one needs to be able to think about what’s happening in the oceans, on land, in Alaska, in the Arctic, to be able to envision what’s necessary to prepare the public, the economy for the challenges that are going to face us,” Podesta said.

Later on, Maher posed the following question to the panel: “How do you go at [Trump] who is a walking brain fart, who will say anything?”

It was Cranston who emerged with the most cogent advice, saying, “Hillary should stay focused on the issues and take the high ground so it shows greater contrast to her opponent. Don’t get sucked into his energy. If you get sucked into that vortex, you’ll swirl down the toilet. Stay calm and stay confident.”

And Maher, as is his wont, decided to end the program with a “New Rule” comparing Trump to a “hysterical” circa-1950s woman, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady clips and all.

“So never forget, Lady Trump, that Hillary Clinton was born a woman, but you chose to live your life like a—say it with me, won’t you?—whiny little bitch,” Maher proclaimed. “Which is why if Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I’ll be voting for the only one that has balls.”

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is giving Jennifer Lopez a virtual high-five for her recent shoutout.

As the former U.S. Secretary of State continues to battle for the country's top job, she took time out to tweet to Lopez in response to her just-released "Ain't Your Mama"" video.

"Thanks for this," Clinton wrote. "Women are so much more than the roles they've been assigned. -H."

Christianity only started spreading seriously in Europe from the fourth century CE [AD], and by the eighth century, only four hundred years later, it had serious competition in Spain and southern France from Islam. Christianity was adopted more slowly than most people realize, with large pockets of essentially pagan survivals and heresies lasting for hundreds of more years– so medieval European religion should be seen as tripartite in these centuries — pagan survivals, spreading Christianity, and spreading Islam.
Islam is a major European religion and is a nearly 1300 year old tradition there.

Some parts of Spain, and often quite a lot of it, were under Muslim rule 711 to 1492. So for example, Abd al-Rahman I was proclaimed Emir of Cordoba in 756.

The Arab Muslim emirate of Sicily lasted from 831 to 1072. For example, Jafar al-Kalbi (983–985) was emir of Sicily, and therefore mayor of Palermo, the capital.

The Ottoman Empire ruled most of what is now Greece 1458-1832. Here is a picture of the Ottoman governor of Athens in 1815 (a decade and a half before the Greeks won independence).

Six months before she was a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton helped launch the Grads of Life campaign. “Creating more opportunities for America’s youth to enter and prosper in the economy is one of my key priorities,” she announced at the Clinton Global Initiative. Since then, she has campaigned across the country championing her vision for America and detailing what precisely she would do as president to create more opportunities for America’s youth. Among the 30 issues listed on her campaign website are proposed programs such as The New College Compact and reforms to the criminal justice system and the workforce.

Closing the Opportunity Divide

In February, the former Secretary of State announced a sweeping economic agenda aimed at closing the Opportunity Divide. The “Breaking Every Barrier Agenda” aspires to break down all barriers that hold Americans back and build ladders of opportunity for all people.

Economic Revitalization Initiative

Secretary Clinton has proposed a $125 billion initiative to create good-paying jobs, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and connect housing to communities that have become “opportunity deserts.” As part of that $125 billion, she would invest $20 billion to support local youth programs; $5 billion in reentry programs for formerly incarcerated individuals; $25 billion to support small businesses in underserved communities; $50 billion to create an Infrastructure Opportunity Fund; and $25 billion in a housing investment program.

In order to direct more federal resources to at-risk communities, Secretary Clinton would leverage bold investments and new partnerships she believes would create millions of youth jobs in hard-hit communities. By expanding programs that work; expanding job training and apprenticeships; and expanding pathways from skills development to work, Clinton hopes to create millions of new career opportunities that would increase employability skills for opportunity youth and enhance economic prosperity for businesses.

That point about her intending to break classification rules is important, because in order to have broken the law, it isn’t enough for Clinton to have had classified information in a place where it was possible for it to be hacked. She would have had to intentionally given classified information to someone without authorization to have it, like David Petraeus did when he showed classified documents to his mistress (and then lied to the FBI about it, by the way). Despite the enormous manpower and time the Justice Department has devoted to this case, there has never been even a suggestion, let alone any evidence, that Clinton did any such thing.

But when it comes to the presidential campaign, that isn’t going to matter. Republicans already know what they think: Hillary Clinton is a criminal whose every thought and action is vile and despicable, so of course she broke the law. If the investigation doesn’t show that, it could only be because the investigation was a sham. So they’ll just keep saying that this is a scandal, over and over and over.

As Bill and Hillary Clinton’s entire careers have proven, when you’re trying to take someone down, the next best thing to a real scandal is a phony one. Let’s not forget that when Bill was president, no alleged wrongdoing was too trivial to investigate, complete with dark insinuations about nefarious conspiracies and potential criminal behavior. You think the endless investigation of Benghazi is ridiculous? In the 1990s, congressional Republicans took 140 hours of sworn testimony on the urgent question of whether the Clintons had misused the White House Christmas card list. Seriously. That’s something that actually happened.

And the media, always operating on the rule that when it comes to the Clintons any smoke should be treated as fire — even if there’s a bunch of Republicans operating a smoke machine in full view — will offer endless breathless stories about the “scandal” and how it just shows that people don’t trust Clinton.

McGough: Just to follow up, would you say that Sanders is right when he says — you can phrase it either way — that you would more willing to use military force than he would. I’m not asking whether it would be appropriate in a particular sense, but is your disposition to be more willing to use military force than his as you see it. Because for a lot of voters, this would be a voting issue.

Clinton: Well it’s a totally hypothetical issue. He’s never had any experience or any authority to make any of these hard decisions. I can’t sit here and tell you what he would have done in the Situation Room about Bin Laden. I can’t tell you what he would have done, other than the vote he made in the Senate, about Libya. I don’t know whether he would have supported a pivot to Asia. I can’t answer those questions. He has to answer those questions. I can just lay out my record. I can refer to my book “Hard Choices,” where I go into great detail. I can tell people about negotiating a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. I can talk about getting the blind dissident out of China against great concerns by the Chinese. I can talk about the role that we played in Latin America and Africa, to try to support democracy, to try provide targeted development. I have a record. I have a record that people can look at and can draw their own conclusions. I can’t compare myself, and wouldn’t, with him. He has to speak for himself. But a lot of what he says, if you read the New York Daily News’ long interview, is problematic, and I think people should not just look at the sound bites and the slogans, but where there has been a comparable grilling about foreign policy and domestic policy, as we both were in that setting, it’s worth taking a read.

If you listened to the Breakfast Show this morning, Steve and Katt received an interesting anonymous tip about CERN’s rodent problems last week.

As it turns out, the critter that chewed through the 66,000 volt transformer was in fact NOT a weasel, but a stone marten, otherwise known as a beech marten or a fouine. You heard the scoop here first!

Apparently several of you have had run-ins of your own with the ‘car eating mammal’. Who knew that German or Japanese car parts might taste different? Here’s a few of our favourite comments from listeners: