The fact that Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who can best be described as little more than a life support system for his hair, can appear wise when talking about Donald Trump is an indication of just how wrong and disturbing the whole phenomenon of Trump’s political ascendance is:
London’s mayor, the conservative politician Boris Johnson, also chimed in. “As a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, London has a proud history of tolerance and diversity and to suggest there are areas where police officers cannot go because of radicalization is simply ridiculous,” he said. “The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump,” Johnson quipped.
After listening to several weeks of testimony and four days of deliberating, a jury has found a former Oklahoma City police officer accused of sex crimes guilty on 18 counts.
Daniel Holtzclaw is accused of sexually assaulting 13 women while on duty as an Oklahoma City police officer.
In August 2014, the state charged Holtzclaw with 36 felony counts of rape, sexual battery, indecent exposure and forcible oral sodomy after the 13 women came forward, claiming the officer assaulted them while they were in custody or inside his police car.
In all, the jury heard 13 accusers’ stories of assault.
………
After four days of deliberating, the jury found Holtzclaw guilty on 18 counts.
They recommend he be sentenced to a total of 263 years.
This is not what I expect from an all white jury in Oklahoma.
Good for the jurors and the prosecutors.
5 Years ago, they probably would not even have charged the guy.
We chan thank Black Lives Matter for this change in attitude.
A study conducted by Play the Game/Danish Institute for Sports Studies, and published in October 2015, found that on the basic criterion of good governance, Fifa ranks second among the 35 Olympic international sports federations with a Sports Governance Observance index of 67.8 percent.
Yes, the same Fifa that was raided by the police for the second time on Wednesday, resulting in more arrests of its officials. The same Fifa against whose officials US government officials revealed a new indictment that alleges “an even more extensive network of criminal behaviour across dozens of countries and that involved some of the most powerful people in international soccer,” according to The New York Times.
It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear saying, “La, la, la, I can’t hear your!”
One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and encompassing treatment far in excess of even the torture techniques formally authorized by the Bush administration. Despite the passage of 12 months, the actual report, comprising 6,700 pages, still has not been made publicly available. In fact, reading it appears to be prohibited among officials in the executive branch. Nearly a month and a half after the report’s initial release, it had not even been taken out of the package in which it was delivered to the Department of Justice and Department of State, according to government lawyers. Even the organization that was the subject of the report, the CIA, tightly controlled internal access and made “very limited use” of it, as had the Department of Defense, the lawyers said in a court filing. That shunning of the torture report appears to be ongoing and very much by design: It turns out the Department of Justice has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote in a letter last month to the attorney general and FBI director, urging that they or their “appropriately cleared” underlings read the full report. “The legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they added. Elizabeth Beavers, a policy coordinator focusing on torture at Amnesty International, believes that no one in the Obama administration, including at the Department of Justice, has read the full report. “They appear to be taking a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ [stance] with regards to the proof of criminal acts it may contain,” she said. But “for the administration not even to read the whole report, and to look the other way while it is possibly buried or even destroyed, sets a dangerous precedent by excusing major crimes like torture and forced disappearance.”
It appears that Obama is still insisting on ignore the most depraved excesses of the state security apparatus, and someone in his administration is trying to insure that they never have direct knowledge of what was done.
They must think that they won’t be subject to the International Criminal Court if they are willfully blind.
Admittedly, my knowledge of international law is limited, but I do not think this argument would wash in The Hague.
In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia—a well known critic of affirmative action—suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them. Referencing an unidentified amicus brief, Scalia said that there were people who would contend that “it does not benefit African-Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.” He argued that “most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.” “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re — that they’re being pushed ahead in — in classes that are too — too fast for them,” Scalia said.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has rejected the comparison of US presidential candidate Donald Trump to the villain in her seven-part book series, saying on Twitter that “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad”.
The author was tweeting in response to a BBC report on the number of tweets comparing the Republican politician with the Dark Lord. Trump made headlines on Tuesday when he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to Muslims, in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. Trump has targeted Muslims in previous speeches, calling for surveillance of mosques across America and claiming Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a claim he refused to retract despite fact-checkers debunking it.
Tervor Noah had a very special guest on The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been obstructing a bill to pay for the health coverage for the first responders at the Twin Towers because he wants to hold it hostage to a change in oil export policy.
Jon Stewart came out of retirement, and appeared as a guest.
He also went down to Congress to harangue what were clearly uncomfortable Senators and Representatives.
Watch the whole thing, particularly the round table toward the end.
It sucks to be Mitch McConnell on even the best of days, this makes it suck even more.
