|
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
|
the political situation outlined here should be of interest for all "blue cities" with rising crime rates and policing issues
Seth Aaron Pendley was arrested on Thursday and charged with plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, prosecutors said.
By Michael Levenson @ NYTimes.com, April 10
A Texas man who boasted that he was at the United States Capitol when a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in January has been charged with plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, the Justice Department said on Friday.
The man, Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, of Wichita Falls, was arrested on Thursday after he took what he believed were explosive devices from a bomb supplier but were in fact inert objects provided by an undercover F.B.I. agent in Fort Worth, prosecutors said.
He was charged with a malicious attempt to destroy a building with an explosive, Prerak Shah, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said in a statement. If convicted, Mr. Pendley faces 20 years in prison. Federal officials said they had begun investigating the plot after a concerned citizen contacted the F.B.I. on Jan. 8 about alarming statements posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups.
A user with the screen name Dionysus wrote that he was planning to “conduct a little experiment” that he said would “draw a lot of heat” and could be “dangerous,” prosecutors said. According to the statement, when another user asked what Dionysus wanted, he responded, “death.” A confidential source provided the F.B.I. with the user’s email address, which was registered to Mr. Pendley, prosecutors said.
“We are indebted to the concerned citizen who came forward to report the defendant’s alarming online rhetoric,” Mr. Shah said in the statement. “In flagging his posts to the F.B.I., this individual may have saved the lives of a number of tech workers [....]
@ DemocracyCorps.com (Stan Greenberg), March 26
[....] Democrats have only a 2-point lead in party identification and 43 percent still approve of his behavior — unchanged after the insurrection. Fully 58 percent are Trump Loyalists who strongly approve of Trump and another 12 percent Trump-aligned who “somewhat approve” of him but are very conservative or Evangelical
Trump’s base is angry about government restrictions on their freedom and believe they are fighting to save the “American way of life” from cancel culture and Black Lives Matter’s violent attacks on police and white people.
We conducted focus groups in March with Trump Loyalists in Georgia and Wisconsin and Trump-aligned, non-Trump conservatives and moderates in suburban and rural Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It took a long time to recruit these groups because Trump voters seemed particularly distrustful of outsiders right now, wary of being victimized, and avoided revealing their true position until in a Zoom room with all Trump voters — then, they let it all out.
And here are the conclusions that emerged from this new research:
- The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics;
- Trump’s base saw Biden, as a white man, as not threatening, controlled by others, unlike Obama who represented everything Tea Party-Republicans were determined to fight;
- Even Trump’s base is curious about the extent to which they benefit from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and Biden’s signature program, compared to Obamacare that they viewed as a new entitlement for Blacks and immigrants that must be stopped;
- The Trump loyalists and the Trump aligned are animated about government taking away their freedom and a cancel culture that leaves no place for white Americans and the fear they’re losing “their” country to non-whites;
- They were angered most of all by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa that were responsible for a full year of violence in Democratic cities that put white people on the defensive – and was ignored by the media; [....]
A lawyer for Citigroup Inc. told a federal judge on Friday he was aware of another big bank that had recently made an even larger payment error than its own $900 million transfer to Revlon Inc. lenders.
The lawyer, Neal Katyal, dropped the bombshell at a hearing in which Citibank urged the judge to extend a freeze on more than half a billion dollars it wired asset managers for Revlon creditors last summer -- an epic back office blunder that led to a closely watched trial. Some of them returned the money, and Citibank unsuccessfully sued 10 others for the $504 million they refused to give back. The judge froze the funds during the dispute.
Katyal never identified the other bank after alluding to it on Friday. The hearing centered on whether the freeze would continue. The judge didn’t rule.
“The toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube,” Katyal told U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan by video conference. “There’s no guarantee this can be fixed later” if Furman releases the money and Citibank wins an appeal it filed shortly after the judge ruled for the defendants in February.
‘Lottery-like Windfall’ [....]
The company’s decisive victory deals a crushing blow to organized labor, which had hoped the time was ripe to start making inroads.
