you know you. two palestinian protesters are killed on the gaza border as clashes also a robbery to an israeli soldiers and muslim worshipers on the temple mount in jerusalem. the firm behind minatory is trying russian dolls here is something to court in the us after a lawsuit is brought by a russian entrepreneur. and ecuador says wiki leaks founder julian assange launched may soon have to leave their embassy in london where he's been for the past six years. the latest on these stories head to r.t. dot com in the meantime stay with us for the big picture.

if your child or you will soon apply for college and you suspect that it's not a level playing field you're right on this week's show you will hear why and how that is changing but first are you a bargain hunting for a last minute summer vacation deal do not click enter before you hear about an online scam that could rip you off i'm holland cook in washington this is the big picture on our t. america. so your tight budget had you sitting tight this summer but staycation get sold and if you're searching online for a great getaway deal and expert scam busters says be careful attorney and

professor seaven j.j. wiseman is an expert on fraud identity theft and whatever else wise guys are doing to try to rip you off and if you read only one of the ten books he's written we recommend identity theft alert ten rules you must follow to protect yourself from america's number one crime steve's website updated daily is scam aside dot com we welcome him from beautiful amherst massachusetts where the h. is silent steve thank you again for joining the big picture and good to be with you and you're correct the age. they have t. shirts here that say an amorous only the eighty's it's different in new york and new hampshire we know that one of the big reasons newspapers business model is collapsing is craigslist free classifieds anyone can post so if you're selling that's attractive because what was once

a big revenue stream to the newspaper now cause a zero but at least there was a paper trail to those paid classified ads you recently reported on a cape cod rental that should have looked too good to be true tell that heartbreaking story. yeah this is a case and unfortunately it's not just one incident there's a particular very attractive piece of property some rental in provincetown at the tip of cape cod and it keeps appearing on craig's list at a very very low rent that someone has to wire money to in order to get the rental and the problem is it's a total scam the properties there but it is not for rent and the owners have actually taken to putting a sign on their door the home is not for rent your problem is with craigslist and time and time again people are falling for this it's very very easy online to

list a place for for rent it's easy to get a picture of it and if people are just too trusting they end up sending money and getting nothing in return what on nightmare driving all the way out there to find out you have been scammed how can i the consumer ascertain whether a rental property posted on craigslist is for real. you know it's interesting because this is one of these incidents where i actually took my own advice and had it work out for me the simple thing is just like the the internet's the problem the internet is also the solution to you go online to the tax assessor's office for the particular piece of property and if the person you have been talking with and you are communicating with is not the same person who is listed as the owner you've got a good indication that that is a scam about air b.n. b. b. o. or a home to go dot com all of which we see advertised on cable is there more accountability

built into those offers. yeah there really is and you know it's not to say that air b.n. b. in these others are perfect they're not but they're pretty darn good and what you need to do though is when you are dealing with say air b.n. b. you stay with your communications on the website you go through them you don't do it offline you don't do it separately wiring and you pay through the website sometimes you'll find people say you know it'll be simpler and quicker and we'll both save money by doing this offline don't do it those safety precautions are built in there for a reason so yeah you can use your air b.n. b. but do it on the site and pay through the site that's the red flag when the other party says hey let's skip the commission and do this directly how about oh yeah how about online offers to sell like airline tickets or airline rewards risky business . yeah very much so and this is one of these things where there are all

kinds of phony sales for airline rewards in points and tickets and they're the best thing is it's just too darn hard to tell what's legit and what's not and so what you need to do is to make sure that you go only to sites that you know are legitimate and want your typing because there are times where someone may mistype the name of a particular travel website in but with just a name or a letter off and end up going to a very good looking but totally phony web site that has been set up to grab you when you go there so go to legitimate web sites and watch your typing hey i want to weigh a baseball game recently and didn't have tickets and bought from a scalper and i noticed that they had both kinds of tickets the actual ticket that you get the old school kind and increasingly when we reserve online from stub hub

or one of them we can print out the ticket at home and bring it i would never buy one of those printed things because somebody could simply print ten copies you're pretty safe buying the actual authentic ticket from a scalper. yeah you know most of the time dealing with scalpers if you see those actual tickets there you're in pretty good shape but yeah as far as the electronic tickets and we all use electronic tickets i'm using some this weekend but i would never buy through a scalper an electronic ticket just too many places for that to go wrong too easy to counterfeit hey lots of news lately about cyber espionage like spy versus spy and mag magazine gone high tech but the mess to criminal hackers are using some of these same techniques to steal our identities and to steal our money and we've often heard about the term spear phishing ph spear phishing when that's in the news