Because Comedy Central vids autoplay on some platforms, I have put the video after the break
Seriously, it is a complete mindf%$# that the Donald has plumbed depths that Dick Cheney recoils from in horror:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is joining a chorus of voices slamming GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims from entering the U.S. “I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in,” Cheney told radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from,” Cheney added during Monday’s interview.
This is so wrong, and so weird, that I am at a complete loss for words.
……… Murder here is easy to commit — because weapons and ammunition that tear at human flesh are easily obtainable. And once murder is committed, it is far harder to solve than it should be — because the devices that are repositories for incriminating evidence are increasingly beyond the reach of law enforcement. Police on Thursday reported that all four weapons used by killer Syed Farook and his wife-accomplice, Tashfeen Malik — two assault rifles and two handguns — were bought legally. The two had a guerrilla-sized stockpile at home: a staggering 2,000 rounds of 9-mm. bullets and 2,500 rounds of .223-caliber rifle ammunition. Also in the home: 12 pipe bombs and hundreds of tools that could be used to build IEDs or pipe bombs. In what country is it legal to collect enough weaponry to go to war? In ours, thanks to gun laws crafted and protected by lawmakers obedient to the National Rifle Association.
(emphasis mine)
On their cover, they call Wayne LaPierre a terrorist.
I agree.
What’s more, the News understands that the apocalyptic language and policies of the NRA are not effectively opposed by the standard civil and polite hand wring that we see on the editorial pages of other papers.
Texas has filed a lawsuit aiming to block Syrian refugees from settling in the Dallas area, in the latest salvo of an escalating row between the state, an aid group and the federal government. Relatives of Faez and Shaza, who fled Syria for Jordan in 2013 and were settled this year in a Dallas suburb, are expected to arrive as early as Friday. They are being helped by the Dallas branch of the New York-based International Rescue Committee (IRC), but Texas officials sent letters to IRC asking them to halt their assistance to the refugees. The humanitarian group issued a statement on Wednesday refusing to comply with instructions from Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, and Chris Traylor, the head of the state’s health agency. In response, Texas’s health and human services commission filed a federal lawsuit against the IRC and the Obama administration this week that asks the court to stop the family from arriving in Texas in the next few days. It accuses the defendants of potentially endangering public safety by failing to cooperate closely and share sufficient information about the background of the refugees.
Donald L. Blankenship, whose leadership of the Massey Energy Company was widely criticized after 29 workers were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010, was convicted Thursday of conspiring to violate federal safety standards, becoming the most prominent American coal executive ever convicted of a crime related to mining deaths. But in a substantial defeat for the Justice Department, the verdict, announced in Federal District Court here, exonerated Mr. Blankenship, Massey’s former chief executive, of three felony charges that could have led to a prison term of 30 years. Instead, after a protracted and complex trial that began on Oct. 1, jurors convicted Mr. Blankenship only of a single misdemeanor charge that carried a maximum of a year in prison. “We are disappointed, but not as disappointed as we could have been,” said William W. Taylor III, a defense lawyer for Mr. Blankenship, who will appeal the conviction and is expected to be sentenced next spring. Mr. Blankenship was not tried on any charges that accused him of direct responsibility for the deaths at Upper Big Branch, which investigators said exploded because of improper ventilation that allowed gases to accumulate. But prosecutors argued that Mr. Blankenship’s leadership had laid the groundwork for a catastrophe. There was not necessarily a formal conspiracy, prosecutors acknowledged, but they said that Mr. Blankenship’s example and tone had set Massey on a course that put profits ahead of lives.
I hope that the judge sentences him to the full year, but somehow I doubt it.
I expect him to get probation, or possibly house arrest, which would be far less satisfying than his ass getting shivved while he is in the stir.
Prayers aren’t working. White House hopefuls on the Democratic side of the aisle called for stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino that left at least 14 dead. But after yet another mass shooting in America, GOP presidential contenders were conspicuously silent on the issue of gun control. Instead, the Republicans were preaching about prayer. ……… Democrats — even those not running for office — slammed the GOP presidential candidates for offering prayers instead of action. “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) posted on Twitter. “Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing — again.” Some critics accused Murphy of religious insensitivity, but he didn’t waver in a statement later Wednesday. “My heart aches for the people of San Bernardino,” he said. “I cannot express the profound sadness I feel each time a new community grieves and endures the same pain that brought Newtown to its knees three years ago this month.”
In addition to the Daily News‘ magnificent statement on Republicans resort to religious hypocrisy as an alternative to action.
I would like to add three bits of information to provide some perspective.
