If they want to be a Dallas Cowboy, players will have to stand for the National Anthem
by Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
July 31, 2018
Refusing to stand for the playing of The Star Spangled Banner disrespects our flag and country. And that’s what many NFL players did all last season as a protest against police brutality. And to their shame, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and most of the team owners supported the protest on the field.
Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans, did not support the protests. In October he said, “We can't have the inmates running the prison.” He received so much flack from players throughout the league, so that he apologized for having made that remark. But then in April he said he wished he had not made that apology.
The NFL is really the UFL … Unpatriotic Football League. And one of the teams also needs a name change. No, not the Washington Redskins. It’s the New England Patriots that have sure been misnamed. Owner Bob Kraft, coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady have all supported the right of players to disrespect our flag and country by refusing to stand during the anthem. Patriots my ass!
Finally in May, after a continuing barrage of criticism and declining TV viewership of NFL games, Roger Goodell got off his ass and instituted a new National Anthem policy. All players on the field would have to stand during the anthem. Players who did not want to respect our flag and country would have to remain in the locker room until after the anthem.
The NFL Players Association (NFLPA) had a fit. Earlier this month the NFLPA filed a grievance against the NFL, claiming that “this new policy, imposed by the NFL’s governing body without consultation with the NFLPA, is inconsistent with the collective bargaining agreement and infringes on player rights.”
A spineless Goodell quickly caved in. On July 19 The NFL and NFLPA issued a joint statement which said “no new rules relating to the anthem will be issued or enforced for the next several weeks”
How disgusting! Respect for flag and country should never ever be subject to collective bargaining.
And that is how Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, must feel. On Wednesday a patriotic Jerry Jones defied an unpatriotic Roger Goodell and an unpatriotic NFLPA. He told reporters that his players would be forbidden from protesting or remaining in the locker room during The Star-Spangled Banner. “Our policy is you stand during the anthem, toe on the line.”
Stephen Jones, Jerry’s son and executive vice president of the Cowboys, said that players will have to stand “if they want to be a Dallas Cowboy.” He went on to say:
“We certainly are supportive of them when they have their personal issues or their personal things that they want to pursue. And we'll help them pursue them on Tuesdays. But when you're wearing the Dallas Cowboy uniform and a Dallas Cowboy helmet and you're working for the Dallas Cowboys, you check the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ at the door, and you're a part of a team.”
President Trump tweeted Friday morning, “Way to go Jerry. This is what the league should do!”
The NFL players have every right to publicly express their personal views on any subject. They can condemn police brutality against blacks on any street corner, on any TV news show and in interviews with the print media. And they can even express those views on the playing field in some manner, provided they have the league’s permission to do so. But they do not have the right to disrespect our flag and country in front of thousands of spectators and millions of TV viewers.
The players are employees subject to the reasonable work rules of their bosses. While salaries and playing conditions are subject to collective bargaining, respect for flag and country is not and cannot ever be subject to any kinds of negotiation.
Goodell apparently believes that inmates should run the prison. Jerry and Stephen Jones and Bob McNair believe the guards should be in charge. They are patriotic. Goodell, the protesting players and the owners and coaches who support the players make up the Unpatriotic Football League..
God bless Jerry and Stephen Jones, and God bless America!
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
POTENTIALLY FAR-REACHING TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY CASE
by Bob Walsh
Back in 1999 Patrick Murphy, who is a Creek Indian, was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of George Jacobs, also a Creek Indian. The murder occurred on land assigned to the tribe when Oklahoma was still a territory and congress never formally disestablished the tribal borders though the land has not been a reservation for a very long time.
A federal appeals court has just ruled that the case should have been tried in federal court, not state court, due to the jurisdictional issue. SCOTUS has agreed to hear the case this fall. Inmates and defendants all over Oklahoma are now filing for dismissal of charges on the same basis.
There are 38 tribes based in Oklahoma. The Creek Nation alone covered about 3 million acres, including all of modern Tulsa. If this ruling is upheld in total it would give the feds original jurisdiction over most crimes committed by or against native people over most of eight counties with a population of close to 1 million people.
__________
The Grisly Murder Case That Could Turn Half of Oklahoma Back Into Tribal Lands
Did Congress fail to legally abolish the Muscogee Creek Nation's reservation? The Supreme Court may have to answer that question.
by Matt Ford
The New Republic
March 15, 2018
In a legal quirk for the ages, a 1990s capital murder case involving two Native Americans could restore tribal sovereignty to almost half of Oklahoma for the first time in a century—unless the Supreme Court intervenes, that is.
The federal government asked the justices last Friday to review and reverse the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Royal v. Murphy, an unusual case in which Patrick Murphy, a death-row inmate and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, claimed Oklahoma lacked the jurisdiction to try him for the murder of another tribal member on what was part of the Creek Nation’s reservation.
Until now, state and federal officials assumed those boundaries no longer existed. To prepare Oklahoma for statehood in the late nineteenth century, Congress stripped the Creek Nation and other tribes in the territory of their courts, governments, and laws. The federal government also compelled the Creek to convert their tribal lands into allotments for private ownership by the tribe’s members, with the surplus land to be sold to white settlers. When Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907, state and federal power held total sway.
A three-judge panel in the Tenth Circuit ruled last summer, however, that Congress never explicitly abolished the Creek Nation’s reservation along the way. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, the judges concluded, the oversight left the reservation legally intact until the present day. As a result, the panel ruled that the defendant’s murder case could only be tried in federal courts, like other major crimes between Native Americans on tribal land under current federal law.
That was good news for Murphy, who could be retried in federal court if the ruling stands. But the Tenth Circuit’s decision has ramifications beyond a single capital case. It effectively restores the Creek Nation’s sovereign territory after a century in abeyance, handing the tribe a significant and perhaps unintentional legal victory. (Tribal officials did not return a request for comment.) The ruling also raises the possibility of sovereignty claims by other Oklahoma tribes, including the other four of what are known as the Five Civilized Tribes.
“This is something that almost all other tribes in this country have outside of Oklahoma, and this would put Oklahoma tribes on an equal footing with Indian tribes elsewhere,” Judith Royster, a University of Tulsa law professor who specializes in Indian law, told me.
A reservation delineated by the Creek Nation’s 1866 boundaries alone would fill 4,600 square miles of eastern Oklahoma and include more than 750,000 inhabitants, the state of Oklahoma told the Supreme Court in its petition for review. “The 1866 boundaries also include most of Tulsa, the State’s second largest city and home to more than 403,000 Oklahomans,” the state told the court. “A reconstituted Creek territory would be by far the largest Indian reservation by population in the United States.” If the ruling is applied to the rest of the Five Tribes, the state added, just over 40 percent of Oklahoma would become Indian country.
If the Tenth Circuit’s ruling stands, the state’s criminal jurisdiction in that territory would be reduced to minor offenses like traffic violations and crimes against non-Indians. Federal and tribal courts would take over all other cases, with serious crimes left to the federal government to investigate and prosecute. State officials cast the loss of jurisdiction in dire terms, especially if the Murphy ruling is applied to other tribes. “Stripping Oklahoma of criminal jurisdiction over all Indians in this densely populated area, or even worse, in the entire eastern half of the state, would render Oklahoma a fractured, second-class state,” Oklahoma officials told the Supreme Court.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who represents the federal government at the Supreme Court, joined the fight on Oklahoma’s side in a brief filed last week. The justices routinely invites solicitors general to weigh in on major potential cases that could affect federal law or foreign policy. This time, however, Francisco took the rare step of filing one before the court asked him for it, a move that underscores the government’s urgent interest in the case.
“The Tenth Circuit’s reasoning could well extend to the original territories of each of the Five Tribes, expanding federal jurisdiction over nearly all of eastern Oklahoma,” the solicitor general’s office warned the court. “And it could have significant implications for application of state tax and other civil laws to Indians in the former Indian Territory. The decision ... thus threatens to disrupt the distribution of governmental authority in nearly half of Oklahoma.”
Groups representing oil and gas companies and the state’s business community also urged the Supreme Court to intervene, framing the situation as economically disruptive. “By effectively declaring half the state to be Indian country, the Tenth Circuit’s decision will upend practically every aspect of Oklahoma’s legal and regulatory regime,” the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association complained in its brief.
Royster disputed that interpretation, telling me that the immediate impact on civil matters for Oklahomans would be minimal. “Nothing’s going to happen to my property, nothing’s going to happen to my day-to-day life,” she said. “Nobody except criminals and the federal courts are going to see any immediate changes because of this.”
Those effects are already apparent: State officials told the court last month that at least 46 defendants had already invoked the ruling in lawsuits challenging their own convictions.
The case’s disturbing origins didn’t hint at its unusual outcome. In 1999, an Oklahoma jury found Murphy guilty of mutilating and murdering his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, George Jacobs. Both men were members of the Creek Nation and the crime occurred within the 1866 borders. Jurors handed Murphy a death sentence, kicking off a nearly two-decade-long appeals process in state and federal courts.
Lengthy and byzantine appeals are a hallmark of American capital punishment. But Murphy presented an unusual claim along the way: that the federal government, and not the state of Oklahoma, had jurisdiction over his case. He cited the Indian Major Crimes Act, which gives the Justice Department the exclusive power to prosecute serious offenses like murder and kidnapping if they’re committed between Native Americans in “Indian country,” a federal legal term that includes reservations and other lands owned by a tribe.
For Murphy, the case’s stakes are life and death. Federal law also forbids the death penalty for crimes committed on tribal land unless the tribal government authorizes the punishment, which virtually none do. If the Tenth Circuit’s decision stands, Murphy could be retried by federal prosecutors for Jacobs’s murder—but not sentenced to death for it if he’s found guilty a second time.
The case also delves into the darkest chapters of American history. During the nineteenth century, the federal government brutally forced the Five Civilized Tribes—the Creek, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Seminole—out of their lands in the southeastern United States. From there, they migrated towards the Great Plains into what was called the Indian Territory. At the time, the federal government promised those lands to the resettled tribes in perpetuity. But influxes of white settlers—and constant accommodations of them by Congress—quickly undermined that pledge after the Civil War.
State courts acknowledged that Murphy and Jacobs were both members of Creek Nation. The Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals also held that Murphy’s historical evidence was insufficient to prove that the land on which the crime occurred was still part of Indian country. Murphy then turned to the federal courts, where he argued that the state courts had wrongly interpreted existing precedents on tribal reservations.
Last year, the Tenth Circuit panel sided with Murphy and ordered his conviction to be vacated. In a voluminous 133-page decision, the judges admonished the state courts for ignoring precedents like Solem v. Bartlett, a 1984 Supreme Court case that laid out a three-part test for disputes about Indian reservation boundaries. In Solem, the high court had unanimously ruled that each reservation continues to exist in its original form unless Congress explicitly changes its borders or abolishes it altogether.
“Only Congress can do this,” Royster explained. “And so the question is, looking at all the treaties and statutes for a particular tribe, whether Congress has done this, and in this case the Tenth Circuit said it never did. And if it never did, that post–Civil War reservation is still intact.”
The panel went through each of the three steps in turn. Did Congress explicitly disestablish the Creek reservation at any point? No, the judges concluded, because none of the statutes cited by Oklahoma include specific language to do so. Only days after legislators passed Oklahoma’s statehood act in 1906, for example, they passed laws referencing the Creek Nation’s boundaries as a point of reference in a surveying law.
Is there contemporaneous historical evidence that indicates Congress intended to disestablish the Creek reservation, even if it didn’t do so explicitly? The state cited committee reports and a failed Senate resolution from before statehood, which the panel found unpersuasive of “unequivocal” evidence of intent.
Finally, did subsequent approaches by federal, state, and tribal governments confirm disestablishment? Other federal court rulings made “scattered” references to the reservation’s dissolution, the panel acknowledged, but they hadn’t directly wrestled with the issue.
Accordingly, the panel found that the reservation survived to the present day, and that Oklahoma had wrongly convicted Murphy for a crime committed within its bounds. “The decision whether to prosecute Mr. Murphy in federal court rests with the United States,” Judge Scott Matheson concluded for the unanimous panel. “Decisions about the borders of the Creek Reservation remain with Congress.”
In November, the Tenth Circuit panel declined Oklahoma’s request to reconsider its ruling. Nonetheless, Chief Judge Timothy Tymkovich attached a concurring opinion in which he wrote that the “challenging and interesting case makes a good candidate for Supreme Court review.” The panel’s three judges faithfully applied the high court’s existing precedents to the facts at hand, he explained. At the same time, Tymkovich noted that the justices may find that “the square peg of Solem is ill suited for the round hole of Oklahoma statehood.”
If the Supreme Court takes up the dispute in the coming months, it’d likely rank among the most significant cases of the fall 2018 term. How the justices will decide the case is unclear. Perhaps the most interesting voice in the matter would be the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, who sat as a member of the Tenth Circuit before his nomination to the high court by President Donald Trump. Gorsuch’s tenure on a Western federal appellate court gave him more experience on tribal issues than most of his colleagues. His record also won the praise and support of native legal groups during his confirmation process.
“Our history with Native Americans is not the prettiest history,” Gorsuch told Arizona Senator Jeff Flake during his confirmation hearing, when asked about his experience with tribal cases. “As a judge, you try very hard to administer the law without respect to persons, equally.”
Back in 1999 Patrick Murphy, who is a Creek Indian, was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of George Jacobs, also a Creek Indian. The murder occurred on land assigned to the tribe when Oklahoma was still a territory and congress never formally disestablished the tribal borders though the land has not been a reservation for a very long time.
A federal appeals court has just ruled that the case should have been tried in federal court, not state court, due to the jurisdictional issue. SCOTUS has agreed to hear the case this fall. Inmates and defendants all over Oklahoma are now filing for dismissal of charges on the same basis.
There are 38 tribes based in Oklahoma. The Creek Nation alone covered about 3 million acres, including all of modern Tulsa. If this ruling is upheld in total it would give the feds original jurisdiction over most crimes committed by or against native people over most of eight counties with a population of close to 1 million people.
__________
The Grisly Murder Case That Could Turn Half of Oklahoma Back Into Tribal Lands
Did Congress fail to legally abolish the Muscogee Creek Nation's reservation? The Supreme Court may have to answer that question.
by Matt Ford
The New Republic
March 15, 2018
In a legal quirk for the ages, a 1990s capital murder case involving two Native Americans could restore tribal sovereignty to almost half of Oklahoma for the first time in a century—unless the Supreme Court intervenes, that is.
The federal government asked the justices last Friday to review and reverse the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Royal v. Murphy, an unusual case in which Patrick Murphy, a death-row inmate and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, claimed Oklahoma lacked the jurisdiction to try him for the murder of another tribal member on what was part of the Creek Nation’s reservation.
Until now, state and federal officials assumed those boundaries no longer existed. To prepare Oklahoma for statehood in the late nineteenth century, Congress stripped the Creek Nation and other tribes in the territory of their courts, governments, and laws. The federal government also compelled the Creek to convert their tribal lands into allotments for private ownership by the tribe’s members, with the surplus land to be sold to white settlers. When Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907, state and federal power held total sway.
A three-judge panel in the Tenth Circuit ruled last summer, however, that Congress never explicitly abolished the Creek Nation’s reservation along the way. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, the judges concluded, the oversight left the reservation legally intact until the present day. As a result, the panel ruled that the defendant’s murder case could only be tried in federal courts, like other major crimes between Native Americans on tribal land under current federal law.
That was good news for Murphy, who could be retried in federal court if the ruling stands. But the Tenth Circuit’s decision has ramifications beyond a single capital case. It effectively restores the Creek Nation’s sovereign territory after a century in abeyance, handing the tribe a significant and perhaps unintentional legal victory. (Tribal officials did not return a request for comment.) The ruling also raises the possibility of sovereignty claims by other Oklahoma tribes, including the other four of what are known as the Five Civilized Tribes.
“This is something that almost all other tribes in this country have outside of Oklahoma, and this would put Oklahoma tribes on an equal footing with Indian tribes elsewhere,” Judith Royster, a University of Tulsa law professor who specializes in Indian law, told me.
A reservation delineated by the Creek Nation’s 1866 boundaries alone would fill 4,600 square miles of eastern Oklahoma and include more than 750,000 inhabitants, the state of Oklahoma told the Supreme Court in its petition for review. “The 1866 boundaries also include most of Tulsa, the State’s second largest city and home to more than 403,000 Oklahomans,” the state told the court. “A reconstituted Creek territory would be by far the largest Indian reservation by population in the United States.” If the ruling is applied to the rest of the Five Tribes, the state added, just over 40 percent of Oklahoma would become Indian country.
If the Tenth Circuit’s ruling stands, the state’s criminal jurisdiction in that territory would be reduced to minor offenses like traffic violations and crimes against non-Indians. Federal and tribal courts would take over all other cases, with serious crimes left to the federal government to investigate and prosecute. State officials cast the loss of jurisdiction in dire terms, especially if the Murphy ruling is applied to other tribes. “Stripping Oklahoma of criminal jurisdiction over all Indians in this densely populated area, or even worse, in the entire eastern half of the state, would render Oklahoma a fractured, second-class state,” Oklahoma officials told the Supreme Court.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who represents the federal government at the Supreme Court, joined the fight on Oklahoma’s side in a brief filed last week. The justices routinely invites solicitors general to weigh in on major potential cases that could affect federal law or foreign policy. This time, however, Francisco took the rare step of filing one before the court asked him for it, a move that underscores the government’s urgent interest in the case.
“The Tenth Circuit’s reasoning could well extend to the original territories of each of the Five Tribes, expanding federal jurisdiction over nearly all of eastern Oklahoma,” the solicitor general’s office warned the court. “And it could have significant implications for application of state tax and other civil laws to Indians in the former Indian Territory. The decision ... thus threatens to disrupt the distribution of governmental authority in nearly half of Oklahoma.”
Groups representing oil and gas companies and the state’s business community also urged the Supreme Court to intervene, framing the situation as economically disruptive. “By effectively declaring half the state to be Indian country, the Tenth Circuit’s decision will upend practically every aspect of Oklahoma’s legal and regulatory regime,” the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association complained in its brief.
Royster disputed that interpretation, telling me that the immediate impact on civil matters for Oklahomans would be minimal. “Nothing’s going to happen to my property, nothing’s going to happen to my day-to-day life,” she said. “Nobody except criminals and the federal courts are going to see any immediate changes because of this.”
Those effects are already apparent: State officials told the court last month that at least 46 defendants had already invoked the ruling in lawsuits challenging their own convictions.