give us the short version of what that means. yes you know from the major countries to the smaller criminals spearfishing is the main way that security is breached whether it's us or governments or agencies or companies equifax you name it and what it is is you know we know the phishing e-mail you get an e-mail that's crying to lure you into clicking on a link but it's dear customer or dear someone else in the english is not particularly good but would spearfishing what they're doing is they're specifically tailoring that e-mail that text message to you with a link for you to click on but this time they may have gone on facebook and they may have found things that you're interested in perhaps you're talking about going to a baseball game maybe or a washington nationals fan maybe a red sox fan and there's something about that that connects with you or

a particular band and sometimes we are our own worst enemy by putting too much information on social media that the scammers are able to really put to their own best use by luring us into. king on the links so the the lesson you never click on any link in an email in a text message in anything unless you've absolutely confirmed that it is legitimate almost every day i get what looks like an urgent message just for me from apple or from amazon saying that they need to verify something about my order and i always click on details up in the email address and this has nothing to do with amazon so check the email address it's coming from despite who it says it's coming from right absolutely because one of the main ways that these are sent out in is sent out in large bulk is through what's called a bot net it's

a network of the zombie computers these are computers around the world that have been hacked into and just used to send out this kind of fishing with malware and so i got one today it was from chase bank but it came from some professor at the university of texas who had been hacked so it's a very easy thing to see when it's done that way now some of them will actually have email addresses that look very very similar to what are the legitimate ones but very often you'll find it's the bot net and yeah it doesn't match so it ain't working lately when we think rip off we think online about phone scams are they still alive and all too well. oh yeah they're huge and you know robo calls people are still falling for robo calls they're answering them they're providing personal information and the thing with phone scams and they particularly seem to hit the elderly they are more willing to pick up they're more trusting and actually

there's a scientific basis for that there's a part of our brain as we age that deals with skepticism that makes us more you know more trusting but the thing with the phone call is these scammers can fool they can trick your caller id it's a technique called spoofing very easy to do so i can get a call that appears to come from the i.r.s. it appears to come from the local police department but it's really coming from a scammer so any time you get a call asking for personal information or to pay for something with a with a credit card online or whatever are over the phone you just can't trust it and so you if you're interested you call back at a number that you know is accurate but no you can't trust that phone call don't believe color ideas which you're saying. hey i it i was told i don't know if this is true i was told that when you get one of these calls and if the first thing

they say is can you hear me say no because they may be recording your voice saying yes to impersonate authorization down the line is that an urban legend or does that actually happened. it's an urban legend it's so interesting because i researched this thing to the hilt and i kept seeing this as a warning coming from all kinds of different law enforcement agencies and other there is not a single instance of that actually occurring and being used so you know it's not the kind of thing that people want to do you don't want to say yes but oh my goodness if they you know can you hear me yes don't worry they're not going to come and take your house at least we have one less thing to worry about steve's website is a scam aside dot com it's free and i urge that you subscribe because every single day he's got a scam of the day and you can search his entire archive and as steve as often

cautioned us if something seems too good to be true it probably is thank you ace scam buster an attorney steven j. j. wiseman. always good to be with you. choosing a college is one major decision but are they choosing you fairly not always but that's changing as you'll hear next this is the big picture on our t. america. just far away. down there aka poco he does the dollar vigilante and he's an advocate and that is an arche it's anarchy in that there is no centralized authority that is corrupt of all that leads to all kinds of bad outcomes when you

have got to centralization of power you know you have the wherewithal to have a more peaceful existence. is democratic socialism the future of the democratic party the future of america is moving to the left a winning strategy to take on donald trump's vision of conservative populism one thing is undeniable mainstream politics in both parties for under pressure to evolve and become more accountable. he. resists is hotter than kentucky. in this group i'm going to see you go very fine you need. a co money since it was almost no coal mines left. the jobs are gone all the coal

was said. that it was a laugh to see these people the survivors of disappearing before their own eyes. i remember thinking when i was younger that is anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that in the end it's how it's happened. the class of twenty twenty two heading off for freshman year there's new controversy or is it old controversy about college admissions the trump administration is reversing obama academic affirmative action policies which encouraged schools to favor minority applicants opponents call it reverse

