Chicago likes to compare itself to other world cities, so Ward Room thought it would find out how we rank in violence. It turns out no one can top us. Among what are considered Alpha world cities, Chicago has the highest murder rate -- higher even than the Third World metropolises of Mexico City and Sao Paolo.
Bogota, Columbia complained that it's dead were being counted in Chicago.
Chicago politicians like Rahm Immanuel and Barack Obama must be so proud.
A pretty good article by George Will on how the feds can get you, if they want, using the example of the captain of a whale watching vessel accused of a series of crimes:
... our unhinged government, with an obsession like that of Melville’s Ahab, has crippled Nancy Black’s scientific career, cost her more than $100,000 in legal fees — so far — and might sentence her to 20 years in prison. This Kafkaesque burlesque of law enforcement began when someone whistled.
Black, 50, a marine biologist who also captains a whale-watching ship, was with some watchers in Monterey Bay in 2005 when a member of her crew whistled at the humpback that had approached her boat, hoping to entice the whale to linger. Back on land, another of her employees called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ask if the whistling constituted “harassment” of a marine mammal, which is an “environmental crime.” NOAA requested a video of the episode, which Black sent after editing it slightly to highlight the whistling. NOAA found no harassment — but got her indicted for editing the tape, calling this a “material false statement” to federal investigators, which is a felony under the 1863 False Claims Act, intended to punish suppliers defrauding the government during the Civil War.
She has also been charged with the crime of feeding killer whales when she and two aides were in a dinghy observing them feeding on strips of blubber torn from their prey — a gray whale.
To facilitate photographing the killers’ feeding habits, she cut a hole in one of the floating slabs of blubber and, through the hole, attached a rope to stabilize the slab while a camera on a pole recorded the whales’ underwater eating.
So she is charged with “feeding” killer whales that were already feeding on a gray whale they had killed. She could more plausibly be accused of interfering with the feeding.
Now, this isn't a partisan thing, it's a bureaucratic thing. Black's problems began in 2005, back in the era when Preznit Bush was, at least according to liberals, allowing businesses run wild and commit all kinds of environmental and economic crimes. The bureaucracy has it's own agenda, and they are permanent, where administrations come and go. All it takes is one asshole with a pencil to ruin some one else's life.
A rural Oregon man was sentenced Wednesday to 30 days in jail and over $1,500 in fines because he had three reservoirs on his property to collect and use rainwater.
Gary Harrington of Eagle Point, Ore., says he plans to appeal his conviction in Jackson County (Ore.) Circuit Court on nine misdemeanor charges under a 1925 law for having what state water managers called “three illegal reservoirs” on his property – and for filling the reservoirs with rainwater and snow runoff.
“The government is bullying,” Harrington told CNSNews.com in an interview Thursday.
“They’ve just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies. So, we as Americans, we need to stand on our constitutional rights, on our rights as citizens and hang tough. This is a good country, we’ll prevail,” he said.
The court has given Harrington two weeks to report to the Jackson County Jail to begin serving his sentence.
Water rights in western states are funny things and deadly serious, but this seems a little extreme.
Harrington said he applied for three permits to legally house reservoirs for storm and snow water runoff on his property. One of the “reservoirs” had been on his property for 37 years, he said.
Though the state Water Resources Department initially approved his permits in 2003, the state – and a state court -- ultimately reversed the decision.
“They issued me my permits. I had my permits in hand and they retracted them just arbitrarily, basically. They took them back and said ‘No, you can’t have them,’ so I’ve been fighting it ever since,” Harrington told CNSNews.com.
The case, he said, is centered on a 1925 law which states that the city of Medford holds exclusive rights to “all core sources of water” in the Big Butte Creek watershed and its tributaries.
The Calvert Marine Museum presents Lieutenant Gregory L. Bartles speaking on The Chesapeake Oyster Wars in the museum’s auditorium on Thursday, August 2 at 7:00 p.m. Lt. Bartles is the Area 8 Commander/Agency Historian for the Maryland Natural Resources Police and was responsible for bringing the oyster war cannon to DNR. The cannon is currently on exhibit in the museum’s lobby through the end of September. The lecture is free and open to the public.
In 1865, Maryland realized oysters were not an infinite resource, and implemented the first restrictions on their harvest, started requiring annual permits for their harvest. Watermen resisted, and in 1868, Maryland formed the Maryland Oyster Navy, the predecessor of Maryland Department of Natural Resources to fight poaching by local watermen and encroaching New Englanders, fleeing their own depleted beds. Virginia too took measures to fight the poaching, and in1882, the Governor of Virginia led an expedition against armed and organized oyster poachers, and arrested 46 and seized 7 boats.