The case’s disturbing origins didn’t hint at its unusual outcome. In 1999, an Oklahoma jury found Murphy guilty of mutilating and murdering his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, George Jacobs. Both men were members of the Creek Nation and the crime occurred within the 1866 borders. Jurors handed Murphy a death sentence, kicking off a nearly two-decade-long appeals process in state and federal courts.
Lengthy and byzantine appeals are a hallmark of American capital punishment. But Murphy presented an unusual claim along the way: that the federal government, and not the state of Oklahoma, had jurisdiction over his case. He cited the Indian Major Crimes Act, which gives the Justice Department the exclusive power to prosecute serious offenses like murder and kidnapping if they’re committed between Native Americans in “Indian country,” a federal legal term that includes reservations and other lands owned by a tribe.
For Murphy, the case’s stakes are life and death. Federal law also forbids the death penalty for crimes committed on tribal land unless the tribal government authorizes the punishment, which virtually none do. If the Tenth Circuit’s decision stands, Murphy could be retried by federal prosecutors for Jacobs’s murder—but not sentenced to death for it if he’s found guilty a second time.
The case also delves into the darkest chapters of American history. During the nineteenth century, the federal government brutally forced the Five Civilized Tribes—the Creek, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Seminole—out of their lands in the southeastern United States. From there, they migrated towards the Great Plains into what was called the Indian Territory. At the time, the federal government promised those lands to the resettled tribes in perpetuity. But influxes of white settlers—and constant accommodations of them by Congress—quickly undermined that pledge after the Civil War.
State courts acknowledged that Murphy and Jacobs were both members of Creek Nation. The Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals also held that Murphy’s historical evidence was insufficient to prove that the land on which the crime occurred was still part of Indian country. Murphy then turned to the federal courts, where he argued that the state courts had wrongly interpreted existing precedents on tribal reservations.
Last year, the Tenth Circuit panel sided with Murphy and ordered his conviction to be vacated. In a voluminous 133-page decision, the judges admonished the state courts for ignoring precedents like Solem v. Bartlett, a 1984 Supreme Court case that laid out a three-part test for disputes about Indian reservation boundaries. In Solem, the high court had unanimously ruled that each reservation continues to exist in its original form unless Congress explicitly changes its borders or abolishes it altogether.
“Only Congress can do this,” Royster explained. “And so the question is, looking at all the treaties and statutes for a particular tribe, whether Congress has done this, and in this case the Tenth Circuit said it never did. And if it never did, that post–Civil War reservation is still intact.”
The panel went through each of the three steps in turn. Did Congress explicitly disestablish the Creek reservation at any point? No, the judges concluded, because none of the statutes cited by Oklahoma include specific language to do so. Only days after legislators passed Oklahoma’s statehood act in 1906, for example, they passed laws referencing the Creek Nation’s boundaries as a point of reference in a surveying law.
Is there contemporaneous historical evidence that indicates Congress intended to disestablish the Creek reservation, even if it didn’t do so explicitly? The state cited committee reports and a failed Senate resolution from before statehood, which the panel found unpersuasive of “unequivocal” evidence of intent.
Finally, did subsequent approaches by federal, state, and tribal governments confirm disestablishment? Other federal court rulings made “scattered” references to the reservation’s dissolution, the panel acknowledged, but they hadn’t directly wrestled with the issue.
Accordingly, the panel found that the reservation survived to the present day, and that Oklahoma had wrongly convicted Murphy for a crime committed within its bounds. “The decision whether to prosecute Mr. Murphy in federal court rests with the United States,” Judge Scott Matheson concluded for the unanimous panel. “Decisions about the borders of the Creek Reservation remain with Congress.”
In November, the Tenth Circuit panel declined Oklahoma’s request to reconsider its ruling. Nonetheless, Chief Judge Timothy Tymkovich attached a concurring opinion in which he wrote that the “challenging and interesting case makes a good candidate for Supreme Court review.” The panel’s three judges faithfully applied the high court’s existing precedents to the facts at hand, he explained. At the same time, Tymkovich noted that the justices may find that “the square peg of Solem is ill suited for the round hole of Oklahoma statehood.”
If the Supreme Court takes up the dispute in the coming months, it’d likely rank among the most significant cases of the fall 2018 term. How the justices will decide the case is unclear. Perhaps the most interesting voice in the matter would be the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, who sat as a member of the Tenth Circuit before his nomination to the high court by President Donald Trump. Gorsuch’s tenure on a Western federal appellate court gave him more experience on tribal issues than most of his colleagues. His record also won the praise and support of native legal groups during his confirmation process.
“Our history with Native Americans is not the prettiest history,” Gorsuch told Arizona Senator Jeff Flake during his confirmation hearing, when asked about his experience with tribal cases. “As a judge, you try very hard to administer the law without respect to persons, equally.”
MOST URBAN BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS ARE SHITHOLES … BUT RICK SHAFTAN IS A DISGUSTING RACIST
Spokesman for controversial senate candidate Corey Stewart calls Baltimore, New Orleans and Memphis 'shitholes' and says business would be 'fools' to open in black neighborhoods
By Nic White
Daily Mail
July 30, 2018
A spokesman for controversial senate candidate Corey Stewart called three majority-black U.S. cities 'shitholes'.
Rick Shaftan derided Baltimore, New Orleans, and Memphis in a series of tweets this year while working to get the Virginia candidate elected.
He reserved particular ire for Louisiana's biggest city: 'You can run your gang-infested shithole without our tourist dollars and soon, our tax dollars.'
Mr Shaftan was using the word President Donald Trump used to describe countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries in an anti-immigration tweet.
The racist posts were yet another gaffe in Mr Stewart's scandal-plagued campaign that has seen him pilloried as a white supremacist by Democrats.
Mr Shaftan is no stranger to openly denigrating black people and the neighborhoods they live in on his social media accounts.
Following the riots in Ferguson in response to police shooting an unarmed black man, he repeatedly warned businesses not to open in black neighborhoods.
'After Ferguson, only a fool would start, finance or insure a business in a black neighborhood,' one of them read.
In response to news of a 2011 robbery he wrote: 'Another reason why white people (and Asians and Latinos) don't want to live with black people. #TheTruthHurts #Reality'
He also branded the NCAAP as the 'black KKK, only more violent' in a 2010 tweet.
Shaftan has a history of support controversial candidates, including far-right congress hopeful Paul Nehlen and accused pedophile Roy Moore.
He worked on a political action committee that supported Mr Nehlen, who has long expressed anti-Muslim views.
From late 2017 Mr Nehlen also started sharing anti-Semitic posts including an image of Jews' heads on pikes in the Oval Office.
'I was with [America Speaks PAC] back in 2016 where we boosted Nehlen. There was no sign he was anything other than a Trump guy, pretty much,' Mr Shaftan told the Daily Beast.
'I made an ad for him, I think in November, before he went wacko.'
Numerous other staffers for Mr Stewart's campaign have been exposed as having racist, anti-Semitic, or white supremacist views.
They include one who was a member of a chat group planning a sequel to the deadly Charlottesville rally, and another who praised the president of the American Nazi Party.
Mr Stewart's campaign also awarded Volunteer of the Month to a man with links to neo-Nazi groups.
By Nic White
Daily Mail
July 30, 2018
A spokesman for controversial senate candidate Corey Stewart called three majority-black U.S. cities 'shitholes'.
Rick Shaftan derided Baltimore, New Orleans, and Memphis in a series of tweets this year while working to get the Virginia candidate elected.
He reserved particular ire for Louisiana's biggest city: 'You can run your gang-infested shithole without our tourist dollars and soon, our tax dollars.'
Mr Shaftan was using the word President Donald Trump used to describe countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries in an anti-immigration tweet.
The racist posts were yet another gaffe in Mr Stewart's scandal-plagued campaign that has seen him pilloried as a white supremacist by Democrats.
Mr Shaftan is no stranger to openly denigrating black people and the neighborhoods they live in on his social media accounts.
Following the riots in Ferguson in response to police shooting an unarmed black man, he repeatedly warned businesses not to open in black neighborhoods.
'After Ferguson, only a fool would start, finance or insure a business in a black neighborhood,' one of them read.
In response to news of a 2011 robbery he wrote: 'Another reason why white people (and Asians and Latinos) don't want to live with black people. #TheTruthHurts #Reality'
He also branded the NCAAP as the 'black KKK, only more violent' in a 2010 tweet.
Shaftan has a history of support controversial candidates, including far-right congress hopeful Paul Nehlen and accused pedophile Roy Moore.
He worked on a political action committee that supported Mr Nehlen, who has long expressed anti-Muslim views.
From late 2017 Mr Nehlen also started sharing anti-Semitic posts including an image of Jews' heads on pikes in the Oval Office.
'I was with [America Speaks PAC] back in 2016 where we boosted Nehlen. There was no sign he was anything other than a Trump guy, pretty much,' Mr Shaftan told the Daily Beast.
'I made an ad for him, I think in November, before he went wacko.'
Numerous other staffers for Mr Stewart's campaign have been exposed as having racist, anti-Semitic, or white supremacist views.
They include one who was a member of a chat group planning a sequel to the deadly Charlottesville rally, and another who praised the president of the American Nazi Party.
Mr Stewart's campaign also awarded Volunteer of the Month to a man with links to neo-Nazi groups.
ISRAEL’S ORTHODOX RABBIS IN LOCKSTEP WITH AMERICA’S CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES
Outrage in Israel After Rabbis Call LGBT Community 'Perverts'
Israel Today
July 30, 2018
The more liberal and progressive elements in Israeli society are fuming after a group of 200 leading rabbis published a letter labeling homosexuals as "perverts."
As a nation, Israel prides itself on tolerance toward and acceptance of homosexuals. There are openly-gay members of Knesset; the IDF touts its integration of the LGBT community; Tel Aviv is advertised by the Israel Ministry of Tourism as a top gay travel destination; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently highlighted Israel's homosexual credentials at the American Jewish Committee conference.
But Netanyahu and his Likud Party also helped defeat a motion to include homosexuals in a new amendment to Israel's surrogacy laws. The amendment enables single would-be mothers to now make use of surrogacy on the state's dime. Homosexuals hoped to be included in the new regulations, and took to the streets of Tel Aviv in mass protest when the Knesset rejected their appeals.
In response to the liberal outcry, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Aryeh Stern insisted that children born to gay couples would "enter a very strange and unnatural life," and that the government of Israel shouldn't be party to such a "wretched" state of affairs.
Rabbi Stern faced a severe backlash, which prompted the 200 prominent fellow rabbis to come to his defense in a letter reading:
"[Rabbi Stern] spoke simply about the eternal truth of our holy Torah and human normalcy, which the healthy majority of the State of Israel identifies with, and which is outraged by the provocations of the organizations of abomination, who carry out impudent marches in the cities of Israel and even arrange marches of abomination on the Fast of Av, a day of national mourning for the Temple which was destroyed in part due to illicit sexual relations and baseless hatred.
"The media's brainwashing that seeks to destroy the concept of family and turn perverts into heroes will not succeed, and nor will the attempt to silence rabbis and sane people and turn them into delusional extremists."
The letter was swiftly condemned by left-wing and centrist lawmakers in the Knesset, and a petition was started demanding that any of the 200 rabbis who draw a government salary should be fired immediately.
Israel Today
July 30, 2018
The more liberal and progressive elements in Israeli society are fuming after a group of 200 leading rabbis published a letter labeling homosexuals as "perverts."
As a nation, Israel prides itself on tolerance toward and acceptance of homosexuals. There are openly-gay members of Knesset; the IDF touts its integration of the LGBT community; Tel Aviv is advertised by the Israel Ministry of Tourism as a top gay travel destination; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently highlighted Israel's homosexual credentials at the American Jewish Committee conference.
But Netanyahu and his Likud Party also helped defeat a motion to include homosexuals in a new amendment to Israel's surrogacy laws. The amendment enables single would-be mothers to now make use of surrogacy on the state's dime. Homosexuals hoped to be included in the new regulations, and took to the streets of Tel Aviv in mass protest when the Knesset rejected their appeals.
In response to the liberal outcry, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Aryeh Stern insisted that children born to gay couples would "enter a very strange and unnatural life," and that the government of Israel shouldn't be party to such a "wretched" state of affairs.
Rabbi Stern faced a severe backlash, which prompted the 200 prominent fellow rabbis to come to his defense in a letter reading:
"[Rabbi Stern] spoke simply about the eternal truth of our holy Torah and human normalcy, which the healthy majority of the State of Israel identifies with, and which is outraged by the provocations of the organizations of abomination, who carry out impudent marches in the cities of Israel and even arrange marches of abomination on the Fast of Av, a day of national mourning for the Temple which was destroyed in part due to illicit sexual relations and baseless hatred.
"The media's brainwashing that seeks to destroy the concept of family and turn perverts into heroes will not succeed, and nor will the attempt to silence rabbis and sane people and turn them into delusional extremists."
The letter was swiftly condemned by left-wing and centrist lawmakers in the Knesset, and a petition was started demanding that any of the 200 rabbis who draw a government salary should be fired immediately.
Monday, July 30, 2018
JUST A BUGATTI OIL CHANGE
An oil and filter change on this car costs $21,000. But as you saw on this video, it's not a do-it-yourself job.
POISON TOOTHPASTE, PRISONERS HYPNOTISED TO KILL
How Mossad, Israel's secret service, has become the world leader in assassins with 800 operations in the last decade
By Dominic Sandbrook
Daily Mail
July 28, 2018
Forty years ago, Wadie Haddad was one of the world’s most wanted men. Bold, determined, ruthless, Haddad was the founder of the far-Left Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
He trained notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal and masterminded the hijack of an Air France plane that was flown to Entebbe in Uganda and later rescued by Israeli commandos.
Not surprisingly, the Israeli secret service, Mossad, wanted him dead. But six years after they first put out a ‘kill order’, Haddad was still very much alive, living in apparent comfort in Baghdad.
What happened next was worthy of a James Bond thriller. On January 10, 1978, a Mossad agent inside Haddad’s inner circle, known only as Sadness, switched his toothpaste for an identical tube laced with a deadly toxin, developed in a secret laboratory near Tel Aviv.
Every time Haddad brushed his teeth, a tiny quantity of the toxin worked its way through his gums into his bloodstream.
Little by little, he began to die. His Palestinian friends contacted the East German secret police, who flew him to a hospital in East Berlin. Ten days later, bleeding from every orifice, Haddad died in agony.
The doctors were baffled. But back in Israel, Mossad congratulated itself on a job well done.
What happened to Haddad, argues Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in a riveting new book, was merely the most melodramatic example of what is now an enduring pattern.
Israel, a country born in bloodshed, has become the world leader in assassinations.
The numbers alone are extraordinary. Not only have Mossad’s secret agents killed more people than the agents of any other state since World War II, but the pace has rapidly increased, with some 800 operations in the past decade.
The number of deaths will never be known for sure, but they are in the thousands.
There is, of course, something irresistibly fascinating about the idea of the globe-trotting secret agent, moving through the murky world of Middle Eastern politics with a licence to kill. And some of Bergman’s stories do have the flavour of a Hollywood spy blockbuster.
One operation in 1968 was directly inspired by the film The Manchurian Candidate, with Mossad hiring a Swedish-born psychologist to brainwash a Palestinian prisoner into murdering Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
The psychologist picked a suitable prisoner and spent three months hypnotising him with the simple message: ‘Arafat bad. He must be removed’.
The prisoner, known only as Fatkhi, was trained to shoot at pictures of Arafat, hidden in a specially prepared room.
On December 19, 1968, a Mossad team smuggled Fatkhi across the River Jordan, from where he was supposed to infiltrate Arafat’s headquarters.
Then they waited. Five hours later, news came. Fatkhi had wasted no time. He had gone straight to a police station and accused Mossad of trying to brainwash him. The operation was an abject failure.
In recent years, however, Mossad has lived up to its reputation as the most efficient secret killing machine in the world. One operation in Dubai proves the point. In January 2010, a team of several dozen Mossad agents flew to the oil-rich emirate on false passports, wearing wigs and false moustaches.
Disguised as tourists and tennis players — some of them even carried racquets — they broke into a room at the luxurious Al-Bustan Hotel.
There they waited for their quarry, top Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. As soon as al-Mabhouh let himself into his room, they grabbed him and used a high-tech ultrasound instrument to inject poison into his neck without even breaking the skin.
He died within moments. Four hours later, most of the team had already flown out of Dubai. Job done.
All this might sound swashbuckling or heroic. In reality, there is nothing glamorous about Bergman’s story.
Indeed, the first man to die in his book is not some Palestinian terrorist or Left-wing extremist. It is a British policeman: Detective Superintendent Tom Wilkin, from Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast.
In the autumn of 1944, Wilkin was in Jerusalem, where he was in charge of cracking down on Zionist guerillas.
At the time, Jerusalem was part of British-governed Palestine, where the authorities were struggling to keep a lid on the tensions between Zionists — who wanted an independent Jewish state — and their Palestinian neighbours.
To the Jewish militants in the terrorist Stern Gang, Wilkin was not a man. He was a target. In September, 1944, as he was strolling down a street, a boy sitting outside a grocery store threw down his hat — a sign the target was in range.
Moments later, two young Jewish men opened fire with revolvers. Wilkin ‘managed to turn around and draw his pistol,’ one assailant, David Shomron, recalled, ‘but then he fell face first. A spurt of blood came out of his forehead, like a fountain.’
Shomron did not feel the slightest remorse. ‘Not even a little twinge of guilt,’ he said later. ‘We believed the more coffins that reached London, the closer the day of freedom would be.’
That terrible phrase — ‘the more coffins that reached London’ — captures the mood of Bergman’s book. For, as cold-blooded as this sounds, Shomron was proved right.
Faced with a wave of killings, including the infamous 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 mostly British officials were killed, Clement Attlee’s government decided to get out. The Zionists got what they wanted.
But the blood that gushed from poor Tom Wilkin’s head would soon become a torrent.
The state of Israel was born amid brutal ethnic cleansing, with Jewish and Palestinian neighbours slaughtering one another in their thousands, while the new country’s Arab neighbours tried to strangle it at birth. It is hardly surprising that, ever since, Israel’s leaders have been driven by insecurity. After all, Israel has always been surrounded by hostile states, most of which deny that it even has the right to exist.
On top of that, no Israeli can ever forget the awful shadow of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis.