The third bit is a some historical perspective: Twice as many people were murdered in San Bernardino as were killed in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
And still, the Republican response to a call for action is, “I’m too busy praying.”
Following the release of dashcam footage of the shooting of Laquan McDonald, which took a year of court fights, the shooter Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with the first-degree murder.
The head of the Chicago Police Department was fired Tuesday amid widespread criticism over how authorities responded to the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer last year. Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he formally asked Garry F. McCarthy, the Chicago police superintendent, for his resignation on Tuesday morning, a week after video footage of the shooting was released and the officer was charged with murder. “He has become an issue, rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction,” Emanuel said. He added that while he is loyal to McCarthy, whom he praised for his leadership of the department, the needs of the city are more important. Even as the embattled Emanuel dismissed his police superintendent and made other vows of increased police accountability, announcing a task force to review police oversight, another Illinois official suggested that federal intervention was needed for the Chicago police. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan wrote a letter Tuesday asking the Justice Department to investigate possible civil rights violations by the Chicago Police Department. Anger has erupted in Chicago since authorities released footage of Jason Van Dyke, a city police officer, shooting Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old, last year. In the video, Van Dyke is seen firing a volley of shots at McDonald, many of them after the teenager had already fallen to the ground.
What is clear now that the video has been released, is that there has been an aggressive attempt to sweep everyting under the rug.
The cover-up that began 13 months ago when a Chicago police officer executed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on a busy street might well have included highly ranked officials who ordered subordinates to conceal information. But the conspiracy of concealment exposed last week when the city, under court order, finally released a video of the shooting could also be seen as a kind of autonomic response from a historically corrupt law enforcement agency that is well versed in the art of hiding misconduct, brutality — and even torture. Mayor Rahm Emanuel demonstrated a willful ignorance when he talked about the murder charges against the police officer who shot Mr. McDonald, seeking to depict the cop as a rogue officer. He showed a complete lack of comprehension on Tuesday when he explained that he had decided to fire his increasingly unpopular police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, not because he failed in his leadership role, but because he had become “a distraction.” Mr. Emanuel’s announcement that he had appointed a task force that will review the Police Department’s accountability procedures is too little, too late. The fact is, his administration, the Police Department and the prosecutor’s office have lost credibility on this case. Officials must have known what was on that video more than a year ago, and yet they saw no reason to seek a sweeping review of the police procedures until this week. ……… Justice Department officials, however, said on Tuesday that the department did not ask the city to withhold the video from the public because of its investigation. That makes this whole episode look like an attempt by the city, the police and prosecutors to keep the video under wraps, knowing the political problems it would most likely create.
I hope that this is a death knell for Emanuel’s political career, he is a cancer on Democratic Party politics, but the next election is 3 years down the road, and that is a long time in politics.
In a public post on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced Tuesday that they will donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during their lives”—an amount currently worth $45 billion—to their new charity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The organization, which seems to be modeled on the Gates Foundation, states its laudable albeit vague goal to “join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.” The announcement came in the form of a public letter to their newly born daughter Max. It addresses important long-term goals that are often stymied in the public sector, things like “advancing human potential and promoting equality.”
When Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away 99% of his Facebook shares — currently worth around $45 billion — the initial impulse from many was to assume the money would all go to charity. Indeed, very many news organizations described the donation as either going to charity, or a charitable trust. Not so, a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed in an email to BuzzFeed News. The spokeswoman further confirmed the initiative is structured as an LLC, and not as a charitable trust. While charity will certainly be one of the money’s destinations, it will be far from the only one.
It’s beginning to look more and more like a way to avoid income and inheritance taxes than anything else.
SPIEGEL: Forty super wealthy Americans have just announced that they would donate half of their assets, at the very latest after their deaths. As a person who often likes to say that rich people should be asked to contribute more to society, what were your first thoughts? Krämer: I find the US initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That’s unacceptable. SPIEGEL: But doesn’t the money that is donated serve the common good? Krämer: It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That’s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow? SPIEGEL: It is their money at the end of the day. Krämer: In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.
At least 14 people were killed and 14 others injured in a shooting at a San Bernardino, Calif., center for people with developmental disabilities, Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. (Reuters)
At least two attackers opened fire at a holiday party for county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17 others in what the city’s police chief described as an act of domestic terrorism.
Five hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials swarmed a residential neighborhood not far from the complex where the shooting occurred after police “located what appeared to be the suspects’ vehicle,” Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, a San Bernardino police spokeswoman, said during a news conference.
