Man had been seen waving guns, blow torch from roof of building By ABC7 Chicago Digital Team, June 3, 2023 VIDEOS at link
CHICAGO (WLS) -- A man was found dead inside an abandoned warehouse in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood after a more than 12-hour standoff with a police SWAT team.
Chicago police said they responded to the incident in the 4100 block of West Chicago Avenue just after 11 a.m. Friday.
The man who police believed was armed was seen on top of the building waving what appeared to be guns and a blow torch.
Video from Chopper 7HD showed the scaffolding the man was using to display an anti-Semitic sign, the Chicago flag, the Ukrainian flag, and an upside down American flag which is a universal sign of distress.
Police blocked traffic from a six-block radius around the incident [....]
PREVIOUS CRIME NEWS THREAD HERE, covering March 22 thru May 31
State Farm also cites inflation of construction costs in statement which comes after increasing wildfires in state
The insurance giant State Farm, America’s biggest car and home insurer by premium volume, will halt the sale of new home insurance policies in California, citing wildfire risk and inflation of construction costs.
Starting on Saturday, the company will not accept insurance applications for business and personal lines property and casualty insurance. The company will still accept auto insurance applicants.
“State Farm General Insurance Company made this decision due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market,” the company said in a statement. [....]
Video evidence shows asylum seekers, among them young children, being rounded up, taken to sea and abandoned on a raft by the Greek Coast Guard.
The asylum seekers had already hopscotched countries for years to escape war in the Horn of Africa. They had barely set foot in Europe, hoping to start new lives, when masked men rounded them up and stripped them of their belongings.
Now they were crammed into the dinghy, rocking on the open waters and trying to shield themselves from the bright sun as Naima Hassan Aden clutched her 6-month-old baby and wept.
“We didn’t expect to survive on that day,” said Ms. Aden, a 27-year-old from Somalia. “When they were putting us on the inflatable raft, they did so without any mercy.”
Their ordeal might ordinarily have remained largely unknown, like those of so many other asylum seekers whose accounts of mistreatment have been dismissed by the Greek government. Only on this occasion, it was captured in its entirety on video by an activist who shared it with The New York Times.
A Times investigation verified and corroborated the footage. We also interviewed 11 of the asylum seekers from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia whom we located at a detention center in Izmir, on the Turkish coast [....]
Link is to May 7 article at NewArab.com, includes and is about this tweet:
After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct.
By Luke Broadwater @ NYTimes.com, May 10
After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.
At a much-publicized news conference on Capitol Hill to show the preliminary findings of their premier investigation into Mr. Biden and his family, leading Republicans released financial documents detailing how some of the president’s relatives were paid more than $10 million from foreign sources between 2015 and 2017.
Republicans described the transactions as proof of “influence peddling” by Mr. Biden’s family, including his son Hunter Biden, and referenced some previously known, if unflattering, details of the younger Mr. Biden’s business dealings. Those included an episode in which he accepted a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese businessman. G.O.P. lawmakers also produced material suggesting that President Biden and his allies had at times made misleading statements in their efforts to push back aggressively against accusations of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.
But on Wednesday, the Republicans conceded that they had yet to find evidence of a specific corrupt action Mr. Biden took in office in connection with any of the business deals his son entered into. Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival [....]
Analysis by Nathaniel Meyersohn @ CNN.com, April 15
[....]The largest retailer in the country announced plans this week to close four of its eight stores in the city, citing growing financial losses. Three are in predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods, and their closures with little warning mean residents — including elderly citizens and people without reliable transportation — will have to travel further to buy groceries and pick up their medications.
“These stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years,” Walmart said. Despite years of different strategies, the company said, it did not see a route to profitability for these stores. Walmart, which made $20.6 billion in 2022, did not specify why losses were growing in Chicago.
City leaders “used a lot of political capital and their trust were questioned, Now it’s kind of like, ‘I told you so,’” said Chicago Alderman-Elect Ronnie Mosley, who will represent a Chicago ward where one of the Walmarts is set to close. His predecessor, who is retiring, was a major proponent of drawing Walmart to Chicago.
Mayors and key political leaders had pushed to draw Walmart, despite protests from small businesses, labor groups and community activists. Critics pointed to studies that suggested a Walmart presence could push out mom-and-pop stores and drive down wages, as it had in smaller towns.
But, at the time, officials argued opening Walmarts would provide jobs, economic development and convenient places to shop for affordable groceries and pharmacy services in some of the city’s low-income communities.
Meanwhile Walmart [....]
It's signed by Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Greg Casar, Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Note that while Vindman tweets against the letter, Glenn Greenwald tweets in support of it.
In the year since El Salvador declared a state of emergency, the government has delivered a stunning blow to the gangs that were once the ultimate authority in much of the country.