Current headline story by Karen Weise & Michael Corkery @ NYTimes.com, April 9 Updated 4:03 p.m. ET
Amazon workers at a giant warehouse in Alabama voted decisively against forming a union on Friday, squashing the most significant labor drive in the internet giant’s history and dealing a crushing blow to organizers, Democrats and their allies when conditions have appeared ripe for unions to make advances.
Workers cast 1,798 votes against a union, giving Amazon enough to emphatically defeat the effort. Ballots in favor of a union trailed at 738, fewer than 30 percent of the votes tallied, according to federal officials.
The lopsided outcome at the 6,000-person warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., came even as the pandemic’s effect on the economy and the election of a pro-labor president had made the country more aware of the plight of essential workers.
Amazon, which has repeatedly quashed labor activism, had appeared vulnerable as it faced increasing scrutiny in Washington and around the world for its market power and influence. President Biden signaled support for the union effort, as did Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent. The pandemic, which drove millions of people to shop online, also raised questions about Amazon’s ability to keep those employees safe [....]
By Joby Warrick @ WashingtonPost.com, April 7
In confidential interrogation reports, Iraqi detainee M060108-01 is depicted as a model prisoner, “cooperative” with his American captors and unusually chatty. At times, he seemed to go out of his way to be helpful, especially when offered a chance to inform on rivals within his organization, then known as the Islamic State of Iraq.
Over several days of questioning in 2008, the detainee provided precise directions on how to find the secret headquarters of the insurgent group’s media wing, down to the color of the front door and the times of day when the office would be occupied. When asked about the group’s No. 2 leader — a Moroccan-born Swede named Abu Qaswarah — he drew maps of the man’s compound and gave up the name of Abu Qaswarah’s personal courier.
Weeks after those revelations, U.S. soldiers killed Abu Qaswarah in a raid in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Meanwhile, the detainee, U.S. officials say, would go on to become famous under a different name: Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi — the current leader of the Islamic State [....]
The pandemic’s impact shows growth is an arbitrary target.
Op-ed by Malka Older @ ForeignPolicy.com, April 6
The terrifyingly global progression of COVID-19 over the past year should shake long-held assumptions about the benefits of wealth and industrial-technological development. Estimations of which countries were best prepared for a pandemic display those prejudices in full: The 2019 Global Health Security Index, jointly produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, ranked the United States at the top, with the United Kingdom immediately behind it, then the Netherlands, and Sweden only a few rows down; New Zealand comes in at number 35; and Africa is blocked in red. A Washington Post report on the index when it was released expresses patronizing surprise that a “number of middle- and low-income countries scored higher than some wealthy countries.”
Contrasting those assessments with reality shows just how inaccurate they were. A map of COVID-19 deaths per hundred thousand people shows almost the opposite of the preparedness map: The United States, the U.K., and most of Europe are dark with total deaths, while most of Africa and Asia has had far fewer.
Certainly, a few wealthy countries, such as New Zealand, have done well at containing the pandemic. But so have places like the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, one of the densest and poorest places in the world. And while Africa is facing a second wave—and the reluctance of wealthy countries to share vaccines and the technology to build them—numbers from the continent are still far better than those of the United States or U.K. While there are a number of different theories to explain this success—including leadership, civil society, experience with epidemics, demographics, and successfully implementing the policies recommended by the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—none of them include buying their way out of it [....]
GDP is a useful measurement, but it’s not the only one. So why does the international community still hold up a narrow form of economic growth as the goal toward which all countries should be working, even at the expense of planetary viability and human rights?
The world needs a new approach [....]
AND BOY IS IT JUICY! John Boehner served as speaker of the United States House of Representatives for nearly five years (January 2011-October 2015)....; this essay is adapted from his book ON THE HOUSE, to be published by St. Martin’s Press on April 13, 2021.
By Zachary Cohen & Lauren Fox @CNN.com Updated 1:33 PM ET, Fri April 2
The US Capitol is on lockdown due to an external security threat.
An announcement made over the PA system told everyone to stay indoors and away from windows..