The Pirate Brides. The crew of the Dancing Molly was not so complacent. When the Pamlico came upon the little craft "lying close in one of the inlets on the Eastern Shore," it appeared as though no crew members were on board. Thinking to take the unmanned craft as a prize, the crew of the Pamlico bore down upon the vessel. The vessel, though unmanned, was not unwomanned. The captain's wife and two daughters were still aboard, and when their cries for help went unheard by the crew on shore, they unreefed the sails themselves and made their escape. As the Pamlico raced to block the mouth of the inlet the Dancing Molly strained at its sails to escape. The women were "equal to the emergency." All three "were skilled in handling the sails and were determined not to be taken." Despite solid shot flying past them, the three women continued on their way and reaching the open waters of the Bay, easily escaped into Maryland waters with a stiff breeze behind them. According to the Norfolk Virginian of March 4, 1883, spectators along the Virginia shore, though opposed to dredging, "really wished for the safety of the tiny craft when they saw it was simply manned by three women, and when the Dancing Molly got safely out the group of Virginians chivalrously gave three cheers for the pirate's wife and daughters."
Security researchers said they dismantled the world's No. 3 spam botnet after convincing the companies that hosted its command and control servers to pull the plug on the operation.
Atif Mushtaq, senior staff scientist at security firm FireEye, said in a blog post that the botnet known as Grum drew its last dying breath on Wednesday, after six servers in Ukraine and one in Russia were shut down. In a tense faceoff with whitehats, the botnet operators had deployed those servers following the disconnection earlier this week of separate servers in the Netherlands and Panama. Faced with the threat of losing a 100,000-computer network that generated an estimated 18 billion spam messages a day, the Grum operators were desperately trying to transition to those machines when they stopped working.
"Grum's takedown resulted from the efforts of many individuals," Mushtaq wrote. "This collaboration is sending a strong message to all the spammers: 'Stop sending us spam. We don't need your cheap Viagra or fake Rolex. Do something else, work in a Subway or McDonalds, or sell hotdogs, but don't send us spam.'"
Responsible for about 18 percent of the world's junk messages, Grum was ranked as the No. 3 source of spam.
Good going guys. Now get going after #2 and #1. Spam is a plague and parasite on the internet and the economy. Not to mention all the damage and theft carried out by the malware that they also put out.
So how does the value of spam support 100,000 computer network?
Just about every school day, Rachel Moore said, she would see the teenage girl sitting in a grassy area, waiting to catch a bus after attending summer classes at Harding High School on St. Paul's East Side. On Thursday, she and other neighbors heard a crash as a driver lost control of his maroon SUV, hit a fire hydrant and a sign, and then drove down an incline, running over and killing the teen near that city bus stop.
Clarisse Grime, 16, of St. Paul, died at the scene.
Police were questioning a 50-year-old man who was driving the vehicle when it crashed about 1 p.m. at E. 3rd and Hazelwood Streets, in front of Harding, just after summer classes let out for the day.
Witnesses told police that the driver of the maroon SUV was speeding east on 3rd when he tried to turn left onto Hazelwood to head north, said Howie Padilla, a St. Paul police spokesman.
"That red truck came zooming east on Third," said Anthony Williams, 16, a Harding student who said he witnessed the accident. He said he was friends with "Clary" Grime, who was waiting with her boyfriend, as they did every day after school. Her boyfriend, Eduardo Vazquez-Torres, 17, was injured and taken to Regions Hospital, where he was treated for noncritical injuries.
The SUV ran over the hydrant, which rolled into the intersection, he said. The vehicle crossed Hazelwood and drove onto the sidewalk on the north side of 3rd Street, where the driver got out -- but the SUV kept going, Williams said.
"He bails his car, and it went down the hill and squashed the girl," Williams said.
The driver went to his SUV and began checking the front of it for damage, Williams said. "He didn't realize he had hit her."
Once the driver realized that he had hit someone, Williams said, "he stood by his car and was holding his head in shock."
Viveros-Colorado is undocumented and in the United States illegally, Miera said, and state records show he has never had a Minnesota driver's license.
So instead, they have to make it sound like the evil SUV did it. As Patterico says:
But when an illegal immigrant enters this country, and then does something wrong — like, say, killing somebody — the argument from illegal immigration supporters is always the same. They will ask: “Are illegal immigrants more likely than citizens to kill people?”
Here’s my answer.
I don’t care.
They’re not supposed to be here in the first place.
An intoxicated man barricaded himself in a hotel room, threatening to shoot at police and demanding a snack (pizza) and a wife (Paris Hilton), cops said.
Fredrick Denney, 61, from Oregon, caused a disturbance at the Hampton Inn in Belmont, N.C., that wound up drawing multiple agencies — including a SWAT team — to the scene, Charlotte, N.C., NBC affiliate WCNC reported.