Even today, hatred of Jews remains a monstrous feature of Europe’s political landscape — as evidenced by the appalling goings-on inside the Labour Party, where leader Jeremy Corbyn and his friends have turned a blind eye to the resurgence of the most poisonous anti- Semitism. No wonder, then, that in the struggle for survival, Israel’s leaders have reached so often for the bomb and bullet.
‘If someone comes to kill you,’ says the sacred Jewish text, the Talmud, ‘rise up and kill him first.’
As Bergman argues, that has been the principle guiding Mossad, as well as Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet and the army intelligence agency Aman, since the state’s foundation 70 years ago.
Former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who ordered hundreds of assassinations between 2002 and 2011, kept a picture of his Polish-born grandfather, on his knees and surrounded by German soldiers, moments before he was shot and thrown into a mass grave.
The lesson, Dagan told Bergman before his death in 2016, was that ‘most of the Jews in the Holocaust died without fighting. We must never reach that situation again, kneeling, without the ability to fight for our lives.’
Bergman’s own story, by the way, is fascinating. Although this book has earned him a reputation as a whistle-blower, he is the very antithesis of a simplistic, bleeding-hearted activist.
Born in 1972 to parents who were both Holocaust survivors, he did his national service in the intelligence unit of Israel’s Military Police Corps, has a PhD from Cambridge and is now a senior correspondent for Israel’s largest newspaper.
Based on 1,000 interviews and vast numbers of leaked documents, his book often reads like a John le Carre novel. But it took considerable courage for him to publish it.
While he was working on it, the chief of the Israel Defense Forces accused him of ‘aggravated espionage’ and even asked the security services to take action against him.
Why? The reason is that Bergman sheds an unsparing light on the human cost of Israel’s targeted killings policy. He shows, for example, that when operations have taken place overseas, Israel’s agents were, and probably still are, unforgivably casual about civilian victims.
Perhaps the most chilling section of his book concerns an operation in 1973 — and which was about as far from the glamour and romance of a James Bond thriller as you could possibly imagine.
That summer, Mossad was on the hunt for Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the most wanted men in the world. Salameh was chief of operations for Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
Mossad wanted him dead, but the trail had gone cold. Then came a miracle. In Lillehammer, Norway, an Israeli secret agent spotted Salameh in a cafe. Word went back to Tel Aviv and a hit squad was assembled. On July 21, as Salameh and his girlfriend got off a bus on their way home from the cinema, the assassins were waiting in a rented Volvo. They leaped out of the car, fired eight shots, jumped back in their car and screeched away, leaving their target in a pool of blood.
It was almost the perfect hit, but for just one problem. They had killed the wrong man.
It was not Salameh, but Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter with a heavily pregnant wife.
In the aftermath, Norwegian police arrested six Israeli agents. Five served time in Norway, though all were released quickly under a secret deal. When the five returned to Israel, they were greeted as heroes. Few questioned the basic morality of the operation; it was just a shame, they thought, that Mossad had got the wrong man.
But they did get him eventually. On January 22, 1979, Salameh had just left his Beirut apartment when a female Israeli agent, watching from her balcony, pressed a button and a gigantic car bomb ripped through the street.
Eight bystanders were also killed, including a German nun and a British student, but nobody at Mossad cared. ‘You get used to killing,’ explains former security chief Ami Ayalon. ‘Human life becomes easy to dispose of. You spend a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes, on who to kill.’
In a chillingly familiar phrase, Ayalon even calls this the ‘banality of evil’ — words borrowed from the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, who used it to describe the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. That tells its own story.
And although Bergman shows why decent people can feel they have no choice but to take terrible decisions, he also shows the consequences of crossing the line between good and evil.
In the early Eighties, for example, Israeli defence minister, and later prime minister, Ariel Sharon’s obsession with killing Yasser Arafat led him into one of the darkest chapters in Israel’s modern history. At the time, Israel was embroiled in a horrific civil war in Lebanon, which killed at least 120,000 people.
There, on Sharon’s orders, his army colluded with the local Christian Phalange, a militia who murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslims in a Beirut slaughterhouse, cut off their ears as souvenirs and buried their bodies in lime pits. Almost incredibly, Sharon did not stop there.
Some of Bergman’s interviewees told him that on five occasions in 1982, Sharon seriously contemplated shooting down an ordinary civilian airliner when he heard that Arafat might be aboard.
On each occasion the Israeli military refused to obey, sometimes deliberately dithering until it was too late. Had they not done so, hundreds of ordinary passengers would have died in what Bergman calls ‘an intentional war crime’.
No doubt all this will be grist to the mill of Israel’s critics. On the Left, in particular, criticism of Israel has become an automatic reflex, often tinged with more than a hint of anti-Semitism.
There are, of course, good reasons to be critical of Israel. I find it impossible to justify its harsh treatment of the defeated Palestinians, or its callous, cynical policy of expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Yet after all the Jews have suffered — pogroms, persecution and the unspeakable obscenity of the Holocaust — what reasonable person would begrudge them a homeland of their own?
And who can blame them for fighting to defend that homeland from those who would destroy it?
Ever since 1948, as Bergman himself points out, the threats to Israel’s existence have been only too real. One of his book’s most powerful images is a picture of an Israeli woman, drenched in her own blood, being carried away after a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
Sharon used to show it to foreign diplomats whenever they questioned Israel’s targeted assassination programme. Given Israel’s bloody history and dangerous present, I understand why its agents feel they must act as they do.
The question, though, is whether the killings are working. For the past 70 years, the deaths have piled up, yet still there is no peace. The blood flows, but still Israel is not safe.
Its enemies, of course, deserve a large share of the blame. But perhaps killing has become so easy that Israel’s leaders have stopped looking for other solutions. Either way, the end is nowhere in sight — and so Mossad’s killings go on. Because of their secretive nature, they rarely make the headlines.
But even as you are reading these words, someone, somewhere, is planning the next hit.
Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman is available in bookstores and Amazon.com.
By Dominic Sandbrook
Daily Mail
July 28, 2018
Forty years ago, Wadie Haddad was one of the world’s most wanted men. Bold, determined, ruthless, Haddad was the founder of the far-Left Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
He trained notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal and masterminded the hijack of an Air France plane that was flown to Entebbe in Uganda and later rescued by Israeli commandos.
Not surprisingly, the Israeli secret service, Mossad, wanted him dead. But six years after they first put out a ‘kill order’, Haddad was still very much alive, living in apparent comfort in Baghdad.
What happened next was worthy of a James Bond thriller. On January 10, 1978, a Mossad agent inside Haddad’s inner circle, known only as Sadness, switched his toothpaste for an identical tube laced with a deadly toxin, developed in a secret laboratory near Tel Aviv.
Every time Haddad brushed his teeth, a tiny quantity of the toxin worked its way through his gums into his bloodstream.
Little by little, he began to die. His Palestinian friends contacted the East German secret police, who flew him to a hospital in East Berlin. Ten days later, bleeding from every orifice, Haddad died in agony.
The doctors were baffled. But back in Israel, Mossad congratulated itself on a job well done.
What happened to Haddad, argues Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in a riveting new book, was merely the most melodramatic example of what is now an enduring pattern.
Israel, a country born in bloodshed, has become the world leader in assassinations.
The numbers alone are extraordinary. Not only have Mossad’s secret agents killed more people than the agents of any other state since World War II, but the pace has rapidly increased, with some 800 operations in the past decade.
The number of deaths will never be known for sure, but they are in the thousands.
There is, of course, something irresistibly fascinating about the idea of the globe-trotting secret agent, moving through the murky world of Middle Eastern politics with a licence to kill. And some of Bergman’s stories do have the flavour of a Hollywood spy blockbuster.
One operation in 1968 was directly inspired by the film The Manchurian Candidate, with Mossad hiring a Swedish-born psychologist to brainwash a Palestinian prisoner into murdering Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
The psychologist picked a suitable prisoner and spent three months hypnotising him with the simple message: ‘Arafat bad. He must be removed’.
The prisoner, known only as Fatkhi, was trained to shoot at pictures of Arafat, hidden in a specially prepared room.
On December 19, 1968, a Mossad team smuggled Fatkhi across the River Jordan, from where he was supposed to infiltrate Arafat’s headquarters.
Then they waited. Five hours later, news came. Fatkhi had wasted no time. He had gone straight to a police station and accused Mossad of trying to brainwash him. The operation was an abject failure.
In recent years, however, Mossad has lived up to its reputation as the most efficient secret killing machine in the world. One operation in Dubai proves the point. In January 2010, a team of several dozen Mossad agents flew to the oil-rich emirate on false passports, wearing wigs and false moustaches.
Disguised as tourists and tennis players — some of them even carried racquets — they broke into a room at the luxurious Al-Bustan Hotel.
There they waited for their quarry, top Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. As soon as al-Mabhouh let himself into his room, they grabbed him and used a high-tech ultrasound instrument to inject poison into his neck without even breaking the skin.
He died within moments. Four hours later, most of the team had already flown out of Dubai. Job done.
All this might sound swashbuckling or heroic. In reality, there is nothing glamorous about Bergman’s story.
Indeed, the first man to die in his book is not some Palestinian terrorist or Left-wing extremist. It is a British policeman: Detective Superintendent Tom Wilkin, from Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast.
In the autumn of 1944, Wilkin was in Jerusalem, where he was in charge of cracking down on Zionist guerillas.
At the time, Jerusalem was part of British-governed Palestine, where the authorities were struggling to keep a lid on the tensions between Zionists — who wanted an independent Jewish state — and their Palestinian neighbours.
To the Jewish militants in the terrorist Stern Gang, Wilkin was not a man. He was a target. In September, 1944, as he was strolling down a street, a boy sitting outside a grocery store threw down his hat — a sign the target was in range.
Moments later, two young Jewish men opened fire with revolvers. Wilkin ‘managed to turn around and draw his pistol,’ one assailant, David Shomron, recalled, ‘but then he fell face first. A spurt of blood came out of his forehead, like a fountain.’
Shomron did not feel the slightest remorse. ‘Not even a little twinge of guilt,’ he said later. ‘We believed the more coffins that reached London, the closer the day of freedom would be.’
That terrible phrase — ‘the more coffins that reached London’ — captures the mood of Bergman’s book. For, as cold-blooded as this sounds, Shomron was proved right.
Faced with a wave of killings, including the infamous 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 mostly British officials were killed, Clement Attlee’s government decided to get out. The Zionists got what they wanted.
But the blood that gushed from poor Tom Wilkin’s head would soon become a torrent.
The state of Israel was born amid brutal ethnic cleansing, with Jewish and Palestinian neighbours slaughtering one another in their thousands, while the new country’s Arab neighbours tried to strangle it at birth. It is hardly surprising that, ever since, Israel’s leaders have been driven by insecurity. After all, Israel has always been surrounded by hostile states, most of which deny that it even has the right to exist.
On top of that, no Israeli can ever forget the awful shadow of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis.
Even today, hatred of Jews remains a monstrous feature of Europe’s political landscape — as evidenced by the appalling goings-on inside the Labour Party, where leader Jeremy Corbyn and his friends have turned a blind eye to the resurgence of the most poisonous anti- Semitism. No wonder, then, that in the struggle for survival, Israel’s leaders have reached so often for the bomb and bullet.
‘If someone comes to kill you,’ says the sacred Jewish text, the Talmud, ‘rise up and kill him first.’
As Bergman argues, that has been the principle guiding Mossad, as well as Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet and the army intelligence agency Aman, since the state’s foundation 70 years ago.
Former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who ordered hundreds of assassinations between 2002 and 2011, kept a picture of his Polish-born grandfather, on his knees and surrounded by German soldiers, moments before he was shot and thrown into a mass grave.
The lesson, Dagan told Bergman before his death in 2016, was that ‘most of the Jews in the Holocaust died without fighting. We must never reach that situation again, kneeling, without the ability to fight for our lives.’
Bergman’s own story, by the way, is fascinating. Although this book has earned him a reputation as a whistle-blower, he is the very antithesis of a simplistic, bleeding-hearted activist.
Born in 1972 to parents who were both Holocaust survivors, he did his national service in the intelligence unit of Israel’s Military Police Corps, has a PhD from Cambridge and is now a senior correspondent for Israel’s largest newspaper.
Based on 1,000 interviews and vast numbers of leaked documents, his book often reads like a John le Carre novel. But it took considerable courage for him to publish it.
While he was working on it, the chief of the Israel Defense Forces accused him of ‘aggravated espionage’ and even asked the security services to take action against him.
Why? The reason is that Bergman sheds an unsparing light on the human cost of Israel’s targeted killings policy. He shows, for example, that when operations have taken place overseas, Israel’s agents were, and probably still are, unforgivably casual about civilian victims.
Perhaps the most chilling section of his book concerns an operation in 1973 — and which was about as far from the glamour and romance of a James Bond thriller as you could possibly imagine.
That summer, Mossad was on the hunt for Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the most wanted men in the world. Salameh was chief of operations for Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group that murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
Mossad wanted him dead, but the trail had gone cold. Then came a miracle. In Lillehammer, Norway, an Israeli secret agent spotted Salameh in a cafe. Word went back to Tel Aviv and a hit squad was assembled. On July 21, as Salameh and his girlfriend got off a bus on their way home from the cinema, the assassins were waiting in a rented Volvo. They leaped out of the car, fired eight shots, jumped back in their car and screeched away, leaving their target in a pool of blood.
It was almost the perfect hit, but for just one problem. They had killed the wrong man.
It was not Salameh, but Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter with a heavily pregnant wife.
In the aftermath, Norwegian police arrested six Israeli agents. Five served time in Norway, though all were released quickly under a secret deal. When the five returned to Israel, they were greeted as heroes. Few questioned the basic morality of the operation; it was just a shame, they thought, that Mossad had got the wrong man.
But they did get him eventually. On January 22, 1979, Salameh had just left his Beirut apartment when a female Israeli agent, watching from her balcony, pressed a button and a gigantic car bomb ripped through the street.
Eight bystanders were also killed, including a German nun and a British student, but nobody at Mossad cared. ‘You get used to killing,’ explains former security chief Ami Ayalon. ‘Human life becomes easy to dispose of. You spend a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes, on who to kill.’
In a chillingly familiar phrase, Ayalon even calls this the ‘banality of evil’ — words borrowed from the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, who used it to describe the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. That tells its own story.
And although Bergman shows why decent people can feel they have no choice but to take terrible decisions, he also shows the consequences of crossing the line between good and evil.
In the early Eighties, for example, Israeli defence minister, and later prime minister, Ariel Sharon’s obsession with killing Yasser Arafat led him into one of the darkest chapters in Israel’s modern history. At the time, Israel was embroiled in a horrific civil war in Lebanon, which killed at least 120,000 people.
There, on Sharon’s orders, his army colluded with the local Christian Phalange, a militia who murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslims in a Beirut slaughterhouse, cut off their ears as souvenirs and buried their bodies in lime pits. Almost incredibly, Sharon did not stop there.
Some of Bergman’s interviewees told him that on five occasions in 1982, Sharon seriously contemplated shooting down an ordinary civilian airliner when he heard that Arafat might be aboard.
On each occasion the Israeli military refused to obey, sometimes deliberately dithering until it was too late. Had they not done so, hundreds of ordinary passengers would have died in what Bergman calls ‘an intentional war crime’.
No doubt all this will be grist to the mill of Israel’s critics. On the Left, in particular, criticism of Israel has become an automatic reflex, often tinged with more than a hint of anti-Semitism.
There are, of course, good reasons to be critical of Israel. I find it impossible to justify its harsh treatment of the defeated Palestinians, or its callous, cynical policy of expanding Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Yet after all the Jews have suffered — pogroms, persecution and the unspeakable obscenity of the Holocaust — what reasonable person would begrudge them a homeland of their own?
And who can blame them for fighting to defend that homeland from those who would destroy it?
Ever since 1948, as Bergman himself points out, the threats to Israel’s existence have been only too real. One of his book’s most powerful images is a picture of an Israeli woman, drenched in her own blood, being carried away after a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
Sharon used to show it to foreign diplomats whenever they questioned Israel’s targeted assassination programme. Given Israel’s bloody history and dangerous present, I understand why its agents feel they must act as they do.
The question, though, is whether the killings are working. For the past 70 years, the deaths have piled up, yet still there is no peace. The blood flows, but still Israel is not safe.
Its enemies, of course, deserve a large share of the blame. But perhaps killing has become so easy that Israel’s leaders have stopped looking for other solutions. Either way, the end is nowhere in sight — and so Mossad’s killings go on. Because of their secretive nature, they rarely make the headlines.
But even as you are reading these words, someone, somewhere, is planning the next hit.
Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman is available in bookstores and Amazon.com.
AFTER A 39-YEAR SEARCH FOR JUSTICE, A MURDER VICTIM’S SISTER FINALLY SAW THE KILLER ARRESTED AND DIE BEHIND BARS
'They never had a hope': How sister of a young doctor and his girlfriend who were stripped naked, trussed and thrown overboard to die by killer yachtsman during a dream trip four decades ago finally solved the mystery of their horrific slaughter
By Penny Farmer
Daily Mail
July 28, 2018
For the crew of the small wooden boat heading to the fishing grounds off the coast of Guatemala, it must have been a sickening discovery. Floating in the Caribbean waters less than 200 yards from the shore were the bloated corpses of two young Westerners, a man and a woman. They had been bound, tortured and weighed down with heavy engine parts. Their identities were unknown.
It was July 8, 1978, and 5,000 miles away in Manchester, we knew nothing except our deepening concern about the fate of my brother Christopher Farmer, a 25-year-old newly qualified doctor, and his lawyer girlfriend Peta Frampton, 24.
They had set off together at the beginning of December 1977 to fulfil their dream to see the world. For seven months they had kept their promise to keep in touch as they travelled through Australia and the Pacific islands to Los Angeles and then through Mexico to Belize. In the age before the internet, Chris made regular phone calls home and Peta sent wonderfully detailed letters to her mother, who lived across the road from us.
I was 17, and still at school. Then came silence – and the first steps in a deeply painful quest for the truth that would eventually span two continents and the best part of the next four decades as we fought our way to justice.
The last contact we had came in the form of a letter from Peta, dated June 28, 1978, which explained how they had agreed to sail down the Caribbean coastline from Belize to Honduras with an American sailor called Silas Duane Boston.
With his weather-beaten face, she wrote, Boston was an engaging character with a devil-may-care attitude, small, piercing blue eyes and a large tattoo of a mermaid on his left forearm. What he lacked in conventional good looks, he made up for in megawatt charm. It seemed he had been married no fewer than five times and had driven to Belize from his home in Sacramento, California, with his two sons, 13-year-old Vince and Russell, 12.