Officials exchanged gunfire with the suspects, she said, after finding a dark SUV that appears to match a description given by police earlier in the day. Two suspects — a man and a woman — were killed during this shootout, Jarrod Burguan, chief of the San Bernardino Police Department, said during an evening news conference.
A third person was seen running away, and it is unclear if that person was involved in the shooting today, Burguan said. That person was in custody late Wednesday afternoon, he said. Authorities were still working on seeing if there was a third person involved in the shooting or possibly any other people, he said.
For more than a year, a rare coalition of liberal groups and libertarian-minded conservatives has joined the Obama administration in pushing for the most significant liberalization of America’s criminal justice laws since the beginning of the drug war. That effort has had perhaps no ally more important than Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by a pair of brothers who are well-known conservative billionaires. Now, as Congress works to turn those goals into legislation, that joint effort is facing its most significant test — over a House bill that Koch Industries says would make the criminal justice system fairer, but that the Justice Department says would make it significantly harder to prosecute corporate polluters, producers of tainted food and other white-collar criminals. The tension among the unlikely allies emerged over the last week as the House Judiciary Committee, with bipartisan support, approved a package of bills intended to simplify the criminal code and reduce unnecessarily severe sentences. ……… One of those bills — which has been supported by Koch Industries, libertarians and business groups — would make wholesale changes to certain federal criminal laws, requiring prosecutors to prove that suspects “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful,” and did not simply unknowingly violate the law. Many laws already carry such a requirement — known as “mens rea” — but Congress left it out of many others, and libertarian groups say that has made it too easy to unknowingly violate obscure laws. Some environmentalists argue, however, that the real motive of Charles Koch, the philanthropist and the company chairman, in supporting the legislation is to block federal regulators from pursuing potential criminal actions against his family’s network of industrial and energy companies, a charge the company denies. ……… The proposed standard, Justice Department officials said, might have prevented guilty pleas in a variety of cases, such as the charges filed in 2013 against Jensen Farms of Colorado for failing to adequately clean cantaloupe, resulting in an outbreak of food-borne illness that was cited as a factor in at least 33 deaths. It also might have prevented the plea in the 2012 charges against the owner of a pharmacy who sold mislabeled, super-potent painkillers blamed in three deaths. The same powers, officials said, have allowed the government to pursue charges against major corporations, like the 2011 conviction of Guidant, the giant medical device company, for failing to report safety problems with defibrillators, used to restart heartbeats. ……… Mark V. Holden, general counsel and senior vice president at Koch Industries, acknowledged in an interview this week that the company’s efforts to pursue revisions in federal criminal law were inspired in part by a criminal case filed 15 years ago against Koch Industries claiming that it covered up releases of hazardous air pollution at a Texas oil refinery. Those charges resulted in a guilty plea by the company and a $20 million penalty. That case, Mr. Holden said, demonstrated that the Justice Department too often pursues criminal cases even when the accused had no criminal intent. The company itself discovered the problems and notified the authorities, he said, meaning the company did not knowingly violate the law.
Yeah, right.
Koch industries did nothing wrong.
If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida for you.
I was wondering when the other shoe would drop.
I kind of figured that there would be a Republican turd in the punch bowl.
International trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) need to be carefully examined piece by piece because they can take precedence over a country’s own laws. Case in point: the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Friday ruled that dolphin-safe tuna labeling rules — required by U.S. law, in an effort to protect intelligent mammals from slaughter — violate the rights of Mexican fishers. As a result, the U.S. will have to either alter the law or face sanctions from Mexico. I wrote a few weeks ago about how the “investor-state dispute settlement system” baked into trade agreements can force countries to compensate corporations when regulations cut into their profits. The long-running quarrel over tuna reveals another way that domestic laws can be overturned by trade agreements: when countries can file trade challenges on behalf of domestic industries. “This should serve as a warning against expansive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would replicate rules that undermine safeguards for wildlife, clean air, and clean water,” said the Sierra Club’s Ilana Solomon in a statement.
This short of crap is a feature of trade deals, not a bug.
Turing Pharmaceuticals AG will not reverse its decision to raise the price of a decades-old drug, Daraprim, by more than 5,000 percent, backing out of previous statements that it would cut the cost by the end of the year. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company said that the list price of Daraprim, which jumped from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill earlier this year, will not change. Instead, the company will offer hospitals up to 50 percent discounts and will make other adjustments to help patients afford Daraprim, a drug used to treat a parasitic infection and often given to HIV patients.
Out of the goodness of their hearts though, they will be selling a smaller bottle to make it a bit easier for hospitals to stock the drug.