Skank
Authorities said they shut down the second floor of the hotel while they tried to coax him out of the hotel room, but he refused, barring socialite Paris Hilton's hand in marriage, according to cops.
Eventually, Denney was subdued with pepper spray, taken into custody and mentally evaluated, WCNC reported. He faces multiple charges, $90,000 bond — and bachelorhood.
Cops said he had been involved in run-ins with SWAT teams in other states in the past, too.
You know, the endless gray skies and drizzle of Oregon can drive a guy crazy. But she'd probably be lucky to have him.
To better monitor the Chesapeake Bay and reduce poaching, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is moving toward enhanced and increased surveillance.
Later this year, the Maritime Law Enforcement Information Network is scheduled to go online. The network, which will consist of camera and radar units, is part of an initiative to upgrade the Maryland Natural Resources Police's fleets."This will give us 24/7 surveillance of areas in the Chesapeake and it provides us with information about what's going on out in maritime waters," said Lt. Art Windemuth, NRP spokesman. "It allows us to better protect our maritime structure that is so vital to the state's economic success."
When fishing "Location X", I always assume that I'm on camera.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its embattled head Dr. Jane Lubchenco are again the target of criticism after the director of the National Weather Service, Jack Hayes, resigned abruptly on Memorial Day weekend.
An environmental watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), informed the Washington Post when it learned that Hayes had been replaced and the story has since been widely reported.
An internal investigation has uncovered ongoing financial irregularities at the weather service, according to a NOAA memo. In fiscal 2012 alone, up to $35 million may have been "reprogrammed," the term employed by NOAA to describe what has taken place, the memo said.
"This is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, a national organization of federal, state and local employees who work in the environmental field. Structural deficits were built into the National Weather Service budget according to Ruch. "They were using appropriated funds to backfill general operations in a sort of budgetary Ponzi scheme," he said.
A 60-page report produced by NOAA found that, for at least the past two years, the agency has been shifting appropriated funds from a number of its designated programs and using them to cover other expenses and to help avoid employee furloughs, according to Ruch.
Using appropriated funds for any purpose other than what is intended is a violation of the Anti Deficiency Act and that is a crime, he said.
This kind of behavior has long been a criticism of NOAA (2011 budget $5.6 billion). When times are bad, they find ways to retract their external programs to protect their staff, and when times are good, they expand their staff as much as possible in anticipation of lean times to come.
IMHO, the weather service is one of the more critical branches of NOAA, and I find it hard to fault protecting it. But the law is the law...
"The investigation found no evidence of corruption or personal financial gain," said Scott Smullen, NOAA's deputy director of communications, in an email. Expenses were transferred improperly, he acknowledged. "But those expenses were used for legitimate NWS services and functions. We do not believe any money was moved out of the National Weather Service."
National Weather Service employees were attempting to protect parts of the budget that, in their mind, were chronically underfunded, he said. NOAA is citing privacy issues for its failure to make the report public. "It is now being redacted and will be released later," Smullen said.
Ruch speculated that NOAA's fiscal woes stem from the cost of operating a new generation of weather satellites. "It sounds like they have a hungry cannibal in their fiscal closet," he said. "NOAA has been having a disastrous budgetary season and with this on top of it, their credibility on the Hill is less than zero."
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is preparing to implement a commercial tagging program for all states with commercial striped bass fisheries and to increase penalties for poaching.
The commission approved for public comment Draft Addendum II to Amendment Six to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for striped bass. The draft amendment, which is going out for public comment shortly and will likely not be implemented until 2014, follows the recommendations of the Interstate Watershed Task Force. The task force was seeking ways to curb commercial striped bass poaching.
Poaching of striped bass has long been a problem. A recent federal investigation of the problem in the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River resulted in $1.6 million in fines from 19 individuals and three corporations and showed the poachers illegally took more than 1 million pounds of striped bass from Bay waters.
I'm pretty sure that Maryland currently requires watermen to tag all striped bass before sale to dealers. Unfortunately, other states do not, and stripers poached in Maryland and left untagged are often sold to out of state fish dealers. Once beyond the state line, it's very difficult to say that a fish (or a few thousand) were poached in Maryland, or legally caught in some state without the tagging requirement.
To make your thoughts known:
Public comment will be accepted until July 13. Comments should go to Kate Taylor, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at 1050 N. Highland St., Suite 200 A-N, Arlington, VA 22201; 703-842-0741 (fax) or ktaylor@asmfc.org. Put Atlantic Striped Bass Draft Addendum III in the subject line.
MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Miami police are still tight-lipped about the man they shot and killed on the MacArthur Causeway Saturday afternoon, but new details back claims they had no choice: the naked man they shot was trying to chew the face off another naked man, and refused to obey police orders to stop his grisly meal, which one source now claims included his victim’s nose and eyeballs.