There he had bought a 32ft wooden sailing boat, the Justin B, which he used to ferry tourists to the palm-fringed Belizean islands for what he described as a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ experience, mooring at white sandy beaches and spearing fish for supper. Now, explained the letter, he had offered Chris and Peta the chance to sail 150 miles with him and his boys down the coast to Honduras for $500 (about £1,500 in today’s money). For the young couple, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
As the summer wore on we heard nothing else. That last letter was all we had to go on, and my father was growing increasingly desperate for information. On September 22, 1977, he wrote to the harbour master in Belize City asking for records of the Justin B. It was weeks later before he finally got a reply, and when it came it was worrying. It said that Christopher and Peta had indeed been on the crew list when it left port; yet there was no record of them on board when the Justin B next docked.
Another letter from the Honduran authorities revealed that the pair had bought visas for Honduras, but that they had never entered the country.
Back in Manchester, our efforts intensified. At the behest of my parents and Peta’s family, the Foreign Office alerted the British vice- consul in Guatemala, which borders Belize to the north and Honduras to the south.
The best chance of progress still lay with Boston himself and, in mid-October, the Foreign Office called to say that the man and his two sons had been located in California.
At first he was evasive. When an official from the British Consulate in San Francisco spoke with him on the phone in October, he insisted that he had dropped Chris and Peta back in Guatemala.
His vague responses raised more questions than they answered, and a few days later my parents, now deeply suspicious, went to Greater Manchester Police (GMP).
At the same time, the British Consul was sufficiently concerned that he sent an official to interview Boston in person on December 3, 1977. He appeared ‘calm and relaxed’, said the official.
However, when questioned about Chris and Peta, ‘Boston sat straight up in the chair, his eyes widened and his breathing became heavy’.
‘Following this, he slumped back in the chair, placing his face into his right hand, and in a softly spoken voice he said that he thought Chris and Peta would be back home by now,’ the official reported.
With no concrete evidence, the official investigations hit the buffers. In an attempt to keep the case alive, Dad, who worked for the BBC, placed articles in the British press and appealed for information in the Belize Times newspaper.
Among those who got in touch was American Dr Tom Lane, who in turn enlisted a Belizean friend, Alphonso de Pena, to act as a private investigator – and it was de Pena who made the first significant breakthrough. At the end of January 1979, de Pena was told by a Catholic priest in Livingston, Guatemala, just south of the Belize border, that local fishermen had made a terrible discovery: they had found the bodies of a young European couple in the water the previous July. A navy diver had cut the bloated corpses free from ropes anchoring them to engine parts on the seabed 200 yards from shore. Buried in unmarked graves, the dead couple were never identified.
The news hit our families like a hammer blow. We all knew it must be them. How many other missing young Europeans could there be in such a remote area?
We arranged for their dental records to be flown to Guatemala and paid £450 for an exhumation that would prove the matter.
Nine weeks later, we finally learned the truth about Chris and Peta. They had been tortured, tied and beaten before drowning.
Our belief that Boston was responsible was stronger than ever when we learned through Interpol that Boston’s third wife, Mary Lou (the mother of his two boys), had disappeared in September 1968.
Manchester Police asked detectives in Sacramento to interview Boston and his sons in May 1979, but it never happened. He had taken his sons and disappeared.
We lived with our loss for the next 37 years. While the passage of time means you think about it less, the sense of pain never diminishes. It was not until 2015, after my father’s death, that the lightbulb moment came. Mum said wistfully: ‘I wonder what Chris would have looked like. He’d have been 62 now. He’s forever young in our eyes, isn’t he?’
It suddenly struck me that we now live in a different age. We have the worldwide web as a source of almost limitless information, rather than the painfully slow exchange of letters of the late 1970s. I began to scour the internet, driven by the belief that if I looked hard enough, I would get to Boston – and the truth.
I didn’t have to dig far to find his eldest son Vince on Facebook. He was now a 50-year-old aviation electrician living in Arizona and a vocal opponent of America’s free-and-easy gun laws.
He wrote on his page: ‘My mother was killed at 23 with a gun.’ Remembering what the police had told us, my eyes popped out on stalks. His brother, Russell, I found, was a 49-year-old illustrator living near Laguna Beach, California. My head was spinning, we always knew the brothers were the two people we desperately needed to talk to and I sent them private messages urging them to tell me what had happened on the boat.
By now, I was like a dog with a bone and soon tracked down Boston himself. His Facebook picture was of a grizzled 74-year-old with a white beard wearing a T-shirt under a denim shirt, a baseball cap and sunglasses. To me, he looked like trailer trash – or a serial killer from a horror movie. Though I instantly hated him, my overwhelming feeling was relief he was still alive to face justice.
I decided to contact the cold case unit at GMP. Our expectations of them reopening the case were low. But we hadn’t banked on an extraordinary set of coincidences.
The first came soon after discovering the case files had not been lost. For some reason, the long-retired detective in charge had kept a complete copy. We were in business.
The new investigating officer, Detective Constable Michaela Clinch, contacted Interpol, where she was put in touch with an astonished Detective Amy Crosby at Sacramento Police.
Quite coincidentally, she had raised the case with Interpol at almost the same time because of Amy’s reinvestigation of the disappearance of Vince and Russell’s mother in 1968.
Vince gave a statement to Amy on October 13, 2015, 11 days after I had sent him a Facebook message and the day after we had been to GMP.
He told her that it was an open family secret that his father had killed his mother, but no one knew where he had buried her.
Vince then told Amy he had witnessed the cold-blooded murders of Chris and Peta on board the boat.
It would later emerge that he had repeatedly tried to alert the authorities to the killings, but with no success. Vince had joined the US Navy in 1982 at the age of 16, and his first act on escaping Silas Duane Boston’s evil grip was to tell police in London what he had seen four years earlier. He gave Chris and Peta’s full names, but was told there was no file on the case.
Further attempts by Vince and his brother Russell to get the case taken seriously on both sides of the Atlantic fell on deaf ears.
It was our visit to Greater Manchester Police in October 2015 that proved the game-changer. The case was no longer cold but suddenly very much active – particularly when Russell corroborated Vince’s account and produced crucial photographs showing Chris and Peta aboard the Justin B.
We were called to a meeting with GMP’s force review officer, Martin Bottomley, who had Russell and Vince’s statements in front of him. He quietly asked: ‘How much would you like to know?’ Without hesitation, Mum replied: ‘Everything.’
It seemed to us that Chris and Peta’s ghosts were talking from beyond the grave when Martin started reading.
As the story unfolded, we realised the stomach-churning terror they must have felt and just how unlucky they had been to chance upon a psychopath on a remote Central American island. It transpired Boston was in Belize because he had skipped bail on a charge of statutory rape of a minor in Sacramento. The boys described the purchase of the Justin B and how their father would become violent after drinking cheap local rum.
Chris and Peta were on the boat, they said, when a drunken Boston started beating up Russell. When Chris intervened, Boston tried to swing a punch at Chris and fell humiliatingly into the sea instead.
According to Vince, that was when Boston began plotting their murder. The following evening, he told Chris to pull up the anchor, crept up behind him and repeatedly bludgeoned him over the head. He then attempted to stab Chris in the chest with a fillet knife until the blade broke and Chris cried out: ‘I give up!’
The following morning, Boston told Chris and Peta he was going to drop them near Livingston, but would tie their hands and strip them naked to stop them reporting him to the police before he escaped. Over the next 36 hours, Boston taunted them before trussing them, putting plastic bags over their heads, tying them to blocks of metal and throwing them overboard fully conscious. They never had a hope.
When Martin finished reading, a shocked hush descended on the room. The fog that had enveloped their disappearance since 1978 had cleared and the full extent of Boston’s evil was revealed.
Even after all this time, the details were hard to bear. We left the room shell-shocked, but grateful for finally knowing the truth.
After a lifetime spent on the run, Silas Duane Boston’s loathsome past finally caught up with him at the age of 75. On December 1, 2016, he was charged with the murders of Chris and Peta.
It is unlikely they were his only victims. Today, Sacramento Police have two large files, totalling 2,000 pages, detailing five decades of crimes Boston is suspected of – including numerous murders. But after years of alcohol abuse, his health was already failing and Boston died in custody on April 24, 2017, three weeks before Mum and I were due to fly out for a pre-trial hearing.
Boston was defiant to his last gasp. The prison guards described him as ‘controlling with an evil glare right to the very end’.
Dead In The Water, by Penny Farmer, will be available August 9 in paperback at Amazon for $8.34.
By Penny Farmer
Daily Mail
July 28, 2018
For the crew of the small wooden boat heading to the fishing grounds off the coast of Guatemala, it must have been a sickening discovery. Floating in the Caribbean waters less than 200 yards from the shore were the bloated corpses of two young Westerners, a man and a woman. They had been bound, tortured and weighed down with heavy engine parts. Their identities were unknown.
It was July 8, 1978, and 5,000 miles away in Manchester, we knew nothing except our deepening concern about the fate of my brother Christopher Farmer, a 25-year-old newly qualified doctor, and his lawyer girlfriend Peta Frampton, 24.
They had set off together at the beginning of December 1977 to fulfil their dream to see the world. For seven months they had kept their promise to keep in touch as they travelled through Australia and the Pacific islands to Los Angeles and then through Mexico to Belize. In the age before the internet, Chris made regular phone calls home and Peta sent wonderfully detailed letters to her mother, who lived across the road from us.
I was 17, and still at school. Then came silence – and the first steps in a deeply painful quest for the truth that would eventually span two continents and the best part of the next four decades as we fought our way to justice.
The last contact we had came in the form of a letter from Peta, dated June 28, 1978, which explained how they had agreed to sail down the Caribbean coastline from Belize to Honduras with an American sailor called Silas Duane Boston.
With his weather-beaten face, she wrote, Boston was an engaging character with a devil-may-care attitude, small, piercing blue eyes and a large tattoo of a mermaid on his left forearm. What he lacked in conventional good looks, he made up for in megawatt charm. It seemed he had been married no fewer than five times and had driven to Belize from his home in Sacramento, California, with his two sons, 13-year-old Vince and Russell, 12.
There he had bought a 32ft wooden sailing boat, the Justin B, which he used to ferry tourists to the palm-fringed Belizean islands for what he described as a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ experience, mooring at white sandy beaches and spearing fish for supper. Now, explained the letter, he had offered Chris and Peta the chance to sail 150 miles with him and his boys down the coast to Honduras for $500 (about £1,500 in today’s money). For the young couple, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
As the summer wore on we heard nothing else. That last letter was all we had to go on, and my father was growing increasingly desperate for information. On September 22, 1977, he wrote to the harbour master in Belize City asking for records of the Justin B. It was weeks later before he finally got a reply, and when it came it was worrying. It said that Christopher and Peta had indeed been on the crew list when it left port; yet there was no record of them on board when the Justin B next docked.
Another letter from the Honduran authorities revealed that the pair had bought visas for Honduras, but that they had never entered the country.
Back in Manchester, our efforts intensified. At the behest of my parents and Peta’s family, the Foreign Office alerted the British vice- consul in Guatemala, which borders Belize to the north and Honduras to the south.
The best chance of progress still lay with Boston himself and, in mid-October, the Foreign Office called to say that the man and his two sons had been located in California.
At first he was evasive. When an official from the British Consulate in San Francisco spoke with him on the phone in October, he insisted that he had dropped Chris and Peta back in Guatemala.
His vague responses raised more questions than they answered, and a few days later my parents, now deeply suspicious, went to Greater Manchester Police (GMP).
At the same time, the British Consul was sufficiently concerned that he sent an official to interview Boston in person on December 3, 1977. He appeared ‘calm and relaxed’, said the official.
However, when questioned about Chris and Peta, ‘Boston sat straight up in the chair, his eyes widened and his breathing became heavy’.
‘Following this, he slumped back in the chair, placing his face into his right hand, and in a softly spoken voice he said that he thought Chris and Peta would be back home by now,’ the official reported.
With no concrete evidence, the official investigations hit the buffers. In an attempt to keep the case alive, Dad, who worked for the BBC, placed articles in the British press and appealed for information in the Belize Times newspaper.
Among those who got in touch was American Dr Tom Lane, who in turn enlisted a Belizean friend, Alphonso de Pena, to act as a private investigator – and it was de Pena who made the first significant breakthrough. At the end of January 1979, de Pena was told by a Catholic priest in Livingston, Guatemala, just south of the Belize border, that local fishermen had made a terrible discovery: they had found the bodies of a young European couple in the water the previous July. A navy diver had cut the bloated corpses free from ropes anchoring them to engine parts on the seabed 200 yards from shore. Buried in unmarked graves, the dead couple were never identified.
The news hit our families like a hammer blow. We all knew it must be them. How many other missing young Europeans could there be in such a remote area?
We arranged for their dental records to be flown to Guatemala and paid £450 for an exhumation that would prove the matter.
Nine weeks later, we finally learned the truth about Chris and Peta. They had been tortured, tied and beaten before drowning.
Our belief that Boston was responsible was stronger than ever when we learned through Interpol that Boston’s third wife, Mary Lou (the mother of his two boys), had disappeared in September 1968.
Manchester Police asked detectives in Sacramento to interview Boston and his sons in May 1979, but it never happened. He had taken his sons and disappeared.
We lived with our loss for the next 37 years. While the passage of time means you think about it less, the sense of pain never diminishes. It was not until 2015, after my father’s death, that the lightbulb moment came. Mum said wistfully: ‘I wonder what Chris would have looked like. He’d have been 62 now. He’s forever young in our eyes, isn’t he?’
It suddenly struck me that we now live in a different age. We have the worldwide web as a source of almost limitless information, rather than the painfully slow exchange of letters of the late 1970s. I began to scour the internet, driven by the belief that if I looked hard enough, I would get to Boston – and the truth.
I didn’t have to dig far to find his eldest son Vince on Facebook. He was now a 50-year-old aviation electrician living in Arizona and a vocal opponent of America’s free-and-easy gun laws.
He wrote on his page: ‘My mother was killed at 23 with a gun.’ Remembering what the police had told us, my eyes popped out on stalks. His brother, Russell, I found, was a 49-year-old illustrator living near Laguna Beach, California. My head was spinning, we always knew the brothers were the two people we desperately needed to talk to and I sent them private messages urging them to tell me what had happened on the boat.
By now, I was like a dog with a bone and soon tracked down Boston himself. His Facebook picture was of a grizzled 74-year-old with a white beard wearing a T-shirt under a denim shirt, a baseball cap and sunglasses. To me, he looked like trailer trash – or a serial killer from a horror movie. Though I instantly hated him, my overwhelming feeling was relief he was still alive to face justice.
I decided to contact the cold case unit at GMP. Our expectations of them reopening the case were low. But we hadn’t banked on an extraordinary set of coincidences.
The first came soon after discovering the case files had not been lost. For some reason, the long-retired detective in charge had kept a complete copy. We were in business.
The new investigating officer, Detective Constable Michaela Clinch, contacted Interpol, where she was put in touch with an astonished Detective Amy Crosby at Sacramento Police.
Quite coincidentally, she had raised the case with Interpol at almost the same time because of Amy’s reinvestigation of the disappearance of Vince and Russell’s mother in 1968.
Vince gave a statement to Amy on October 13, 2015, 11 days after I had sent him a Facebook message and the day after we had been to GMP.
He told her that it was an open family secret that his father had killed his mother, but no one knew where he had buried her.
Vince then told Amy he had witnessed the cold-blooded murders of Chris and Peta on board the boat.
It would later emerge that he had repeatedly tried to alert the authorities to the killings, but with no success. Vince had joined the US Navy in 1982 at the age of 16, and his first act on escaping Silas Duane Boston’s evil grip was to tell police in London what he had seen four years earlier. He gave Chris and Peta’s full names, but was told there was no file on the case.
Further attempts by Vince and his brother Russell to get the case taken seriously on both sides of the Atlantic fell on deaf ears.
It was our visit to Greater Manchester Police in October 2015 that proved the game-changer. The case was no longer cold but suddenly very much active – particularly when Russell corroborated Vince’s account and produced crucial photographs showing Chris and Peta aboard the Justin B.
We were called to a meeting with GMP’s force review officer, Martin Bottomley, who had Russell and Vince’s statements in front of him. He quietly asked: ‘How much would you like to know?’ Without hesitation, Mum replied: ‘Everything.’
It seemed to us that Chris and Peta’s ghosts were talking from beyond the grave when Martin started reading.
As the story unfolded, we realised the stomach-churning terror they must have felt and just how unlucky they had been to chance upon a psychopath on a remote Central American island. It transpired Boston was in Belize because he had skipped bail on a charge of statutory rape of a minor in Sacramento. The boys described the purchase of the Justin B and how their father would become violent after drinking cheap local rum.
Chris and Peta were on the boat, they said, when a drunken Boston started beating up Russell. When Chris intervened, Boston tried to swing a punch at Chris and fell humiliatingly into the sea instead.
According to Vince, that was when Boston began plotting their murder. The following evening, he told Chris to pull up the anchor, crept up behind him and repeatedly bludgeoned him over the head. He then attempted to stab Chris in the chest with a fillet knife until the blade broke and Chris cried out: ‘I give up!’
The following morning, Boston told Chris and Peta he was going to drop them near Livingston, but would tie their hands and strip them naked to stop them reporting him to the police before he escaped. Over the next 36 hours, Boston taunted them before trussing them, putting plastic bags over their heads, tying them to blocks of metal and throwing them overboard fully conscious. They never had a hope.
When Martin finished reading, a shocked hush descended on the room. The fog that had enveloped their disappearance since 1978 had cleared and the full extent of Boston’s evil was revealed.
Even after all this time, the details were hard to bear. We left the room shell-shocked, but grateful for finally knowing the truth.
After a lifetime spent on the run, Silas Duane Boston’s loathsome past finally caught up with him at the age of 75. On December 1, 2016, he was charged with the murders of Chris and Peta.
It is unlikely they were his only victims. Today, Sacramento Police have two large files, totalling 2,000 pages, detailing five decades of crimes Boston is suspected of – including numerous murders. But after years of alcohol abuse, his health was already failing and Boston died in custody on April 24, 2017, three weeks before Mum and I were due to fly out for a pre-trial hearing.
Boston was defiant to his last gasp. The prison guards described him as ‘controlling with an evil glare right to the very end’.
Dead In The Water, by Penny Farmer, will be available August 9 in paperback at Amazon for $8.34.
