crime

Pussy Riot Member Gets Reprimand Overturned
RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
PERM, Russia -- Jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina has had one of two prison reprimands received since receiving her two-year jail sentence for hooliganism over an anti-Putin stunt in an Orthodox church in the capital. The appeal was heard in a ...

Lies from the other side
by Robert A. Waters

Here’s my idea of what a psychic (if there really were such people) should do.

Let’s say there’s a teenage girl missing from Cleveland, Ohio.  Her mother goes on national television to ask the psychic for help.  A real clairvoyant would say: “Your daughter is being held in a house just blocks from where you live.  Send the cops down to 2207 Seymour Avenue Street and they’ll find your daughter—still alive—along with two other kidnapped women.”

Instead, self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne informed Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead.  Years later, Amanda escaped her captor and led the others to safety, proving Browne dead-wrong. 

Or let’s say an eleven-year-old boy is kidnapped from Richwoods, Missouri.  Here’s what a real psychic would have told his grieving parents: “A big fat pervert kidnapped your boy and is holding him in an apartment in Kirkwood.  Tell police to search in the 400 block of South Holmes Street for a guy who works at a pizza shop.”

Instead, Sylvia Browne advised Shawn Hornbeck’s parents that he’d been kidnapped and murdered. By a tall, thin, “dark-skinned” man, no less.  Four years later, 300-pound, light-skinned Michael Devlin abducted Ben Ownby.  It was only because an eyewitness described his truck to police that Devlin was captured.  Cops rescued Onwby, along with Hornbeck, who'd been held alive for four years.

If a so-called psychic can be so wrong, how in the world can anyone trust her?

Don't gimme that garbage about Browne being right most of the time.  I just don't believe it.  I think she fishes for information and plays the law of averages when making predictions.

For some reason, while penning this blog, the following song kept wigging my mind.

http://youtu.be/cS4LCoh0VGQ
 

The News International
BB murder case: ATC reserves verdict over Musharraf's bail plea
The News International
RAWALPINDI: The Rawalpindi Anti Terrorism Court (ATC) has reserved its verdict over former President General (retd) Pervez Musharraf's bail plea in the Benazir Bhutto murder case. Pervez Musharraf's bail plea was heard by ATC judge Habib ur Rehman.
ATC to announce decision in BB murder case today - PakwatanPak Watan

all 4 news articles »

Press TV
Canada's government, senate under corruption investigation
Press TV
This week it was publicized that if you are looking for corruption in parliament, then turn to the Senate, or as it was put, Canada's dirty little secret, the anachronism imposed by Britain, and critics say despite scandals nothing will change and no ...

and more »

New York Times
Police: Man charged in hate crime of slain NYC gay man - USA Today
USA TODAY
Elliot Morales, who appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court, was charged with murder as a hate crime and weapons charges, The Wall Street Journal reported. Morales was ordered held without bail pending another court appearance on Thursday.
Charges Filed in Killing of Gay Man in Greenwich VillageNew York Times
Man Charged With Murder as Gay Hate CrimeWall Street Journal
Allegedly random murder, "hate crime," stuns NYCCBS News
NBCNews.com -Gothamist -Huffington Post
all 83 news articles »

Web-crime complaints in Ohio drop 43% in 2012
Columbus Dispatch
The state's top law-enforcement officer called those statistics a “blip” and said they don't reflect the number of online fraud cases being reported to his office. “I don't think we are into any kind of long-term decline in that type of crime,” Ohio ...

and more »

“Silent Corruption” vs. Professor Lungu's thoughts?
GhanaWeb
At this point, we want to reference a featured article of Saturday, 18 May 2013, by one Professor Lungu that purports to rubbish President Mahama's use of the two worded concept “silent corruption”. The President expressed that African leaders should ...

The Independent
Imran Khan blames rival for murder of politician
The Independent
Mr Khan blamed the Karachi-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) for the murder, a charge they have angrily denied. The movement's leader, Altaf Hussain, leads his party from exile in London. He also directed his anger at the UK authorities.
Imran Khan accuses rivals of involvement in murderMirror.co.uk
Imran blames rival for colleague murderHindustan Times
PTI stages nationwide demos against Zahra's murderThe News International
The Express Tribune -IBTimes.co.uk -Metro
all 270 news articles »

Ynetnews
Haredim riot in Jerusalem as soldiers cross Mea Shearim
Ynetnews
Haredim riot in Jerusalem as soldiers cross Mea Shearim. Police claim dozens set fire to trash bins, hurled stones in protest of haredi soldiers crossing ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. No injuries reported. Noam (Dabul) Dvir ...
Dozens Of Haredim Reportedly Stone 2 Haredi IDF Soldiers In Mea ShearimFailedMessiah.com

all 3 news articles »

Riot in the Pasture
Salisbury Post
Six year old Madilyn Wilson on the right works on a birdhouse during the Bread Riot's "Riot in the Pasture' at Morgan Ridge Vineyards. The Salisbury Art Station provided the material. photo by Wayne HInshaw, for the Salisbury Post. SALISBURY — Sitting ...