Surveillance video taken from security cameras at the nearby Miami Herald building show a police officer arrive on the scene, appear to be startled by the spectacle of two naked men lying on the street, and draw his service weapon. It appears that the officer shot one of the men, but it was difficult to tell in the video.
The bizarre shooting happened shortly after 2 p.m., when police responded to a 911 call about two naked men fighting on a bike path along the Causeway, which was packed with traffic on a busy holiday weekend.
Miami police have not confirmed the details of what happened next, but sources close to the investigation told CBS4 News that officers found one man gnawing on the face of another, in what one police source called the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen.
I suspect it's being spread around the country by the #Occupy movement.
The fight was taking place at the causeway exit near the Miami Herald building, and amazed officers tried to stop it, ordering the man making a meal out of the other man to stop.
Miami police have not confirmed the details of what happened next, but sources close to the investigation told CBS4 News that officers found one man gnawing on the face of another, in what one police source called the most gruesome thing he’d ever seen.
I hope they handle the bodies carefully; we don't really know how contagious this is.
The fight was taking place at the causeway exit near the Miami Herald building, and amazed officers tried to stop it, ordering the man making a meal out of the other man to stop.
Armando Aguilar, who heads the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he has spoken with the officer who responded. Aguilar said the officer saw what the man was doing, and ordered him to stop. He said the man growled at the officer, and then returned to his meal.
Aguilar said the man ate his victim’s nose and eyeballs.
The officer then used his service weapon and shot the man, Aguilar said, but the gunshot had no effect.
Other sources confirmed that the man refused to obey, and continued his attack. Aguilar said the officer had no choice but to keep shooting until the attacker was dead.
Investigators sharing limited details about the confrontation, saying only that the two men were fighting and the officers felt they had no choice but to take deadly force.
Time to prepare.
Hey, what fun is death if you can't laugh at it?
I thank Wombat-Socho for helping to drive traffic my direction with his Rule 5 roundup at The Other McCain, "All Over But the Crying."
In a bloody battle between two warring neighbors in Australia today, one man's arm was almost severed with a chain saw, while another had a finger chopped off with a Samurai sword.
Surgeons were later trying to save the arm of the chain saw victim, Mark Jorgenson, 29, while his neighbor Troy Thornton, 26, was being treated after losing his finger to the Samurai sword.
Police who rushed to the small town of Minto, south west of Sydney, found pools of blood in the street and Mr Jorgenson crying in pain from his almost-severed arm. Detectives are investigating claims that after the two men argued over loud music and reckless driving, Mr Thornton went to Mr Jorgenson's house with the chain saw.
Loud music and reckless driving? Sounds like any neighborhood anywhere. At least they could have picked the fight over something meaningful, like a girl.
Another Miami-area TV journalist has been fired as a result of a local NBC affiliate’s broadcast of a misleading edited version of George Zimmerman’s 911 call the night Trayvon Martin was killed. Local TV station WTVJ veteran Jeff Burnside was fired Friday following an investigation of the station’s separate airing of the conversation that was edited in much the same way as the Today show’s broadcast that resulted in the firing of an unidentified NBC News producer based in Miami. Several other employees were disciplined in that incident. The NBC affiliate acknowledged the station independently made the same questionable edits to Zimmerman’s call to police that were widely denounced when the network’s Today show aired its version of the clip last month.
Hey, who needs a conspiracy when you all think the same thoughts?
Not none, mind you, just less, and more discretely. I wonder if they were given instructions on how to pay, and whether or not to beat up the foreign hookers? (To fair, that was the marines in Brazil, but they were on a protection detail as well)
Seeking to shake the disgrace of a prostitution scandal, the Secret Service late Friday tightened conduct rules for its agents to prohibit them from drinking excessively, visiting disreputable establishments while traveling or bringing foreigners to their hotel rooms.
The new behavior policies apply to Secret Service agents even when they are off duty while traveling, barring them from drinking alcohol within 10 hours of working, according to a memorandum describing the changes obtained by The Associated Press. In some cases under the new rules, chaperones will accompany agents on trips. The embattled Secret Service director, Mark Sullivan, urged agents and other employees to "consider your conduct through the lens of the past several weeks."
Secret Service Agents needing chaperones? Then who will monitor the chaperone?
The new rules did not mention prostitutes or strip clubs, but they prohibit employees from allowing foreigners -- except hotel staff or foreign law enforcement colleagues -- into their hotel rooms. They also ban visits to "non-reputable" establishments, which were not defined. The State Department was expected to brief Secret Service employees on trips about areas and businesses considered off-limits to them.