Sunday, July 29, 2018
THE LORD DOES INDEED WORK IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS HIS WONDERS TO PERFORM
by Bob Walsh
In an act that is described by the Vatican as "unprecedented" the Pope has accepted the "resignation" of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. McCarrick is moving to a "life of prayer and penance" prior to his church trial. McCarrick has been suspended from all religious functions and is facing accusations of sexual misconduct with seminarians and young members of the church.
As far as can be determined this order of prayer and penance has NEVER before been imposed prior to a trial.
The former Cardinal is now 80. He had previously been heavily involved in the church's response to allegations of sexual abuse by priests.
In a somewhat related story, the A.P. has just released a major piece about sexual abuse of nuns by priests. Apparently it was relatively common for sexually active priests to go after nuns back in the 1990s, during the heights of the AIDS scare, as they figured they would not catch anything nasty from them.
In 1994 Sister Maura O'Donahue wrote up a comprehensive, six-year study covering 23 countries concerning apparent sexual abuse against nuns by priests. Among other things she found one congregation in which 29 nuns had become pregnant during the time of the study.
The problem allegedly moved from Africa, where the rape of nuns by priests was said to be "common" to the Vatican. When nuns were sent to the Vatican for study they often approached seminarians and priests for help with their studies. Sexual favors were often the payment for this assistance.
The Vatican has never commented on what, if anything, they chose to do with this information once they had it. I am guessing they simply ignored it as being inconvenient. It must be nice to have you own country, all be it a small one, where the head guy can simply ignore shit if he wants to.
In an act that is described by the Vatican as "unprecedented" the Pope has accepted the "resignation" of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. McCarrick is moving to a "life of prayer and penance" prior to his church trial. McCarrick has been suspended from all religious functions and is facing accusations of sexual misconduct with seminarians and young members of the church.
As far as can be determined this order of prayer and penance has NEVER before been imposed prior to a trial.
The former Cardinal is now 80. He had previously been heavily involved in the church's response to allegations of sexual abuse by priests.
In a somewhat related story, the A.P. has just released a major piece about sexual abuse of nuns by priests. Apparently it was relatively common for sexually active priests to go after nuns back in the 1990s, during the heights of the AIDS scare, as they figured they would not catch anything nasty from them.
In 1994 Sister Maura O'Donahue wrote up a comprehensive, six-year study covering 23 countries concerning apparent sexual abuse against nuns by priests. Among other things she found one congregation in which 29 nuns had become pregnant during the time of the study.
The problem allegedly moved from Africa, where the rape of nuns by priests was said to be "common" to the Vatican. When nuns were sent to the Vatican for study they often approached seminarians and priests for help with their studies. Sexual favors were often the payment for this assistance.
The Vatican has never commented on what, if anything, they chose to do with this information once they had it. I am guessing they simply ignored it as being inconvenient. It must be nice to have you own country, all be it a small one, where the head guy can simply ignore shit if he wants to.
KNOWN ISLAMIC TERRORIST GROUP FUNDED BY OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
Obama administration approved $200,000 grant to group with Al Qaeda ties
By Alex Pappas
Fox News
July 27, 2018
The Obama administration approved a $200,000 grant to a group in Sudan with ties to Al Qaeda even though it had been designated a terrorist-financing organization by the U.S. years earlier, a conservative think tank revealed this week.
Further, an agency official acknowledged the prior administration allowed taxpayer money to flow to the group even after its designation was discovered.
The 2014 grant to the Islamic Relief Agency, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, was revealed by Sam Westrop of the Middle East Forum in a story for the National Review.
“More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization,” Westrop wrote in the article.
USAID has since reviewed its policies, though the Trump administration stressed this all occurred in the Obama years.
“As this occurred under the prior administration, the current Secretary of the State, Secretary of Treasury, and USAID Administrator had no involvement in decisions surrounding this award or
subsequent license,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement to Fox News on Friday.
An official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, backed up the National Review account in an email to Fox News, providing a timeline of events:
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the Islamic Relief Agency in Khartoum in 2004 a terror-financing organization because of links to Usama bin Laden.
But 10 years later, in March 2014, USAID awarded $723,405 to a charity called World Vision Inc., with $200,000 of those funds being directed to the Islamic Relief Agency.
The money was directed “to help provide humanitarian aid, including emergency food, water, sanitation, and hygiene services, to displaced people affected by the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” the official said.
The grant to ISRA, though, soon set off alarms.
In November 2014, according to the official, USAID learned that the ISRA could be on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons, or SDN, list.
“USAID directed World Vision to suspend all activities with ISRA, and not to engage in further transactions with the organization,” the official said.
But in May 2015, the Treasury Department still authorized “a one-time transfer” from that money of $115,000 to ISRA “for humanitarian assistance work already performed.”
According to the National Review story, there was pressure from inside USAID at the time to still pay ISRA, even after the designation was revealed. USAID’s mission director for Sudan, Larry Meserve, warned colleagues that the organization’s “whole program will be jeopardized” if ISRA was not paid, the story said.
“Obama-administration officials knowingly approved the transfer of taxpayer dollars to an al-Qaeda affiliate, and not an obscure one but an enormous international network that was often in the headlines,” Westrop wrote.
USAID now says the grant should not have been made. Because of the grant, the USAID said Friday, they have since conducted a review of policies on the screening of awardees.
“USAID has also updated trainings for our agreement officers to improve our screening of prime and sub-awardees,” the official said.
By Alex Pappas
Fox News
July 27, 2018
The Obama administration approved a $200,000 grant to a group in Sudan with ties to Al Qaeda even though it had been designated a terrorist-financing organization by the U.S. years earlier, a conservative think tank revealed this week.
Further, an agency official acknowledged the prior administration allowed taxpayer money to flow to the group even after its designation was discovered.
The 2014 grant to the Islamic Relief Agency, through the U.S. Agency for International Development, was revealed by Sam Westrop of the Middle East Forum in a story for the National Review.
“More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization,” Westrop wrote in the article.
USAID has since reviewed its policies, though the Trump administration stressed this all occurred in the Obama years.
“As this occurred under the prior administration, the current Secretary of the State, Secretary of Treasury, and USAID Administrator had no involvement in decisions surrounding this award or
subsequent license,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement to Fox News on Friday.
An official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, backed up the National Review account in an email to Fox News, providing a timeline of events:
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the Islamic Relief Agency in Khartoum in 2004 a terror-financing organization because of links to Usama bin Laden.
But 10 years later, in March 2014, USAID awarded $723,405 to a charity called World Vision Inc., with $200,000 of those funds being directed to the Islamic Relief Agency.
The money was directed “to help provide humanitarian aid, including emergency food, water, sanitation, and hygiene services, to displaced people affected by the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” the official said.
The grant to ISRA, though, soon set off alarms.
In November 2014, according to the official, USAID learned that the ISRA could be on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons, or SDN, list.
“USAID directed World Vision to suspend all activities with ISRA, and not to engage in further transactions with the organization,” the official said.
But in May 2015, the Treasury Department still authorized “a one-time transfer” from that money of $115,000 to ISRA “for humanitarian assistance work already performed.”
According to the National Review story, there was pressure from inside USAID at the time to still pay ISRA, even after the designation was revealed. USAID’s mission director for Sudan, Larry Meserve, warned colleagues that the organization’s “whole program will be jeopardized” if ISRA was not paid, the story said.
“Obama-administration officials knowingly approved the transfer of taxpayer dollars to an al-Qaeda affiliate, and not an obscure one but an enormous international network that was often in the headlines,” Westrop wrote.
USAID now says the grant should not have been made. Because of the grant, the USAID said Friday, they have since conducted a review of policies on the screening of awardees.
“USAID has also updated trainings for our agreement officers to improve our screening of prime and sub-awardees,” the official said.
HISPANIC COPS IN FLORIDA DID NOT LIKE BLACKS
Cop admits framing two black men as Florida town’s false arrest scandal widens
By Jay Weaver
Miami Herald
July 28, 2018
The federal investigation into a handful of former Biscayne Park police officers accused of framing innocent people widened this week, when another cop was accused of falsifying arrest warrants for two men at the direction of the police chief.
Guillermo Ravelo, who was fired from the force earlier this year, pleaded guilty Thursday in Miami federal court to a conspiracy charge that he violated the rights of the falsely accused men — one charged with a pair of home break-ins in 2013, the other with five vehicle burglaries the following year. The charges against the two men, both black, were eventually dropped.
Ravelo, 37, also pleaded guilty to using excessive force during a Biscayne Park traffic stop in 2013 when he struck a handcuffed suspect in the face with his fist.
Ravelo’s admission to the false police arrests intensifies the spotlight on former Biscayne Park police chief Raimundo Atesiano. The 52-year-old was indicted in June along with two other former police officers, Raul Fernandez and Charlie Dayoub, on a conspiracy charge of pinning four unsolved home burglaries on a 16-year-old so the chief could claim a perfect clearance rate on property crimes in 2013. The teen also was black.
The town reported clearing 29 of 30 burglary cases during Atesiano’s tenure as chief in 2013 and 2014. But now that seemingly stellar record — once touted by Atesiano to town leaders — has been shattered by the reality that at least 11 of those cases were based on false arrest reports, according to federal authorities.
On Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Wallace added an additional charge to Atesiano’s civil-rights conspiracy indictment stemming from one of Ravelo’s arrests. Meanwhile, Fernandez and Dayoub plan to change their pleas to guilty at a hearing set for Aug. 3, court records show. Prosecutors say both officers were ordered by Atesiano to frame the teenager by falsifying arrest affidavits.
Fernandez, Dayoub and now Ravelo are all cooperating with the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office in the case against Atesiano.
Atesiano has strongly denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty as he awaits trial. His defense attorney, Richard Docobo, questioned the integrity of the cops who have flipped for the feds to reduce their potential prison time.
“There is a very good reason why juries are instructed that the testimony of flipped witnesses should be taken with caution,” Docobo said. “Witnesses who hope to gain more favorable treatment in their own cases may have a reason to make a false statement in order to strike a good bargain with the government.”
Biscayne Park’s new police chief and village manager insist they have overhauled the small department in the years since Atesiano resigned amid an investigation of allegations of racial profiling and other issues.
In the aftermath of Atesiano’s indictment in June, the Miami Herald obtained internal public records suggesting that during his tenure as chief, the command staff pressured some Biscayne Park officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
“If they have burglaries that are open cases that are not solved yet, if you see anybody black walking through our streets and they have somewhat of a record, arrest them so we can pin them for all the burglaries,” one cop said in an internal probe ordered in 2014. “They were basically doing this to have a 100% clearance rate for the city.”
In a report from that probe, four officers — a third of the small force — told an outside investigator they were under marching orders to file the bogus charges to improve the department’s crime stats. While only one officer specifically mentioned targeting blacks, former Biscayne Park village manager Heidi Shafran, who ordered the investigation after receiving a string of letters from disgruntled officers, said the message seemed clear for cops on the street.
“The letters said police were doing a lot of bad things,” Shafran told the Herald. “It said police officers were directed to pick up people of color and blame the crimes on them.”
In February 2014, Atesiano told Ravelo that he wanted him to arrest Erasmus Banmah, 31, for five unsolved vehicle burglaries, despite knowing there was “no evidence” that he had committed the crimes, prosecutors allege in court records. A couple of days later, Ravelo filled out five arrest forms falsely accusing Banmah of the vehicle burglaries at five different street locations in Biscayne Park.
For each of the five burglaries, Ravelo “falsely claimed in an arrest affidavit that [Banmah] had taken him to the site of the respective burglary and confessed to the items that [he] had stolen,” they say.
In January 2013, Atesiano ordered Ravelo to arrest Clarens Desrouleaux, 35, for two unsolved home break-ins. The officer signed two arrest affidavits falsely claiming that Desrouleaux “had confessed to committing the burglary,” prosecutors allege.
On Thursday, Ravelo admitted his wrongdoing in federal court.
By Jay Weaver
Miami Herald
July 28, 2018
The federal investigation into a handful of former Biscayne Park police officers accused of framing innocent people widened this week, when another cop was accused of falsifying arrest warrants for two men at the direction of the police chief.
Guillermo Ravelo, who was fired from the force earlier this year, pleaded guilty Thursday in Miami federal court to a conspiracy charge that he violated the rights of the falsely accused men — one charged with a pair of home break-ins in 2013, the other with five vehicle burglaries the following year. The charges against the two men, both black, were eventually dropped.
Ravelo, 37, also pleaded guilty to using excessive force during a Biscayne Park traffic stop in 2013 when he struck a handcuffed suspect in the face with his fist.
Ravelo’s admission to the false police arrests intensifies the spotlight on former Biscayne Park police chief Raimundo Atesiano. The 52-year-old was indicted in June along with two other former police officers, Raul Fernandez and Charlie Dayoub, on a conspiracy charge of pinning four unsolved home burglaries on a 16-year-old so the chief could claim a perfect clearance rate on property crimes in 2013. The teen also was black.
The town reported clearing 29 of 30 burglary cases during Atesiano’s tenure as chief in 2013 and 2014. But now that seemingly stellar record — once touted by Atesiano to town leaders — has been shattered by the reality that at least 11 of those cases were based on false arrest reports, according to federal authorities.
On Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Wallace added an additional charge to Atesiano’s civil-rights conspiracy indictment stemming from one of Ravelo’s arrests. Meanwhile, Fernandez and Dayoub plan to change their pleas to guilty at a hearing set for Aug. 3, court records show. Prosecutors say both officers were ordered by Atesiano to frame the teenager by falsifying arrest affidavits.
Fernandez, Dayoub and now Ravelo are all cooperating with the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office in the case against Atesiano.
Atesiano has strongly denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty as he awaits trial. His defense attorney, Richard Docobo, questioned the integrity of the cops who have flipped for the feds to reduce their potential prison time.
“There is a very good reason why juries are instructed that the testimony of flipped witnesses should be taken with caution,” Docobo said. “Witnesses who hope to gain more favorable treatment in their own cases may have a reason to make a false statement in order to strike a good bargain with the government.”
Biscayne Park’s new police chief and village manager insist they have overhauled the small department in the years since Atesiano resigned amid an investigation of allegations of racial profiling and other issues.
In the aftermath of Atesiano’s indictment in June, the Miami Herald obtained internal public records suggesting that during his tenure as chief, the command staff pressured some Biscayne Park officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
“If they have burglaries that are open cases that are not solved yet, if you see anybody black walking through our streets and they have somewhat of a record, arrest them so we can pin them for all the burglaries,” one cop said in an internal probe ordered in 2014. “They were basically doing this to have a 100% clearance rate for the city.”
In a report from that probe, four officers — a third of the small force — told an outside investigator they were under marching orders to file the bogus charges to improve the department’s crime stats. While only one officer specifically mentioned targeting blacks, former Biscayne Park village manager Heidi Shafran, who ordered the investigation after receiving a string of letters from disgruntled officers, said the message seemed clear for cops on the street.
“The letters said police were doing a lot of bad things,” Shafran told the Herald. “It said police officers were directed to pick up people of color and blame the crimes on them.”
In February 2014, Atesiano told Ravelo that he wanted him to arrest Erasmus Banmah, 31, for five unsolved vehicle burglaries, despite knowing there was “no evidence” that he had committed the crimes, prosecutors allege in court records. A couple of days later, Ravelo filled out five arrest forms falsely accusing Banmah of the vehicle burglaries at five different street locations in Biscayne Park.
For each of the five burglaries, Ravelo “falsely claimed in an arrest affidavit that [Banmah] had taken him to the site of the respective burglary and confessed to the items that [he] had stolen,” they say.
In January 2013, Atesiano ordered Ravelo to arrest Clarens Desrouleaux, 35, for two unsolved home break-ins. The officer signed two arrest affidavits falsely claiming that Desrouleaux “had confessed to committing the burglary,” prosecutors allege.
On Thursday, Ravelo admitted his wrongdoing in federal court.
TEXAS COUNTY SHERIFF’S LOVER GOT BOTH OF THEM INTO DEEP SHIT ….. THAT’S TEXAS COUNTY, MISSOURI
Sheriff let girlfriend act as deputy before hiring her, and she ran amok, Missouri Highway Patrol alleges
By Kaitlyn Schwers
The Kansas City Star
July 19, 2018
A southern Missouri sheriff and a deputy he was dating are facing a slew of charges centered around multiple instances of misconduct within the sheriff’s office, including allegations of threats, assaults and bringing a child to jail around “sexually violent offenders and other dangerous” inmates.
The sheriff and the deputy are identified in court records as Texas County Sheriff James Sigman and Chief Deputy Jennifer Tomaszewski.
Sigman, 48, and Tomaszewski, 38, were each formally charged with first-degree assault,two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful use of a weapon, first-degree harassment, misuse of official information by a public servant and false impersonation, according to online court records.
There is also a charge of first-degree robbery listed, but no details are provided.
Special prosecutors have been assigned to both cases.
Neither have attorneys listed on their behalf.
Aside from being co-workers, Sigman and Tomaszewski were also romantic partners, court records said.
The relationship began around the time she was first hired to work at the Texas County jail in 2016.
The investigation into the two law enforcement officers was led by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. It focuses on late 2016 when Tomaszewski was hired as a corrections officer up until last May when she graduated from the academy and received a peace officer license.
Court records list the following allegations based on an investigation by the Missouri State Highway Patrol:
For more than a year, the sheriff allegedly allowed Tomaszewski to conduct law enforcement duties when she wasn’t a commissioned officer, which included detaining suspects, going on ride-alongs and searches with other deputies, and acting as an “undercover officer.” She also wore a deputy uniform and carried guns owned by the sheriff’s office, court records said.
In one instance where she accompanied authorities serving a search warrant, court records said she pointed a gun at five individuals, including a 1-year-old, who were across the street from where officers were working because she “thought they were video recording the officers and taking pictures,” court records said. That incident happened in June 2017, court records said.
No one was reported injured, but the individuals told authorities they feared for their lives.
The court records also go on to describe times where Tomaszewski allegedly threatened an inmate’s life, elbowed an inmate in the face while he was unconscious and placed another on “permanent lockdown ... for no reason other than punishment for (the inmate).”
The last set of allegations center around Tomaszewski bringing a child to the jail. Court records said she and Sigman took the child there “resulting in the jail facility essentially being used as a child care facility by them.”
Sheriff’s office employees told the highway patrol they were concerned for the child because she was in danger.
Surveillance video also showed the child in the kitchen at the jail, where she allegedly “helped serve meals to the inmates and ate with two inmates in the jail kitchen” last November — one of which was described as a “sexually violent offender” from another county.