racism and the education and justice departments have now jointly reissued bush forty three era guidelines encouraging race neutral admission policy education secretary betsy device says the supreme court has determined what affirmative action policies are constitutional and the courts written decisions are the best guide for navigating this complex issue are they let's bring in role mansion tourney who specializes in immigration law civil rights and criminal defense and family law welcome. thanks sir our president is up and doing lots of his predecessor's work how much of this is just politics. well look i mean i think the american people have had enough of the social engineering that has sort of plagued this country for the last ten fifteen years and i think you know used to be a white versus black thing i think that the asian community now is thrown their

weight into this and sort of sort of tilted it in the opposite direction and made it more more complicated obviously the harvard case is a prime example of that where the asian american community felt that they were being discriminated against in their admissions policies so this is part and parcel of something that's happening where in the asian american community is now moving this country in the direction of you know disavowing race as the primary factor and reaffirming that quotas are unacceptable in a competitive university setting this is america you know exposed to be the land of the free home of the brave and the the fittest in the sense of a capitalist society but the social engineering has as in the opinion of most americans i think at this point has really gone the way of the dodo and it's sort of you know run its course and i think it's time to get back on track to being competitive and moving forward and you know awarding admissions based on merit

rather than quota systems the justice department has filed what's called a statement of interest in the suit that is going to go to trial in october which you just referenced defendant is harvard plaintiffs students for fair admissions alleging that harvard does intentionally discriminate against asian americans by limiting their admissions now why would harvard do that how could this not be racial discrimination. that's exactly correct you know they they're playing a very fine game in there and their and their lives are being exposed in the sense that well you know we don't consider races you know the primary issue but i think they're concerned i mean that also brings in the into play the issue of the legacies you know in the sense that there are certain people that are more equal than others and they generally tend to be you know white americans who are legacies quote unquote and parents grandparents have gone to the same university for generations and then so there are progeny sort of get you know bump right to the

front even if they're not the brightest sometimes or not the most motivated and that's also unfair but they tend to be a defacto de joria analysis they tend to be mainly white the ones who are beneficial is the legacy. movement but in terms of the asian american community i think what the concern seems to be is that they are tending to be you know industrious in the in the immigrant mentality and they're achieving great feats academically and they're actually quite understandably outraged that they have to seem to have to work two three four times harder to get in to university and they feel that's very unfair and that there's a microcosm of that happening in the new york city schools as well where mayor de blasio is talking about that and the asian american beauty is not very happy about that. you know in terms of getting them out of the prep schools for example because

you know for whatever reason you have that caricature of them being smarter than us just reeks of resentment. well it's not about smarter or less smart or it's about it's about industriousness i guess in the sense you know it's just results i mean really it's just about results the results of their and they feel that they're being held back so you know it's a very very thorny dicey issue it's written with controversy but i feel but but but i think many feel that affirmative action has played its part for many generations and that's now time to get to brass tacks and i think it's time to get back to competitiveness and honesty in the admissions process which you should you know we're ray should be one of maybe could be one factor out of many but not the most compelling factor or gearing a university towards placing an emphasis on race in terms of a court which has been ruled unconstitutional consistently by the supreme court the

court of race based quotas are absolute and constitutional however race can be a factor out of many factors if there is a compelling interest now that to the legacies whom you mentioned a while ago these could be the children the grandchildren even for some of the ivy covered walls even the great grandchildren obama neither they often get favored consideration cornell university president martha pollack says legacy admissions help perpetuate quote a cornell family that goes on for generations if you graduated notre dame the university of virginia or georgetown your kids have a roughly two to one advantage at princeton legacies are accepted four times the general admission rate at harvard five times now as the usa becomes more diverse this will be less of a factor for future generations but for now legacy preference does work against the student body diversity has this surfaced in any legal actions. well

that's a great question nobody's really touched that. and that's that also shows a little bit of the hypocrisy as well that's going on here nobody really discussed the legacy issue they tend to see it as a marginal issue that legacy students are only a small percentage of the student body and the vast majority of it is based on other factors but it is true that legacies bar by and large white americans just because of the generational issue there was not a lot of you know non white students going to the universities a few a couple generations ago non-white immigration nonwhite admission to school teen aversive these is a relatively new phenomenon for the last forty fifty maybe thirty forty fifty years so you know that's one or two generations away so legacies by virtue by them by nature are inherently biased because they just are but it is

interesting to see the asian american community teaming up with the white community on this very issue because the asian american is being denied equal access to the universities even if their scores are off the charts even if they've shown to be very meritorious so they're understandably very angry about this and the trumpet ministrations thrown has their weight behind this trump administration is so interested in this is isn't the obvious playing to their base. no i actually think it's ironic this kind of shows trump as a man who braces competition he embraces excellence see embraces the hard work ethic you know this is definitely not a race issue so all the all those people who claim that trump is a you know he's racist or a race baiter whatever the case may be this is this is just right in their face he's actually getting behind the asian american community in this on this issue because he's showing that this is not about race this is about rot natural talent