CNN's Lauren Fox reports seeing ambulances and a helicopter outside the building. One person was seen on a stretcher.
DC Fire spokesman Vito Maggiolo says they are responding to a reported shooting at the north barricade of the Capitol and there are indications they will be transporting patients.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
Executives said that the song’s lyrics violated the company’s hate speech policy, but it’s staying up because of an exception made for music videos’ “artistic context”
By Evan Minsker @ Pitchfork.com, March 30
YouTube has declined to remove YG’s 2014 song “Meet the Flockers” after the company’s staffers called for the video to be pulled due to lyrics about targeting “Chinese neighborhoods” during burglary attempts, Bloomberg reports. Employees’ request to YouTube’s Trust & Safety team was denied in an email from executives to the staff on March 22.
“We’ll start by saying we find this video to be highly offensive and understand it is painful for many to watch, including many in Trust & Safety and especially given the ongoing violence against the Asian community,” the statement reads. “One of the biggest challenges of working in Trust & Safety is that sometimes we have to leave up content we disagree with or find offensive.”
The statement noted that the song’s lyrics violated the company’s hate speech policy, but said it will stay up because of an Educational, Documentary, Scientific or Artistic exception, citing the video’s “artistic context” and noting concern about setting a precedent that would lead to the removal of more music videos.
“While EDSA is not a free pass for any content, there are likely thousands of music videos that would otherwise violate policies including Sex & Nudity, Violent or Graphic Content and Hate Speech were it not for these sorts of EDSA exceptions [....]
PAROLE thing just NOT WORKING; even kumbaya DeBlasio willing to say so straight out.
By Ali Bauman @ CBS New York, April 1
NEW YORK — A young family is recovering after being randomly slashed near Battery Park. Police say the suspect was out on parole. The youngest victim was in a stroller.
City officials told CBS2’s Ali Bauman on Thursday there is a pattern with these recent random assaults and hate crimes. Many of the suspects are homeless, mentally ill or recently incarcerated. Experts say the revolving door between prison and the shelter system is getting worse and finding solutions would make all of us safer.
Surveillance video shows a Hasidic couple walking near Battery Park with their 1-year-old on Wednesday evening when a man attacks from behind, slashing all three.
Police arrested 30-year-old Darryl Jones. He has 12 priors and was just released on parole in February after serving time for attempted murder.
One day earlier, police arrested Brandon Elliot for stomping on a 65-year-old Asian woman in Hell’s Kitchen. He was living in a nearby homeless shelter after being released from prison on lifetime parole in 2019 for murdering his own mother.
“The parole system in New York state does not work. It takes people coming out of prison, dumps them in New York City with no plan, no housing, no job, no mental health support,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. Right now, there are about 1,500 state parolees living in New York City shelters [....]
Previous Crime News thread HERE, starting with "AFTER A VIOLENT YEAR, A SEARCH FOR ANSWERS" on 3/19 and continuing with articles & discussion thru early 4/1.
550,000 US Covid-19 deaths have left an estimated 5 million mourners. It’s a crisis.
Millions of Americans have lost relatives and friends. We need to pay attention to the science and consequences of grief.
By Brian Resnick @ Vox.com, March 30
It’s been nearly a year since Julie Horowitz-Jackson’s mother, Arlene, died of Covid-19 in a nursing facility in Philadelphia. “What hit me recently is that the world is opening back up, and my mom’s still dead,” Horowitz-Jackson says.
At this point in the Covid-19 pandemic, as vaccines get rolled out in the United States and around the globe, there is a glimmer of hope that life will safely start shifting back to “normal” in the coming months. But so many people, like Horowitz-Jackson, are still working through their grief, and it won’t just disappear when the virus does. Horowitz-Jackson, 51, says she was coping well with the loss of her mom until recently, when, in Chicago, where she lives, she saw many people out and about, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in large crowds. “I get angry,” she says. “I get angry that people aren’t taking it seriously.”
With over 550,000 reported Covid-19 deaths in the US and 2.8 million worldwide, a massive grief crisis is upon us — with large, unaddressed mental health and economic implications [....]