In nearly all of these incidents, authorities said Sigman was present and “did nothing to intervene,” court records said.
According to the Houston Herald, Sigman was first elected sheriff in 2012. In the past year, the newspaper reported “more than 40 employees” have either left the sheriff’s office or have been fired.
Court records also noted “all of the dispatchers” resigned when they refused to answer Tomaszewski’s law enforcement inquires using the sheriff’s badge number.
Sigman remained in the Greene County jail while Tomaszewski was taken to the Shannon County jail on Wednesday night. Their bail amounts are set at $500,000 each.
By Kaitlyn Schwers
The Kansas City Star
July 19, 2018
A southern Missouri sheriff and a deputy he was dating are facing a slew of charges centered around multiple instances of misconduct within the sheriff’s office, including allegations of threats, assaults and bringing a child to jail around “sexually violent offenders and other dangerous” inmates.
The sheriff and the deputy are identified in court records as Texas County Sheriff James Sigman and Chief Deputy Jennifer Tomaszewski.
Sigman, 48, and Tomaszewski, 38, were each formally charged with first-degree assault,two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful use of a weapon, first-degree harassment, misuse of official information by a public servant and false impersonation, according to online court records.
There is also a charge of first-degree robbery listed, but no details are provided.
Special prosecutors have been assigned to both cases.
Neither have attorneys listed on their behalf.
Aside from being co-workers, Sigman and Tomaszewski were also romantic partners, court records said.
The relationship began around the time she was first hired to work at the Texas County jail in 2016.
The investigation into the two law enforcement officers was led by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. It focuses on late 2016 when Tomaszewski was hired as a corrections officer up until last May when she graduated from the academy and received a peace officer license.
Court records list the following allegations based on an investigation by the Missouri State Highway Patrol:
For more than a year, the sheriff allegedly allowed Tomaszewski to conduct law enforcement duties when she wasn’t a commissioned officer, which included detaining suspects, going on ride-alongs and searches with other deputies, and acting as an “undercover officer.” She also wore a deputy uniform and carried guns owned by the sheriff’s office, court records said.
In one instance where she accompanied authorities serving a search warrant, court records said she pointed a gun at five individuals, including a 1-year-old, who were across the street from where officers were working because she “thought they were video recording the officers and taking pictures,” court records said. That incident happened in June 2017, court records said.
No one was reported injured, but the individuals told authorities they feared for their lives.
The court records also go on to describe times where Tomaszewski allegedly threatened an inmate’s life, elbowed an inmate in the face while he was unconscious and placed another on “permanent lockdown ... for no reason other than punishment for (the inmate).”
The last set of allegations center around Tomaszewski bringing a child to the jail. Court records said she and Sigman took the child there “resulting in the jail facility essentially being used as a child care facility by them.”
Sheriff’s office employees told the highway patrol they were concerned for the child because she was in danger.
Surveillance video also showed the child in the kitchen at the jail, where she allegedly “helped serve meals to the inmates and ate with two inmates in the jail kitchen” last November — one of which was described as a “sexually violent offender” from another county.
In nearly all of these incidents, authorities said Sigman was present and “did nothing to intervene,” court records said.
According to the Houston Herald, Sigman was first elected sheriff in 2012. In the past year, the newspaper reported “more than 40 employees” have either left the sheriff’s office or have been fired.
Court records also noted “all of the dispatchers” resigned when they refused to answer Tomaszewski’s law enforcement inquires using the sheriff’s badge number.
Sigman remained in the Greene County jail while Tomaszewski was taken to the Shannon County jail on Wednesday night. Their bail amounts are set at $500,000 each.
Saturday, July 28, 2018
THE COLOMBIAN SNIFFER DOG WITH A $70,000 PRICE ON ITS HEAD
German shepherd has busted so many stashes of drugs that Colombian gangs are now coming after her
By Julian Robinson
Daily Mail
July 27, 2018
A notorious drugs gang in Colombia has placed a $70,000 price on the head of a crime-busting police sniffer dog.
The Urabeños, considered the country's most powerful criminal organisation, offered the bounty after the German shepherd found almost 10 tonnes of the cartel's cocaine.
Sombra - meaning Shadow - is said to be responsible for the arrest of some 245 suspects over the years.
Many of these came during her work at ports on the Atlantic coast from which large quantities of cocaine are shipped to Central and North America.
The six-year-old dog is so highly prized that she has been moved to Bogota airport to take her out of the firing line.
She now receives special protection from extra officers as well as her usual handler.
The six-year-old only recently found 5.3 tonnes of cocaine in the port of Turbo. This followed her discovery of a four-tonne stash hidden in car parts that were set to be exported.
Six years ago, the feared Urabeños offered $500 to anyone who killed a police officer.
But the sum is dwarfed by that promised for the killing of Sombra, showing how damaging the dog has been to their criminal enterprise.
A police spokesperson told local media: 'Sombra is a huge headache for drug traffickers.'
By Julian Robinson
Daily Mail
July 27, 2018
A notorious drugs gang in Colombia has placed a $70,000 price on the head of a crime-busting police sniffer dog.
The Urabeños, considered the country's most powerful criminal organisation, offered the bounty after the German shepherd found almost 10 tonnes of the cartel's cocaine.
Sombra - meaning Shadow - is said to be responsible for the arrest of some 245 suspects over the years.
Many of these came during her work at ports on the Atlantic coast from which large quantities of cocaine are shipped to Central and North America.
The six-year-old dog is so highly prized that she has been moved to Bogota airport to take her out of the firing line.
She now receives special protection from extra officers as well as her usual handler.
The six-year-old only recently found 5.3 tonnes of cocaine in the port of Turbo. This followed her discovery of a four-tonne stash hidden in car parts that were set to be exported.
Six years ago, the feared Urabeños offered $500 to anyone who killed a police officer.
But the sum is dwarfed by that promised for the killing of Sombra, showing how damaging the dog has been to their criminal enterprise.
A police spokesperson told local media: 'Sombra is a huge headache for drug traffickers.'
TOMA ESTO USTED PERRA
Mexican husband shoots dead his wife as she breast-feeds their 9-month-old son because she was 'taking too long to get ready for a night out'
By Adry Torres
Daily Mail
July 27, 2018
A Mexican man gunned down his wife in cold blood while she was breast-feeding her nine-month old son after he became enraged she was taking too long to get ready for a night out on the town.
Gabriel Hernandez Reyes, 26, pumped two bullets into Hortencia Balcanzar, 26, the mother of his four children, ages nine months, two, four and eight, inside her parents ranch in Veracruz on July 19.
According to Blog Expediente, the abusive husband impregnated another woman in the town, causing Balcanzar to fall into a deep depression before her death on July 19.
In several interviews with Univision this week, neighbors recalled the harassment the victim had endured over the years.
Furthermore, those close to Balcanzar detailed how Hernandez Reyes would beat her with cables and used a hand gun to threaten her.
The victim's father wondered why his daughter's father and mother-in-law failed to intervene every time their son targeted her.
'He would take her back to his parent's house, but the in-laws provided her a bad life,' Anselmo Balcazar said. 'They used her as a cook, and when he beat her, they didn't get involved.
'She said she wouldn't return after the last incident occurred. The man pistol-whipped her face. His father promised to intervene and never did anything.'
The story shocked the tight-knit countryside community in Minatitlan, Veracruz.
Hortencia Balcanzar crashed to the floor along with the baby boy after being shot.
The nine-month old child and his four-year old sibling were not hurt in the gruesome murder.
Residents that heard the loud shots sprung to action and called authorities, but by the time they arrived on the scene, Hernandez Reyes had already escaped.
Mexican law enforcement officers still have no leads regarding the accused farmer's whereabouts.
The victim’s mother, Francisca, was overcome with emotion when she was interviewed by local media.
She said she felt useless and extremely saddened because she was unable to save her daughter.
‘I couldn’t defend her because I did not see if he was carrying a gun,’ said the grieving parent. ‘I left running and she screamed, "mama".’
By Adry Torres
Daily Mail
July 27, 2018
A Mexican man gunned down his wife in cold blood while she was breast-feeding her nine-month old son after he became enraged she was taking too long to get ready for a night out on the town.
Gabriel Hernandez Reyes, 26, pumped two bullets into Hortencia Balcanzar, 26, the mother of his four children, ages nine months, two, four and eight, inside her parents ranch in Veracruz on July 19.
According to Blog Expediente, the abusive husband impregnated another woman in the town, causing Balcanzar to fall into a deep depression before her death on July 19.
In several interviews with Univision this week, neighbors recalled the harassment the victim had endured over the years.
Furthermore, those close to Balcanzar detailed how Hernandez Reyes would beat her with cables and used a hand gun to threaten her.
The victim's father wondered why his daughter's father and mother-in-law failed to intervene every time their son targeted her.
'He would take her back to his parent's house, but the in-laws provided her a bad life,' Anselmo Balcazar said. 'They used her as a cook, and when he beat her, they didn't get involved.
'She said she wouldn't return after the last incident occurred. The man pistol-whipped her face. His father promised to intervene and never did anything.'
The story shocked the tight-knit countryside community in Minatitlan, Veracruz.
Hortencia Balcanzar crashed to the floor along with the baby boy after being shot.
The nine-month old child and his four-year old sibling were not hurt in the gruesome murder.
Residents that heard the loud shots sprung to action and called authorities, but by the time they arrived on the scene, Hernandez Reyes had already escaped.
Mexican law enforcement officers still have no leads regarding the accused farmer's whereabouts.
The victim’s mother, Francisca, was overcome with emotion when she was interviewed by local media.
She said she felt useless and extremely saddened because she was unable to save her daughter.
‘I couldn’t defend her because I did not see if he was carrying a gun,’ said the grieving parent. ‘I left running and she screamed, "mama".’
ISRAEL PLANNING TO DESTROY THE DOME OF THE ROCK AND THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE BY CREATING EARTHQUAKES
Arab Media Claims Israel Wielding the Forces of Nature in War Against Islam
By Ryan Jones
Israel Today
July 25, 2018
In addition to its military prowess, some Arab journalists are now telling their readers that Israel is wielding the very forces of nature in its supposed war against the Muslim world.
Such outlandish charges are nothing new in the Arab media's efforts to defame and incite hatred (and even fear) of Israel.
While these allegations sadly put genuine peace even further out of reach by turning Israeli Jews into a kind of bogeyman in the eyes of average Arabs, they are also a source of amusement here in the Jewish state.
There wasn't much to do but chuckle at the conclusions reached by Maal Zakarna, a columnist for Jordan's Ad-Dustour daily newspaper, when considering the recent string of earthquakes that struck northern Israel.
According to Zakarna, the location and frequency of the tremors raised serious questions. "It could be that they were caused by experimental explosions carried out by the Israeli occupation's army at a certain depth under the Kinneret," he wrote.
One of the goals of these explosions, Zakarna continued, could be preparing for "a major criminal action against sites in occupied Jerusalem which are holy to Islam and Christianity, and especially against the Al-Aqsa mosque, Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre...[to] create a pre-planned earthquake to destroy them in preparation for creating a Holy Temple in the attempt to Judaize Jerusalem."
Never mind that Israel sits on the Syrian-African rift, one of the world's most active fault lines. If there's potential calamity in the Middle East, then the Jews must be guilty.
By Ryan Jones
Israel Today
July 25, 2018
In addition to its military prowess, some Arab journalists are now telling their readers that Israel is wielding the very forces of nature in its supposed war against the Muslim world.
Such outlandish charges are nothing new in the Arab media's efforts to defame and incite hatred (and even fear) of Israel.
While these allegations sadly put genuine peace even further out of reach by turning Israeli Jews into a kind of bogeyman in the eyes of average Arabs, they are also a source of amusement here in the Jewish state.
There wasn't much to do but chuckle at the conclusions reached by Maal Zakarna, a columnist for Jordan's Ad-Dustour daily newspaper, when considering the recent string of earthquakes that struck northern Israel.
According to Zakarna, the location and frequency of the tremors raised serious questions. "It could be that they were caused by experimental explosions carried out by the Israeli occupation's army at a certain depth under the Kinneret," he wrote.
One of the goals of these explosions, Zakarna continued, could be preparing for "a major criminal action against sites in occupied Jerusalem which are holy to Islam and Christianity, and especially against the Al-Aqsa mosque, Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre...[to] create a pre-planned earthquake to destroy them in preparation for creating a Holy Temple in the attempt to Judaize Jerusalem."
Never mind that Israel sits on the Syrian-African rift, one of the world's most active fault lines. If there's potential calamity in the Middle East, then the Jews must be guilty.
Friday, July 27, 2018
DICK GONE TO THE DOGS
Drunken man was furious because his friend tried to make whoopee with his wife, cuts off his dick and throws it to his dogs
BarkGrowlBite
July 27, 2018
Three buddies were drinking at Permsak Petprasert’s home in Ratchaburi, Thailand on Saturday night. When thy ran out of booze, Petprasert and one of the other buddies left to get some more.
While the two men were gone, Suwit Tipjantha sneaked into the bedroom and stroked the arm of Petprasert’s sleeping wife. That woke her up. She ran out of the house and screamed at her returning husband that Tipjantha was trying to fuck her.
That didn’t sit too well with Petprasert. The furious husband clocked Tipjantha with a hammer and then cut off his unconscious friend’s dick with a fruit peeling knife. Then he threw the severed dick to his pet dogs for a treat. After that, he had some neighbors take Tipjantha to a hospital.
When Tipjantha regained consciousness in the hospital, he told the police that he had no recollection of what happened after they started drinking.
Thai cops busted Petprasert and he copped to everything. He was charged him with physical assault leading to a serious injury of another person. If convicted, he faces six months to 10 years behind bars.
Tipjanth is 39, Petprasert is 50 and Petprasert’s wife is 52.
Alas, poor Suwit. Doctors cannot reattach your dick. It’s gone to the dogs. Noe you will find it hard to hit the spot whenever you pee. And from now on, when you want to make love to some gal, you can only do it ‘eating at the Y.’
I guess the moral to this story is, don’t leave your wife alone with a drunken friend.
BarkGrowlBite
July 27, 2018
Three buddies were drinking at Permsak Petprasert’s home in Ratchaburi, Thailand on Saturday night. When thy ran out of booze, Petprasert and one of the other buddies left to get some more.
While the two men were gone, Suwit Tipjantha sneaked into the bedroom and stroked the arm of Petprasert’s sleeping wife. That woke her up. She ran out of the house and screamed at her returning husband that Tipjantha was trying to fuck her.
That didn’t sit too well with Petprasert. The furious husband clocked Tipjantha with a hammer and then cut off his unconscious friend’s dick with a fruit peeling knife. Then he threw the severed dick to his pet dogs for a treat. After that, he had some neighbors take Tipjantha to a hospital.
When Tipjantha regained consciousness in the hospital, he told the police that he had no recollection of what happened after they started drinking.
Thai cops busted Petprasert and he copped to everything. He was charged him with physical assault leading to a serious injury of another person. If convicted, he faces six months to 10 years behind bars.
Tipjanth is 39, Petprasert is 50 and Petprasert’s wife is 52.
Alas, poor Suwit. Doctors cannot reattach your dick. It’s gone to the dogs. Noe you will find it hard to hit the spot whenever you pee. And from now on, when you want to make love to some gal, you can only do it ‘eating at the Y.’
I guess the moral to this story is, don’t leave your wife alone with a drunken friend.
HOT AND SMOKEY IN CALIFORNIA
by Bob Walsh
There are about a gazillion dead trees in CA forests, due to the years-long drought and bark beetle disease. Dead trees burn like dead trees. The CA fire season is now year around.
As of right now CA has spent 22 percent of it's wildfire fighting budget and we are less than one month into the fire season.
The environmental nutjobs don't want to clear-cut dead trees so there are large areas of tinder just waiting for a spark to set it afire.
It is really unpleasant in much of CA due to the smoke from the fires and it isn't going to get better any time soon. Life is hard, and sometimes unfair, and you can't always get what you want.
There are about a gazillion dead trees in CA forests, due to the years-long drought and bark beetle disease. Dead trees burn like dead trees. The CA fire season is now year around.
As of right now CA has spent 22 percent of it's wildfire fighting budget and we are less than one month into the fire season.
The environmental nutjobs don't want to clear-cut dead trees so there are large areas of tinder just waiting for a spark to set it afire.
It is really unpleasant in much of CA due to the smoke from the fires and it isn't going to get better any time soon. Life is hard, and sometimes unfair, and you can't always get what you want.
EDUCATION LAWSUIT IS MOVING AHEAD
by Bob Walsh
Last December a group of students in LA and Stockton filed a suit, asserting that education in their government schools suck ass. The suit noted that of the 26 shittiest large school districts in the country, 11 are in the formerly great state of California.
The State Dept. of Education tried to have the suit dismissed, asserting among other things that the state constitution does not necessarily guarantee a decent education, just a free one.
L. A. County Judge Yvette Palazuelos has just ruled that the suit may move forward.
The plaintiffs include the PTA and Calif. Teachers Association, a large union representing teachers.
EDITOR'S NOTE: California high school graduates can barely read or write, and cannot do simple math because their brains have been saturated with politically correct multiculturalism and diversity. But that holds true for most of the other states in our dumbed down country.
Last December a group of students in LA and Stockton filed a suit, asserting that education in their government schools suck ass. The suit noted that of the 26 shittiest large school districts in the country, 11 are in the formerly great state of California.
The State Dept. of Education tried to have the suit dismissed, asserting among other things that the state constitution does not necessarily guarantee a decent education, just a free one.
L. A. County Judge Yvette Palazuelos has just ruled that the suit may move forward.
The plaintiffs include the PTA and Calif. Teachers Association, a large union representing teachers.
EDITOR'S NOTE: California high school graduates can barely read or write, and cannot do simple math because their brains have been saturated with politically correct multiculturalism and diversity. But that holds true for most of the other states in our dumbed down country.
AGE PROGRESSION PHOTO LEADS TO BABY MISSING 24 YEARS
Missing Phoenix girl found alive nearly 24 years later
By Lauren Reimer
azfamily
July 25, 2018
A Phoenix girl missing since 1994 has been found.
Aleacia Stancil disappeared without a trace nearly 24 years ago, leaving police with few clues. That is, until her age progression photo was recognized clear across the country.
Recently obtained police documents are shedding light on this case.
Her mother, Toni Stancil, had a hard life. After leaving the Air Force, she struggled with drug use and turned to prostitution.