to make america great again and the bottom line is if that means that. the racial results will not be to everyone's liking will so be it it's all about the excellence the grades the the hard work the results and the product and that's really what he's all about and that's that's sort of the new york spirit in him and i think that's the c.e.o. in him he just wants to find the right people for the job he doesn't really care about race or ethnicity he just cares that you're competent and you're good at what you do and you work hard and i think that that's a tribute to his administration thank you attorney rowe who mansion joining us from our two studios in new york thank you sir. for another camera angle on this here's veteran united states diplomat jim john triss welcome back to the big think it was helen glad to be here you have an historical perspective on this today the phrase affirmative action implies race but it's long enough ago that many today are unaware that in the early twentieth century harvard princeton

yale actually throttled down the number of jews admitted correct well absolutely that was it was a cap was a quota was generally around four percent in most elite institutions and it was just a tip or it was frankly knowledge most of the time that they said we had this limit that really didn't survive world war two a lot of negative associations as you might imagine but that was standard procedure in the early part of the twentieth century when they do it to begin with because they were afraid that if they didn't have it there would be too many jews there that that you know look the fact of the matter is that there are you know different people have different capabilities you don't you you can't hand out to different capabilities strictly according to what percentage of people exist in the population maybe there are a lot of smart jewish people there i don't know but the but the fear was is that they didn't have the cap that just as some some people are claiming schools today are becoming too asian right and there's an informal cap being put in place that it

was frankly of knowledge that's what they were doing back then does not a diverse student body of though inherently contribute to students' perspective. you know i think well you could say sure that in normal human relations it's nice to be people of all different backgrounds but you don't necessarily have to have quotas within a an academic institution to make sure you meet people with different backgrounds from yourself and if that's the the the deliverable so to speak of diversity is that really worth it to have what amounts to naked religious or ethnic or racial discrimination our previous guest talked about legacies meaning admissions. applicants who are the children grandchildren even great grandchildren of alumni some who are moneyed does not affirmative action help counterbalance that kind of favoritism well i don't know if it balances so much as simply adds to it and where do you take another one group that has a certain set of let's say advantages that are according to the not based

necessarily on their academic ability and we're going to take another group that for broadly socially favored reasons we're going to have a set aside for them and then what are going to do that squeeze the other end of the balloon and say but we're going have a quota for these people because they're too capable or maybe we won't do that i mean it's it seems to me that any kind of a thumb on the scale whether you're for broad social motives or for things like legacy is really inappropriate two wrongs don't make a right and that's what it comes down to haul and thank you jim thank you and thank you for watching that is the big picture if you missed any part of this week's show or if you'd like to share it thanks in advance you can where you'll find all our shows at youtube dot com slash the big picture our t.v. watch any time anywhere on any device and if you see us somewhere else you can also find our t america on direct t.v. channel three two one dish channel two avi and on the free pluto t.v.

app at channel one three two i'm holland cook in washington back next week and on twitter in the meantime at holland. question more. is democratic socialism the future of the democratic party the future of america is moving to the left a winning strategy to take on donald trump's vision of conservative populism one thing is undeniable mainstream. politics in both parties for under pressure to evolve and become more accounts. and. we are going through a dramatic economic and social and cultural transformation that women want to participate gay lesbian people want immigrants want rights in many cities are

saying that's my way but there are more traditional parts of the society that are saying no i don't want that i live in a more of a world community i believe we should have one that i believe in a country that's divided as much as any in the world we actually have to localise our government. for manners sitting in a car when the fifth gets shot in the head. all four different versions of what happened one of them is on the death row there's no way he could have done it there's no possible way because the us did not shoot around a corner. i

am asked. kaiser this is the kaiser report here with lovely the talented the vicious the intelligent stacey who will now take us through into the next segment of what you're watching here now stacey k.-max well you know the mexicans have provided us with a great solution to corrupt politicians and bad things corruption crime all that sort of stuff because there's a town in mexico called share ron the mexican indigenous community that ran politicians out of town shiran in the violent state of mitchell walk and will stand apart from mexico's electioneering season having tackle corruption and exploitation by banishing political parties police and gangsters this is an article from april back in two thousand and eleven they banned all politicians and political parties from ever operating in their town and you know what happens crime and their use.