Wenty run riot in the second half against Roos
New South Wales Rugby League
The Wentworthville Magpies proved far too classy for Wyong, running out 55-16 winners in a free flowing Round 10 clash at Morry Breen Oval. A predominantly even opening half only tipped the visitors way very late. Wyong had in fact led the contest 10-8 ...

Business owners say crime, blight threaten Tulane Ave progress
WWL
"I don't think they should wait until this hospital is up and ready before they address any of the crime areas or the prostitution on Tulane. I think they've got a wonderful opportunity to make this an absolutely gorgeous looking street and now is the ...

New York Daily News
Suspect in West Village anti-gay murder laughed while confessing
New York Daily News
The homophobe accused of shooting a gay man to death in the West Village laughed in hideous glee as he confessed, a prosecutor told a judge said Sunday. Elliot Morales was hauled before a judge and charged with killing Mark Carson with a point-blank ...

Crime decreases in Highlands County
Highlands Today
Sebring Police Chief Thomas Dettman said he's also pleased with the progress that has been made in reducing crime. He said his statistics show that crime is lower than what it was 30 years ago and has fallen significantly since the peak crime years of ...

and more »

Police corruption defined by Chook's crotch cam
Newcastle Herald
Fowler had been the boss of Kings Cross detectives but, unknown to him, his equally corrupt second-in-charge Trevor Haken had rolled over to the Wood Royal Commission on the NSW Police Service. For months Haken had been secretly recording his ...

and more »

Town Hall
It's not the Crime, It's the Cover-up
Town Hall
There is an old saying in Washington: "It's not the crime, it's the cover up" that does the damage. The Nixon Administration attempted to dismiss the June 17, 1972 break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex as "a ...

and more »

Updates:

• Lynne Stewart Compassionate Release Petition
  
• Please Also Write to: Charles E Samuels Jr. / Federal Bureau of Prisons /
• 320 1st Street Northwest / Washington DC 20534

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Court Upholds Broad Injunction to Remedy FDNY Discrimination

We talk today about recent developments in the New York City Fire Department discrimination case known as the US and Vulcan Society v. City of New York. Last week, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that, in light of the City’s “distressing pattern of limited FDNY minority hiring,” broad relief ordered by the district judge to end discrimination in the FDNY was “entirely warranted.”

This decision includes an independent monitor in order to “oversee the FDNY’s long awaited progress toward ending discrimination.”  The Court also ruled that the plaintiffs’ intentional discrimination claim should proceed to a trial.  The district court had found that the evidence of intentional discrimination was so overwhelming that no trial was necessary. The Court of Appeals also reinstated the plaintiffs’ claim that former FDNY Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is individually liable for intentional discrimination.

Attorney  Dana Lossia:

• The Vulcan Society which is our client, a fraternity of black fire fighters sued the city of New York and said that the reason why the fire department back in the 60s and 70s was virtually all white was because of the hiring process that the city was using, it was discriminatory, it was unlawful.
• A federal judge agreed back in 1973 and ordered the city to hire one minority firefighter for every 3 white firefighters that was hired.
• Decades went on, we get up to the 90s and you look at the FDNY and it’s still 3 percent African American.
• It instituted the quota that was required for the bare minimum amount of time that was required and then it reverted to the all white club that the fire department has been its entire history in New York City.
• In a city that is 25 percent African American or more and 25 percent Latino.
• We made the case that not only was the city using these exams but they were continuing to use them with the knowledge and intent to perpetuate the fire department as it has existed.
• So that fathers could bring their sons and their nephews into the force and it would stay the way it had always been which is virtually all white, more than 90 percent white.
• The District Court Judge in Brooklyn agreed with us he said this was clearly intentional discrimination. He issued a remedial order requiring broad oversight  of the FDNY hiring process.
• The city didn’t like that, they appealed to the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals came down with a decision that largely upheld this very broad and deep oversight on everything the city does to hire firefighters.
• Every other fire department in a big city across the country is more racially diverse than in New York City.
• Back in the 80s women came into the fire department and face horrible harassment and retaliation.
• One of the things we learned is that fire fighting is less dangerous than construction work, its far less dangerous job than being a police officer, a roofer.
• Fire fighters are revered wherever they go and the job is much much more safe than sanitation work.