One night in December of 1994, Toni gave her 9-month-old daughter Aleacia to a friend, saying she needed a few days to "clear her head."
The child was passed from person to person until she ended up with police, her identity unknown.
When Toni came back two days later, the baby was gone.
She went to jail soon after and didn't report Aleacia missing until March of 1995.
By then the little girl was under the care of Child Protective Services, but the information was never connected.
Toni was found murdered that same year.
"Without that one and only witness, I'm very limited in how to proceed with the investigation," said Det. William Andersen with the Phoenix Police Missing Persons Unit in a 2013 interview.
Fast forward to 2014. A young woman in Connecticut showed up at a hospital. She had no ID and did not know much about herself.
The nurse found it suspicious and looked online for missing people. She came across an age progression photo of Aleacia and called police.
Police took her DNA for testing. Three years later, the tests came back a match.
Aleacia had been adopted, and now goes by a different name.
Her grandmother, Frances Ford, who now lives in Georgia, says Aleacia wishes to stay out of the spotlight.
She says the two were able to meet in person. From that meeting, she deduced Alecia's life has been complicated and confusing. Ford wishes to one day have a relationship with her.
"I would want the world to know that these are the things that can happen to kids, and not every story is not a happily-ever-after, and it doesn't mean that they came from someone who didn't want them or didn't care," said Ford.
By Lauren Reimer
azfamily
July 25, 2018
A Phoenix girl missing since 1994 has been found.
Aleacia Stancil disappeared without a trace nearly 24 years ago, leaving police with few clues. That is, until her age progression photo was recognized clear across the country.
Recently obtained police documents are shedding light on this case.
Her mother, Toni Stancil, had a hard life. After leaving the Air Force, she struggled with drug use and turned to prostitution.
One night in December of 1994, Toni gave her 9-month-old daughter Aleacia to a friend, saying she needed a few days to "clear her head."
The child was passed from person to person until she ended up with police, her identity unknown.
When Toni came back two days later, the baby was gone.
She went to jail soon after and didn't report Aleacia missing until March of 1995.
By then the little girl was under the care of Child Protective Services, but the information was never connected.
Toni was found murdered that same year.
"Without that one and only witness, I'm very limited in how to proceed with the investigation," said Det. William Andersen with the Phoenix Police Missing Persons Unit in a 2013 interview.
Fast forward to 2014. A young woman in Connecticut showed up at a hospital. She had no ID and did not know much about herself.
The nurse found it suspicious and looked online for missing people. She came across an age progression photo of Aleacia and called police.
Police took her DNA for testing. Three years later, the tests came back a match.
Aleacia had been adopted, and now goes by a different name.
Her grandmother, Frances Ford, who now lives in Georgia, says Aleacia wishes to stay out of the spotlight.
She says the two were able to meet in person. From that meeting, she deduced Alecia's life has been complicated and confusing. Ford wishes to one day have a relationship with her.
"I would want the world to know that these are the things that can happen to kids, and not every story is not a happily-ever-after, and it doesn't mean that they came from someone who didn't want them or didn't care," said Ford.
FUN AND GAMES THE TJ WAY
Tijuana: 15 murders in the last 24 hours
Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from Zeta Tijuana
Borderland Beat
July 25, 2018
In Tijuana, unstoppable violence continues. In the last 24 hours, 13 men and two women have been killed in different parts of the city.
At 07:00 hours in the Nueva Esperanza neighborhood, two lifeless bodies were found and their faces were wrapped in plastic bags. They died from apparent strangulation.
A burned body was located in a water basin of the CESPT located on Roble Street, in the El Carmen neighborhood.
The corpse of a male aged 60 to 70 years was found in a bag located on the Libramiento Rosas Magallón in Cañón del Matadero.
In Palmas street in the Campestre Murua neighborhood, the charred body of a man was located.
In an armed attack occurring on Abelardo L. RodrÃguez Street in the Ejido Matamoros neighborhood, Luis Javier Hernández Ramos died and another subject was wounded. Witnesses reported that three men aboard a golden-colored Cherokee pickup arrived at the scene and asked for "Luis" shooting their firearms.
Jesús ElÃas Salazar RamÃrez was killed gunshots in the neighborhood of Mariano Matamoros Sur. The victim had received death threats from a person nicknamed "Fibi".
A woman was killed with a sharp object and her putrefying body was found in a bathroom at the Vicente Riva Palacios residence # 504, in the Otay Nueva Tijuana neighborhood.
A double homicide was registered in the El Peñón neighborhood, in the La Presa Delegation. The victims were identified as Iván Uriel de Jesús and Margarito de Jesús FrÃas.
Shot with a firearm, a woman between 25 and 30 years old died in Calle del Nogal Este, in the La Morita II neighborhood.
On the morning of July 25, when he was on board a vehicle, Arturo Gutiérrez Valle was killed at point-blank range on Avenida de La Amistad, inside the "Pera" parking lot, in the Empleados Federales neighborhood.
Outside the Hotel Niza, located on Coahuila avenue in the Central Zone, a blue suitcase with a corpse with signs of strangulation was found. Information revealed to ZETA indicates that the victim is allegedly Jhonatán Alexander Romero, alias "El Jhony", "El Moreno", "El Fory", "El 40". The now deceased was presumably shot on June 19 in the same area. On that occasion two men with a .45-caliber firearm were registered.
At 05:30 hours on Mitla street, in the Mariano Matamoros neighborhood, a man was shot to death, so far unidentified.
Finally, at 07:30 hours on the Tijuana-Tecate highway near Plaza Sendero, a lifeless body of a subject was located in a white plastic bag.
So far no people are being detained for the previous crimes.
Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from Zeta Tijuana
Borderland Beat
July 25, 2018
In Tijuana, unstoppable violence continues. In the last 24 hours, 13 men and two women have been killed in different parts of the city.
At 07:00 hours in the Nueva Esperanza neighborhood, two lifeless bodies were found and their faces were wrapped in plastic bags. They died from apparent strangulation.
A burned body was located in a water basin of the CESPT located on Roble Street, in the El Carmen neighborhood.
The corpse of a male aged 60 to 70 years was found in a bag located on the Libramiento Rosas Magallón in Cañón del Matadero.
In Palmas street in the Campestre Murua neighborhood, the charred body of a man was located.
In an armed attack occurring on Abelardo L. RodrÃguez Street in the Ejido Matamoros neighborhood, Luis Javier Hernández Ramos died and another subject was wounded. Witnesses reported that three men aboard a golden-colored Cherokee pickup arrived at the scene and asked for "Luis" shooting their firearms.
Jesús ElÃas Salazar RamÃrez was killed gunshots in the neighborhood of Mariano Matamoros Sur. The victim had received death threats from a person nicknamed "Fibi".
A woman was killed with a sharp object and her putrefying body was found in a bathroom at the Vicente Riva Palacios residence # 504, in the Otay Nueva Tijuana neighborhood.
A double homicide was registered in the El Peñón neighborhood, in the La Presa Delegation. The victims were identified as Iván Uriel de Jesús and Margarito de Jesús FrÃas.
Shot with a firearm, a woman between 25 and 30 years old died in Calle del Nogal Este, in the La Morita II neighborhood.
On the morning of July 25, when he was on board a vehicle, Arturo Gutiérrez Valle was killed at point-blank range on Avenida de La Amistad, inside the "Pera" parking lot, in the Empleados Federales neighborhood.
Outside the Hotel Niza, located on Coahuila avenue in the Central Zone, a blue suitcase with a corpse with signs of strangulation was found. Information revealed to ZETA indicates that the victim is allegedly Jhonatán Alexander Romero, alias "El Jhony", "El Moreno", "El Fory", "El 40". The now deceased was presumably shot on June 19 in the same area. On that occasion two men with a .45-caliber firearm were registered.
At 05:30 hours on Mitla street, in the Mariano Matamoros neighborhood, a man was shot to death, so far unidentified.
Finally, at 07:30 hours on the Tijuana-Tecate highway near Plaza Sendero, a lifeless body of a subject was located in a white plastic bag.
So far no people are being detained for the previous crimes.
NONE OF THAT UNDOCUMENTED PC CRAP ….. THEY ARE ILLEGAL ALIENS
Justice Dept. reportedly tells attorneys 'illegal alien' is correct term, not 'undocumented'
By Victor Morton
The Washington Times
July 24, 2018
No more “undocumented” immigrants, just “illegal aliens.”
CNN reported Tuesday evening that the Justice Department has told its attorneys that the term “undocumented” is inaccurate according to U.S. immigration law and that they should start using the legally correct term.
“Illegal alien” is the accurate term used in the U.S. Code, the email reportedly says.
The use of the term “illegal” in the nation’s immigration debate has come under increasing attack from immigrant-rights activists, who can frequently be seen holding signs saying “no person is illegal.”
The term “undocumented” has gained increasing currency in both their rhetoric and in the stylebooks of U.S. media outlets as a substitute.
Conservatives have generally dismissed the term as a politically correct euphemism designed to distort public debate.
The Justice Department reminded its lawyers Tuesday that there must be uniformity in their usage, implying that “undocumented” usage had been bleeding over.
The email sought “to clear up some confusion and to be consistent in the way we draft our releases,” CNN quoted it as saying.
By Victor Morton
The Washington Times
July 24, 2018
No more “undocumented” immigrants, just “illegal aliens.”
CNN reported Tuesday evening that the Justice Department has told its attorneys that the term “undocumented” is inaccurate according to U.S. immigration law and that they should start using the legally correct term.
“Illegal alien” is the accurate term used in the U.S. Code, the email reportedly says.
The use of the term “illegal” in the nation’s immigration debate has come under increasing attack from immigrant-rights activists, who can frequently be seen holding signs saying “no person is illegal.”
The term “undocumented” has gained increasing currency in both their rhetoric and in the stylebooks of U.S. media outlets as a substitute.
Conservatives have generally dismissed the term as a politically correct euphemism designed to distort public debate.
The Justice Department reminded its lawyers Tuesday that there must be uniformity in their usage, implying that “undocumented” usage had been bleeding over.
The email sought “to clear up some confusion and to be consistent in the way we draft our releases,” CNN quoted it as saying.
Thursday, July 26, 2018
MCRUCKUS AT MCDONALD'S
Shit for brains broad doesn't know any better than to pick a fight with someone three times bigger than her
This brawl took place recently at a Las Vegas McDonald's. Erika Chavolla, 24, a McDonald's employee, came out fighting after Sabrinah Fontelar, also 24, threw a milkshake at her and hit her in the face with a metal tray. It all started when, instead of getting a cup of water that she ordered, Fontelar started to fill her cup with a soda she did not pay for.
Fontelar says she has been charged with battery. Chavolla says she has been allowed to keep her job at McDonald's.
This brawl took place recently at a Las Vegas McDonald's. Erika Chavolla, 24, a McDonald's employee, came out fighting after Sabrinah Fontelar, also 24, threw a milkshake at her and hit her in the face with a metal tray. It all started when, instead of getting a cup of water that she ordered, Fontelar started to fill her cup with a soda she did not pay for.
Fontelar says she has been charged with battery. Chavolla says she has been allowed to keep her job at McDonald's.
EATING LUNCH MAY BECOME HARDER (AND MORE COSTLY) IN S.F.
by Bob Walsh
It seems that the local restaurant owners association is pissed that many of the tech firms in the greater San Francisco area have a cafeteria-commissary on site for their employees. These often provide very low cost or even free meals to the help as part of their compensation.
At the behest of the restaurant association the city and county of San Francisco is moving to make these on-site cafeterias illegal in order to FORCE employees to move into the local area during their lunch breaks and buy food locally (or else brown-bag it).
It is unclear how much traction the proposal will get as many of these firms provide a lot of healthy food, like salads and fruit and low-fat snacks, as opposed to pizza and greaseburgers.
It seems that the local restaurant owners association is pissed that many of the tech firms in the greater San Francisco area have a cafeteria-commissary on site for their employees. These often provide very low cost or even free meals to the help as part of their compensation.
At the behest of the restaurant association the city and county of San Francisco is moving to make these on-site cafeterias illegal in order to FORCE employees to move into the local area during their lunch breaks and buy food locally (or else brown-bag it).
It is unclear how much traction the proposal will get as many of these firms provide a lot of healthy food, like salads and fruit and low-fat snacks, as opposed to pizza and greaseburgers.
COP FIRED FOR FILING CHARGES AGAINST MAYOR, CHIEF AND FORMER CHIEF
by Bob Walsh
Charles Mick used to be a Sergeant with the New Holland, Ohio, police department. He is now unemployed. Last Friday he filed criminal charges against the city Mayor, the former Chief of Police and the current interim Chief. On Monday night he was sacked.
He served Mayor Butch Betzko with a court summons at a special meeting of the village council. When he left the meeting he served interim Police Chief David Conrad in the chief's office. Mick was fired on the spot.
The town has a population of about 800 people. The police department is made up entirely of part-time volunteers. Mick announced in front of a crowd on his way out that he had just been fired for "doing the right thing." He stated he intends to file for whistle-blower protection.
Mick filed a fifth-degree felony forgery charge against Conrad, who is also the P8ickaway County emergency management director. He also filed a charge of complicity to commit forgery against Betzko, formerly a long-time deputy with the Franklin County S.O. That is also a fifth-degree felony.
Conrado is suspected of forging the signature of former Police Chief William Lawless on a document dated July 16. This was required by law to change Lawless' status in the village from Chief to Reserve Officer. It is believed that Lawless was not even in the state at the time his alleged signature was placed on the document.
Lawless has since resigned and stated he is moving out of the state. Neither Conrad nor Betzko could be reached for comment.
There are also allegedly other forged documents floating around. In addition thee is an accusation that Lawless had a local woman make harassing phone calls to a local online news site that deals with local news and issues from his office phone. Other charges may be pending in this matter.
God, don't you just love small town politics??
Charles Mick used to be a Sergeant with the New Holland, Ohio, police department. He is now unemployed. Last Friday he filed criminal charges against the city Mayor, the former Chief of Police and the current interim Chief. On Monday night he was sacked.
He served Mayor Butch Betzko with a court summons at a special meeting of the village council. When he left the meeting he served interim Police Chief David Conrad in the chief's office. Mick was fired on the spot.
The town has a population of about 800 people. The police department is made up entirely of part-time volunteers. Mick announced in front of a crowd on his way out that he had just been fired for "doing the right thing." He stated he intends to file for whistle-blower protection.
Mick filed a fifth-degree felony forgery charge against Conrad, who is also the P8ickaway County emergency management director. He also filed a charge of complicity to commit forgery against Betzko, formerly a long-time deputy with the Franklin County S.O. That is also a fifth-degree felony.
Conrado is suspected of forging the signature of former Police Chief William Lawless on a document dated July 16. This was required by law to change Lawless' status in the village from Chief to Reserve Officer. It is believed that Lawless was not even in the state at the time his alleged signature was placed on the document.
Lawless has since resigned and stated he is moving out of the state. Neither Conrad nor Betzko could be reached for comment.
There are also allegedly other forged documents floating around. In addition thee is an accusation that Lawless had a local woman make harassing phone calls to a local online news site that deals with local news and issues from his office phone. Other charges may be pending in this matter.
God, don't you just love small town politics??
SCHOOL PAYS FOR DISSING TRUMP
by Bob Walsh
Addison Barnes, 18, was a senior at Liberty High School (ironic name) in Hillsboro, Oregon back in January. He showed up wearing a T-shirt that said DONALD J TRUMP BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY on it. He was suspended and sent home for this affront to decency.
He sued. Last May a judge issued a TRO against the school. On Tuesday Barnes and the school reached a settlement. The young man gets a written apology from the principle and $25,000.
The school asserted that the T-shirt would be "disruptive" but was unable to substantiate the assertion.
Addison Barnes, 18, was a senior at Liberty High School (ironic name) in Hillsboro, Oregon back in January. He showed up wearing a T-shirt that said DONALD J TRUMP BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY on it. He was suspended and sent home for this affront to decency.
He sued. Last May a judge issued a TRO against the school. On Tuesday Barnes and the school reached a settlement. The young man gets a written apology from the principle and $25,000.
The school asserted that the T-shirt would be "disruptive" but was unable to substantiate the assertion.
NEW CIVIL SERVICE GIG
by Bob Walsh
The People's Republic of San Francisco has just created a new civil service job with ten spots available. The job is to walk around the city with a bucket and a long-handled grabber to pick up the thousands and thousands of used syringes laying around the city.
Now they need to do something about the piles of human shit on sidewalks around the city. It is so bad there is actually an app for it so you can avoid the areas. Some people have avoided them so effectively that they have recently had at least two major conventions reschedule to other cities to avoid the filth, crime and institutionalized stupidity.
The People's Republic of San Francisco has just created a new civil service job with ten spots available. The job is to walk around the city with a bucket and a long-handled grabber to pick up the thousands and thousands of used syringes laying around the city.
Now they need to do something about the piles of human shit on sidewalks around the city. It is so bad there is actually an app for it so you can avoid the areas. Some people have avoided them so effectively that they have recently had at least two major conventions reschedule to other cities to avoid the filth, crime and institutionalized stupidity.
RELEASE OF TAPE BY COHEN’S LAWYER IS STAB IN TRUMP’S BACK
Exclusive: CNN obtains secret Trump-Cohen tape
By Chris Cuomo, Kara Scannell and Eli Watkins
CNN
July 25, 2018
Presidential candidate Donald Trump is heard on tape discussing with his attorney Michael Cohen how they would buy the rights to a Playboy model's story about an alleged affair Trump had with her years earlier, according to the audio recording of the conversation aired exclusively on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time."
The recording offers the public a glimpse at the confidential discussions between Trump and Cohen, and it confirms the man who now occupies the Oval Office had contemporaneous knowledge of a proposal to buy the rights to the story of Karen McDougal, a woman who has alleged she had an extramarital affair with Trump about a decade ago.
Cohen told Trump about his plans to set up a company and finance the purchase of the rights from American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer. The recording captures what appears to be a routine business conversation of several matters on their agenda. The audio is muddled and the meaning of Trump's use of the word "cash" is disputed by the two sides.
"I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David," Cohen said in the recording, likely a reference to American Media head David Pecker.
When financing comes up again later in the conversation, Trump interrupts Cohen asking, "What financing?" according to the recording. When Cohen tells Trump, "We'll have to pay," Trump is heard saying "pay with cash" but the audio is muddled and it's unclear whether he suggests paying with cash or not paying. Cohen says, "no, no" but it is not clear what is said next.