Guest – Attorney Dana Lossia (Northwestern University, B.A., summa cum laude 2001, Harvard Law School, J.D., 2005) joined Levy Ratner in December 2005. She represents unions in New York and New Jersey in arbitrations, administrative proceedings, NLRB cases and federal and state court litigation. She also represents plaintiffs in complex employment discrimination actions, including a challenge to racially discriminatory hiring practices at the NYC Fire Department. Lossia has also litigated on behalf of tenants in land use and zoning appeals before the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals.

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Lawyers You’ll Like: Anne O’Berry 

As part of our Lawyers You’ll Like series we’re joined by attorney Anne O’Berry, she’s the Vice President of the Southern Region of the National Lawyers Guild and the author of The Law Only As An Enemy:  The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia. While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights. In the last 12 years, Anne has served as counsel at a Florida law firm that specializes in class action litigation, particularly in the areas of securities, consumer and economic fraud, as well as some environmental and privacy rights litigation.

Attorney Anne O’Berry:

• We did a lot of historical research in terms of racism and the law back in pre-civil war Virginia.
• We focused on Virginia because it was a paradigm for slavery basically in the slave laws that were in place.
• We wrote an article for publication, it was published in the University of North Carolina law review. The Law Only As An Enemy:’ The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness Through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia.
• Depending on your status, if you were a free white person or a slave, you were treated differently by the law.
• As an overall theme, depending on the race of the victim was that would effect what your sentence would be.
• For example, if a black woman was raped, that was not considered a crime.  If you were a black person and you stole something, you would be put to death.
• It was ironic for the slave owner because if their slave was put to death, they would have to be compensated by the state.
• If the victim was black, the crime was treated less seriously than if the victim was white.
• I started out working at a firm in New York, a large prominent, Wall Street type.
• Among some people I was known as the pro-bono queen.
• I was there for 2 and a half years and the first pro-bono case was a death penalty case.
• The court ruled back then (1990s) that it was ok to execute the mentally retarded.
• I was so moved by that experience that I gave up my cushy job in New York and go do death penalty work full time.
• I ended up at the Federal Resource Center doing death penalty work in Tallahassee Florida.
• I worked for the Battered Women’s Clemency Project in Florida.
• More recently the Supreme Court did rule that it is unconstitutional to execute people who were juveniles at the time of the offense and unconstitutional to execute people who are mentally retarded.
• I believe in my lifetime we will see the end of the death penalty in this country.
• It’s just an amazing system that we have where the courts will say – yes you’ve got compelling evidence of innocence but we’re not going to hear your case.
• I would say what got me through was the victories.
• Presently,  I’m working with an attorney Jim Green, who’s a prominent civil rights attorney in West Palm Beach,  kind of a legend down here.
• I also some volunteer work with El Sol. It’s a day laborer center in Jupiter, Florida.

Guest – Anne O’Berry, National Lawyers Guild’s Regional Vice President for the Southern Region and a member of the Guild’s South Florida chapter.  She obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and her law degree from New York University Law School in 1986.  While in law school, she served as Director of the Women in Prison Project at Rikers Island, where she taught incarcerated women how to prevent termination of their parental rights.  She was a member of the law school’s civil rights clinic and an editor on one of the law school’s journals, and authored a law review article on prisoners’ rights.

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Guatemalan Ex Dictator Found Guilty of Genocide

After weeks of powerful testimony the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his intelligence chief José Rodríguez Sánchez ended with a guilty conviction on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The verdict marked the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country.The government’s lead prosecutor, Orlando López, gave more than two hours of summation based heavily on the Guatemalan military plans, manuals, and operational records entered as evidence. During the months of General Ríos Montt’s rule, the army used a scorched-earth policy to flush out leftist guerrillas fighting in the hills. The villages of the Mayan highlands suffered the worst of the army’s brutality in the early 1980s, during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

Kate Doyle:

• I’m one of a couple of analysts that look at foreign policy in Latin America. My specialty is Central America and Mexico and I’m the director of something called the Evidence Project at the Archive, which is a way of connecting the right to information, right the truth with human rights and justice struggles around the region.
• We’ve worked very closely with truth commissions, with prosecutors and judges to try to get some of the classified US documents and sometimes even the national documents from their countries in to their hands when they’ve got a human rights investigation underway.
• The impetus for this case really came from the affected communities themselves that is in this case, the community of the Mayan Ixil.
• In the Northwestern part of the country, which worked for decades to identify exhumation sites. Sites where they knew there were clandestine mass graves of their own mothers, fathers, children who had massacred during the scorched earth operations of Rios Montt in 1982 and 1983.
• In March of 1982, Rios Montt headed a trio of military officers that overthrew the previous president. There was a guerrilla armed insurgency underway in Guatemala and had been since the 1960s. Rios Montt decided he was going to launch a series of counterinsurgency operations not only to target the armed insurgents in the highlands but also to destroy or eliminate their social base.
• That meant going after communities of mostly Mayan peoples that lived in the same area where the insurgents operated. It’s one of the most brutal acts of what used to be called low intensity warfare.
• The officials that carried out those operations were left to enjoy total impunity after the regime ended some 17 months later.
• Prosecutors and both the government prosecutors and civil prosecutors who represent the victims who also get to sit at the table ask questions and participate in the investigation pulled together a real interesting case for genocide and crimes against humanity.
• I’ve been working with those prosecutors for years to help them incorporate both declassified US documents as evidence in the case but also those Guatemalan military archives.
• Because of the very tight relationship between the United States and the Guatemalan regime of Rios Montt and predecessor regimes, we knew these agencies would have countless records of the operations themselves of the Guatemalan military structure of command and control.
• Some of the most extraordinary testimony for me came from women because the Guatemalan military like many militaries in these irregular wars used sexual abuse and violation as a part of their counterinsurgency tactics and they actually talk about the destruction of the “semia” the seed.
• The day the verdict came down, the court that seats about 500 people, was absolutely packed to the gills, so every seat was full. When the mood in the room began to feel tense, because of the intensity of the verdict and what that meant for Guatemala. Everybody began to stand up and sing this beautiful song, this poem that was set to music by a Guatemalan musician, over and over again and brought the tension down slowly slowly, it was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever witnessed in a court room.
• The Guatemalans were focused on legally convicting the authors of genocide, and they did it.

Guest – Kate Doyle,  a Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive. She directs several major research projects, including the Guatemala Project, which collects declassified U.S. and Guatemalan government documents on the countries’ shared history from 1954, and the Evidence Project, connecting the right to truth and access to information with human rights and justice struggles in Latin America. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors and judges to obtain government files from secret archives that shed light on state violence. She has testified as an expert witness in numerous human rights legal proceedings, including the 2008 trial of former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru for his role in overseeing military death squads; the case before the Spanish National Court on the 1989 assassination of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador; and the 2010 trial of two former policemen in Guatemala for the forced disappearance of labor leader Edgar Fernando García in 1984

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Corruption, poverty and growth concern the people
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VietNamNet Bridge – People from across the country have submitted over 1,700 messages expressing concern over the unsustainable growth of the national economy, corruption and the widening rich-poor gap, among other issues, to the National Assembly, ...

ABC7Chicago.com
Ryan Harris murder: Harris cousin Shaneda Lawrence fatally shot in Chicago's ...
ABC7Chicago.com
A relative of a child murdered 15 years ago was killed at a park Saturday in what appears to be a random shooting. A crowd gathered to remember 30-year-old Shaneda Lawrence at the park where Lawrence was killed. Ironically, the park is named for her ...

UNNAMED DAD loses his custody rights because of domestic violence. They he gets his visitation rights back. And to demonstrate what a great decision this was, he murder the kids during during their first visit. Who was responsible for this decision?

Stop catering to abusers. No access, no murders. 

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/british-man-france-admits-slitting-two-childrens-throats-185121494.html#bux1u0g

British man in France admits slitting his two children's throats

Reuters – 8 hours ago

 LYON, France (Reuters) - A British father living in France has admitted to killing his two children by slitting their throats, blaming a rocky divorce from his wife, prosecutors said on Sunday.

Police arrested the 48-year-old unemployed man on Saturday after the bodies of his 5-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son were found at his apartment in a suburb of the eastern city of Lyon.

"He offered explanations linked to the children's custody," an official from the Lyon prosecutor's office told Reuters.

The mother left the man in 2010 due to family violence and his right to have the children visit him at his apartment, previously the family home, was revoked after a violent episode. At the time of the murder, he had recently recovered the right to receive the children, and they were staying with him briefly for the first time since then.

The man's ex-wife crossed him in the stairs as he fled the scene on Saturday with blood on his clothes, the official said.

She called police who found the suspect in a street in Lyon.