No payment was ever made from Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the President's attorney, has said. Giuliani has previously acknowledged that the recorded discussion related to the buying the story rights.
"There's no indication of any crime being committed on this tape," Giuliani said on Fox News Channel Tuesday night.
Trump blasted Cohen over the disclosure Wednesday morning.
"What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped - can this be so? Too bad!" Trump tweeted.
The recording, which was provided to CNN by Cohen's attorney Lanny Davis, was made in September 2016. It's the latest breakdown in the decade-long relationship between Trump and Cohen, who once said he would take a bullet for the President. Cohen in recent weeks has made clear he is open to cooperating with US prosecutors.
"What is this about? This is about honesty versus false disparagement of Michael Cohen. Why is Giuliani out falsely disparaging Michael Cohen -- because they fear him," Davis said on "Cuomo Prime Time."
"What do they fear, Chris? Why am I representing him? They fear that he has the truth about Donald Trump. He will someday speak the truth about Donald Trump. The truth is that when Donald Trump said 'cash,' which Rudy Giuliani knows that only drug dealers and mobsters talk about cash, it was, you heard Michael Cohen ... say what? 'No, no, no, no.'"
Davis later added: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you voted for Donald Trump, listen to the tape and ask yourself: Is Donald Trump lying when he said he didn't use the word 'cash' and accuses Michael Cohen of using the word 'cash'? Cohen has been disparaged. Cohen has been insulted and called all sorts of things by people around Donald Trump."
Giuliani and Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, refuted that the tape shows Trump was offering a cash payment.
"There's no way the President is going to be setting up a corporation and then using cash, unless you're a complete idiot," Giuliani said on Fox News Tuesday night.
"This was leaked on us with a very, very scurrilous description of what was on the tape," he added.
Cash, in the conversation, was in reference to how a deal would be financed, Futerfas said.
"Whoever is telling Davis that cash in that conversation refers to green currency is lying to him," Futerfas told CNN. "There's no transaction done in green currency. It doesn't happen. The whole deal never happened. If it was going to happen, it would be a payment to a large company that would obviously be accompanied by an agreement of sale. Those documents would be prepared by lawyers on both sides."
"The word cash came up in the context of the distinction between financing, which is referenced, and no financing, which means a full payment, a total one-time payment. That's the context in which the word cash is used," he said. "Anyone who knows anything about the company or how the President does business knows there is no green cash. Everything is documented. Every penny is documented."
On the tape Cohen also says, "I've spoken with (Trump Organization chief financial officer) Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding."
Futerfas declined to answer whether the payment would have been from the company or from Trump's personal finances. He said Weisselberg wore two hats working for Trump and his company. "I don't even know what Michael Cohen would have said to Allen Weisselberg because all Allen does is bookkeeping and process requests for transactions that are given to him," Futerfas said.
Court filings said federal prosecutors have obtained 12 audio recordings from the FBI raids on Cohen earlier this year. CNN previously reported that Trump's lawyers waived attorney-client privilege on the President's behalf regarding the recording involving him personally.
The audio recording of Trump and Cohen relates to whether Trump should buy the rights of the story from American Media, which paid McDougal $150,000 in August 2016 for her story about an alleged 10 month affair with Trump. The story was never published by AMI.
An attorney for AMI declined to comment Tuesday night.
A spokesman for the US attorney's office in Manhattan, which is investigating Cohen, declined to comment.
In addition to discussing the McDougal payment, Trump and Cohen are overheard running through a list of potential legal issues, including contesting a New York Times request to unseal divorce records from Trump's first wife Ivana as well as more mundane matters such as polling numbers and Trump surrogate Pastor Mark Burns.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis all but called Trump a mobster on Wednesday during an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America. He insisted that it was Trump who suggested the payoff be made in cash and added that “We know that Trump used the word 'cash' and people who use cash, [as] Rudy Giuliani knows when he's U.S. attorney, are either drug dealers or mobsters.”
By Chris Cuomo, Kara Scannell and Eli Watkins
CNN
July 25, 2018
Presidential candidate Donald Trump is heard on tape discussing with his attorney Michael Cohen how they would buy the rights to a Playboy model's story about an alleged affair Trump had with her years earlier, according to the audio recording of the conversation aired exclusively on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time."
The recording offers the public a glimpse at the confidential discussions between Trump and Cohen, and it confirms the man who now occupies the Oval Office had contemporaneous knowledge of a proposal to buy the rights to the story of Karen McDougal, a woman who has alleged she had an extramarital affair with Trump about a decade ago.
Cohen told Trump about his plans to set up a company and finance the purchase of the rights from American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer. The recording captures what appears to be a routine business conversation of several matters on their agenda. The audio is muddled and the meaning of Trump's use of the word "cash" is disputed by the two sides.
"I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David," Cohen said in the recording, likely a reference to American Media head David Pecker.
When financing comes up again later in the conversation, Trump interrupts Cohen asking, "What financing?" according to the recording. When Cohen tells Trump, "We'll have to pay," Trump is heard saying "pay with cash" but the audio is muddled and it's unclear whether he suggests paying with cash or not paying. Cohen says, "no, no" but it is not clear what is said next.
No payment was ever made from Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the President's attorney, has said. Giuliani has previously acknowledged that the recorded discussion related to the buying the story rights.
"There's no indication of any crime being committed on this tape," Giuliani said on Fox News Channel Tuesday night.
Trump blasted Cohen over the disclosure Wednesday morning.
"What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped - can this be so? Too bad!" Trump tweeted.
The recording, which was provided to CNN by Cohen's attorney Lanny Davis, was made in September 2016. It's the latest breakdown in the decade-long relationship between Trump and Cohen, who once said he would take a bullet for the President. Cohen in recent weeks has made clear he is open to cooperating with US prosecutors.
"What is this about? This is about honesty versus false disparagement of Michael Cohen. Why is Giuliani out falsely disparaging Michael Cohen -- because they fear him," Davis said on "Cuomo Prime Time."
"What do they fear, Chris? Why am I representing him? They fear that he has the truth about Donald Trump. He will someday speak the truth about Donald Trump. The truth is that when Donald Trump said 'cash,' which Rudy Giuliani knows that only drug dealers and mobsters talk about cash, it was, you heard Michael Cohen ... say what? 'No, no, no, no.'"
Davis later added: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you voted for Donald Trump, listen to the tape and ask yourself: Is Donald Trump lying when he said he didn't use the word 'cash' and accuses Michael Cohen of using the word 'cash'? Cohen has been disparaged. Cohen has been insulted and called all sorts of things by people around Donald Trump."
Giuliani and Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, refuted that the tape shows Trump was offering a cash payment.
"There's no way the President is going to be setting up a corporation and then using cash, unless you're a complete idiot," Giuliani said on Fox News Tuesday night.
"This was leaked on us with a very, very scurrilous description of what was on the tape," he added.
Cash, in the conversation, was in reference to how a deal would be financed, Futerfas said.
"Whoever is telling Davis that cash in that conversation refers to green currency is lying to him," Futerfas told CNN. "There's no transaction done in green currency. It doesn't happen. The whole deal never happened. If it was going to happen, it would be a payment to a large company that would obviously be accompanied by an agreement of sale. Those documents would be prepared by lawyers on both sides."
"The word cash came up in the context of the distinction between financing, which is referenced, and no financing, which means a full payment, a total one-time payment. That's the context in which the word cash is used," he said. "Anyone who knows anything about the company or how the President does business knows there is no green cash. Everything is documented. Every penny is documented."
On the tape Cohen also says, "I've spoken with (Trump Organization chief financial officer) Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding."
Futerfas declined to answer whether the payment would have been from the company or from Trump's personal finances. He said Weisselberg wore two hats working for Trump and his company. "I don't even know what Michael Cohen would have said to Allen Weisselberg because all Allen does is bookkeeping and process requests for transactions that are given to him," Futerfas said.
Court filings said federal prosecutors have obtained 12 audio recordings from the FBI raids on Cohen earlier this year. CNN previously reported that Trump's lawyers waived attorney-client privilege on the President's behalf regarding the recording involving him personally.
The audio recording of Trump and Cohen relates to whether Trump should buy the rights of the story from American Media, which paid McDougal $150,000 in August 2016 for her story about an alleged 10 month affair with Trump. The story was never published by AMI.
An attorney for AMI declined to comment Tuesday night.
A spokesman for the US attorney's office in Manhattan, which is investigating Cohen, declined to comment.
In addition to discussing the McDougal payment, Trump and Cohen are overheard running through a list of potential legal issues, including contesting a New York Times request to unseal divorce records from Trump's first wife Ivana as well as more mundane matters such as polling numbers and Trump surrogate Pastor Mark Burns.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis all but called Trump a mobster on Wednesday during an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America. He insisted that it was Trump who suggested the payoff be made in cash and added that “We know that Trump used the word 'cash' and people who use cash, [as] Rudy Giuliani knows when he's U.S. attorney, are either drug dealers or mobsters.”
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
AMERICA’S DAD RECOMMENDED FOR NEW HONOR
Pennsylvania state advisory board recommends that Bill Cosby should be classified as a 'sexually violent predator'
By Emily Crane
Daily Mail
July 24, 2018
A Pennsylvania state advisory board has recommended that Bill Cosby be deemed a 'sexually violent predator', which would require the convicted comedian to undergo counseling and register as a sex offender for life.
The Montgomery County District Attorney's office that prosecuted Cosby requested a hearing on Tuesday so a judge can make the final decision on whether the 81-year-old comedian should be considered sexually violent.
The 81-year-old comedian, who was convicted April 26 of aggravated indecent assault, was accused of drugging and assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his home near Philadelphia in 2004.
The weekslong retrial included testimony from five other women who were among the dozens to accuse Cosby of similar sexual misconduct.
The former TV star, once known as 'America's Dad' for his portrayal of kindly Dr Cliff Huxtable on 'The Cosby Show', is now under house arrest with a GPS ankle monitor awaiting sentencing.
He is only allowed to leave to visit doctors or lawyers ahead of his September 24 hearing. Cosby faces up to 10 years in prison but his representatives have said he plans to appeal.
The report by the Sexual Offenders Assessment Board, which examined 14 different criteria, is not public.
Copies are given to the prosecutor, defense attorney and court before the hearing and the board's assessor will likely testify about how she made the recommendation.
State law already requires Cosby to register as a sex offender because of the nature of the charge of which he was convicted.
The sexually violent predator classification would require increased treatment in prison and increased notification of neighbors upon release.
A person deemed a predator is subject to lifetime, at least monthly, mandatory sex offender counseling with a treatment provider approved by the state board.
Under Pennsylvania law, a sexually violent predator is a person who has 'a mental abnormality or personality disorder the makes the person likely to engage in predatory sexually violent offenses.'
Following news of the board's recommendation, Cosby's victim Andrea Constand tweeted: 'I am very thankful right now'.
Asked about the assessment board hearing, Cosby's spokesman Andrew Wyatt said: 'We will see them in court'.
It comes after police were called to Cosby's home earlier this month for a noise complaint while he was celebrating his 81st birthday.
By Emily Crane
Daily Mail
July 24, 2018
A Pennsylvania state advisory board has recommended that Bill Cosby be deemed a 'sexually violent predator', which would require the convicted comedian to undergo counseling and register as a sex offender for life.
The Montgomery County District Attorney's office that prosecuted Cosby requested a hearing on Tuesday so a judge can make the final decision on whether the 81-year-old comedian should be considered sexually violent.
The 81-year-old comedian, who was convicted April 26 of aggravated indecent assault, was accused of drugging and assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his home near Philadelphia in 2004.
The weekslong retrial included testimony from five other women who were among the dozens to accuse Cosby of similar sexual misconduct.
The former TV star, once known as 'America's Dad' for his portrayal of kindly Dr Cliff Huxtable on 'The Cosby Show', is now under house arrest with a GPS ankle monitor awaiting sentencing.
He is only allowed to leave to visit doctors or lawyers ahead of his September 24 hearing. Cosby faces up to 10 years in prison but his representatives have said he plans to appeal.
The report by the Sexual Offenders Assessment Board, which examined 14 different criteria, is not public.
Copies are given to the prosecutor, defense attorney and court before the hearing and the board's assessor will likely testify about how she made the recommendation.
State law already requires Cosby to register as a sex offender because of the nature of the charge of which he was convicted.
The sexually violent predator classification would require increased treatment in prison and increased notification of neighbors upon release.
A person deemed a predator is subject to lifetime, at least monthly, mandatory sex offender counseling with a treatment provider approved by the state board.
Under Pennsylvania law, a sexually violent predator is a person who has 'a mental abnormality or personality disorder the makes the person likely to engage in predatory sexually violent offenses.'
Following news of the board's recommendation, Cosby's victim Andrea Constand tweeted: 'I am very thankful right now'.
Asked about the assessment board hearing, Cosby's spokesman Andrew Wyatt said: 'We will see them in court'.
It comes after police were called to Cosby's home earlier this month for a noise complaint while he was celebrating his 81st birthday.
THE ULTIMATE SELFIE
by Bob Walsh
Sarah Schmid, 36, is from Germany, and is currently living in France. She currently has six children. For reasons passing understanding she decided to give birth to rugrat #6 in her backyard at home, completely unassisted, with her other five children looking on. The whole messy thing was live-streamed on YouTube.
All you selfie dilettantes out there are gonna have to go some to beat that.
Sarah Schmid, 36, is from Germany, and is currently living in France. She currently has six children. For reasons passing understanding she decided to give birth to rugrat #6 in her backyard at home, completely unassisted, with her other five children looking on. The whole messy thing was live-streamed on YouTube.
All you selfie dilettantes out there are gonna have to go some to beat that.
NO, NOTHING WRONG HERE
by Bob Walsh
Willie Wilson is a black man living in Chicago. He is a Democrat, and is running for Mayor. That should come as no surprise, I don't believe Republicans are legally permitted to run for office in Chicago.
He happened to be in church this weekend and just happened to give out about $300,000 in cash money to the parishoners, to help them pay their bills, because he is a nice guy. He said it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with him running for Mayor. He said it with a straight face.
The Chicago elections board has said there it is all perfectly legal. Of course it is, he is a Democrat.
Willie Wilson is a black man living in Chicago. He is a Democrat, and is running for Mayor. That should come as no surprise, I don't believe Republicans are legally permitted to run for office in Chicago.
He happened to be in church this weekend and just happened to give out about $300,000 in cash money to the parishoners, to help them pay their bills, because he is a nice guy. He said it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with him running for Mayor. He said it with a straight face.
The Chicago elections board has said there it is all perfectly legal. Of course it is, he is a Democrat.
NEWS FLASH...NINTH CIRCUIT REMOVES COLLECTIVE HEAD FROM COLLECTIVE ASS
by Bob Walsh
Acting on Tuesday a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recognized that the Second Amendment DOES in fact protect an individual right to bear arms in public in the case of Young vs. Hawaii.
Among other things the ruling, which had extensive historical research, stated "Just as the Second Amendment does not protect a right to bear arms only in connection with a militia, it surely does not protect a right to bear arms only as a security guard." Further the ruling stated, "But, for better or worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense." The ruling notes that no concealed carry license had EVER been granted by the county in which Young resides, seeming to indicated that no one within the county has ever had good cause to be issued a concealed carry license.
This puts the case somewhat at odds with a ruling by the entire Ninth Circuit two years ago in Peruta vs. San Diego County. In that case SCOTUS refused to hear the case, leaving the anti-2A ruling intact. It seems this is likely to set things up for a new referral to SCOTUS which, in light of the Heller decision and recent changes in the court, is likely to be good for fans of the Constitution.
Acting on Tuesday a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recognized that the Second Amendment DOES in fact protect an individual right to bear arms in public in the case of Young vs. Hawaii.
Among other things the ruling, which had extensive historical research, stated "Just as the Second Amendment does not protect a right to bear arms only in connection with a militia, it surely does not protect a right to bear arms only as a security guard." Further the ruling stated, "But, for better or worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense." The ruling notes that no concealed carry license had EVER been granted by the county in which Young resides, seeming to indicated that no one within the county has ever had good cause to be issued a concealed carry license.
This puts the case somewhat at odds with a ruling by the entire Ninth Circuit two years ago in Peruta vs. San Diego County. In that case SCOTUS refused to hear the case, leaving the anti-2A ruling intact. It seems this is likely to set things up for a new referral to SCOTUS which, in light of the Heller decision and recent changes in the court, is likely to be good for fans of the Constitution.
ADIOS AMIGOS, HASTA LA VISTA
Inmates escape Mexican prison, walk out the front gate dressed as guards By Danielle Haynes
By Danielle Haynes
UPI
July 23, 2018
July 23 -- Two inmates at a prison in Mexico's Sinaloa state walked out of the front gate of the facility while dressed as prison guards, state officials said Monday.
Two guards at Culiacan Prison aided the escapees by driving a getaway car Sunday, police said.
El Universal identified the two men as Julian Grimaldi Paredes and Carlos Jesus Salomon Higuera.
Federal officials said Grimaldi Paredes was involved in the Sinaloa Cartel and participated in an ambush of an army convoy in 2016.
Police said Salomon Higuera took part in an ambush of state police in 2012 in which seven officers died.
Fermin Hernandez Montealegre, secretary of public security in Sinaloa, said the two men were being held in a new part of the prison and had to bypass several security measures before escaping.
Sinaloa Gov. Quirino Ordaz Coppel ordered an investigation into the escape and called on anyone who assisted the prisoners to come forward.
"That is and will be the main objective, to recapture them," he said, describing the two men has highly dangerous.
By Danielle Haynes
UPI
July 23, 2018
July 23 -- Two inmates at a prison in Mexico's Sinaloa state walked out of the front gate of the facility while dressed as prison guards, state officials said Monday.
Two guards at Culiacan Prison aided the escapees by driving a getaway car Sunday, police said.
El Universal identified the two men as Julian Grimaldi Paredes and Carlos Jesus Salomon Higuera.
Federal officials said Grimaldi Paredes was involved in the Sinaloa Cartel and participated in an ambush of an army convoy in 2016.
Police said Salomon Higuera took part in an ambush of state police in 2012 in which seven officers died.
Fermin Hernandez Montealegre, secretary of public security in Sinaloa, said the two men were being held in a new part of the prison and had to bypass several security measures before escaping.
Sinaloa Gov. Quirino Ordaz Coppel ordered an investigation into the escape and called on anyone who assisted the prisoners to come forward.
"That is and will be the main objective, to recapture them," he said, describing the two men has highly dangerous.
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