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New Mexico begins training cops to use more deadly force, not less


Police State USA
Thu, 20 Feb 2014 12:37 UTC
Colonel Jack
© NM DPS
Colonel Jack Jones.

New Mexico - All new police cadets will be trained to use more deadly force, thanks to a new curriculum by director of the state's Law Enforcement Academy. That training emphasis will take place in a cadet program that has been shortened by six full weeks.

Jack Jones, a retired Army colonel, was granted sole authority by the LEA over the training curriculum given to all of New Mexico's new recruits. He says the old model was too restrictive with the use of deadly force.

"Evil has come to the state of New Mexico. Evil has come to the Southwest. Evil has come to the United States," Jones said to the Santa Fe New Mexican.

A former instructor named Phillip Gallegos says he was fired by Jones because he refused to teach cadets Jones' controversial philosophy about shooting fleeing vehicles.

"This is the thing - why are you shooting at a car? You should be shooting at the individual that is shooting at you," Gallegos said.
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Snakes in Suits

Mortgages: Shoddy paperwork, erroneous fees and wrongful evictions: Complaints by homeowners rise‏

Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery
New York Times
Tue, 18 Feb 2014 20:16 UTC
Image
© Daniel Rosenbaum/New York Times
Wanda Darden, at home in Riverdale, Md. Her mortgage has bounced among three loan servicers, leading to increasing mix-ups. “I either get conflicting answers or no answer at all,” she said.
A growing number of homeowners trying to avert foreclosure are confronting problems on a new front as the mortgage industry undergoes a seismic shift.

Shoddy paperwork, erroneous fees and wrongful evictions - the same abuses that dogged the nation's largest banks and led to a $26 billion settlement with federal authorities in 2012 - are now cropping up among the specialty firms that collect mortgage payments, according to dozens of foreclosure lawsuits and interviews with borrowers, federal and state regulators and housing lawyers.

These companies are known as servicers, but they do far more than transfer payments from borrowers to lenders. They have great power in deciding whether homeowners can win a mortgage modification or must hand over their home in a foreclosure.

Comment: Indeed, how much more of this organized pathology can the people take?
Portland, Oregon: Angry residents wave pitchforks, torches in protest of Mayor's crackdown on homelessness
100,000 protest against austerity cuts in North Carolina

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Video

Documentary: The dark side of chocolate

Miki Mistrati & U. Roberto Romano
YouTube
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:26 UTC

The Dark Side of Chocolate is a 2010 documentary film about the exploitation and slave trading of African children to harvest chocolate still occurring nearly ten years after the cocoa industry pledged to end it.

Synopsis

In 2001, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association formed an action plan entitled the Harkin-Engel Protocol that would aim to end the worse forms of child trafficking and slave labor.However, child trafficking still continued in countries in West Africa. Authorities and companies denied it happened. Due to this conflicting outlook, the filmmakers went undercover to discover the truth. The film starts with its two filmmakers investigating independently by journeying to the western coast of Africa to the country of Mali, the country where children were rumored to be smuggled from and then transported to the Ivory Coast. The team of journalists aimed to investigate human trafficking and child labor in the Ivory Coast and its effects on the worldwide chocolate industry.
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Cow Skull

Yellowstone National Park: The bison slaughter begins

Matthew Brown
Yahoo! News
Wed, 12 Feb 2014 19:54 UTC
Image
© Kansas City Star
Yellowstone National Park transferred 20 bison to a Montana Indian tribe for slaughter on Wednesday, marking the first such action this winter under a plan to drastically reduce the size of the largest genetically pure bison population in the U.S.

The transfer was first disclosed by the Buffalo Field Campaign, a wildlife advocacy group, and confirmed by park officials.

Five more bison that had been captured were to be turned over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday for use in an experimental animal contraception program, said park spokesman Al Nash.

Yellowstone administrators plan to slaughter up to 600 bison this winter if harsh weather conditions inside the 2.2-million-acre park spur a large migration of the animals to lower elevations in Montana. It's part of a multiyear plan to reduce the population from an estimated 4,600 animals to about 3,000, under an agreement between federal and state officials signed in 2000.

Tens of millions of bison once roamed the North American Plains before overhunting drove them to near extinction by the early 1900s. Yellowstone is one of the few places where they survive in the wild.
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Question

Strange, snake-like image captured on radar off the Australian coast

Liz Klimas
The Blaze
Thu, 13 Feb 2014 08:41 UTC
Image
© Bureau of Meteorology via ABC News
This radar image shows the “Rottnest Monster,” which was later determined to be the work of a military exercise.
A strange, snake-like image appeared on weather radar in the ocean off the coast of Australia near Rottnest Island Wednesday, baffling meteorologists. Theories as to what could cause such a phenomenon swirled. But now the government is coming forward with an explanation.

Neil Bennett with Australia's Bureau of Meteorology told ABC News he ruled out the S shape being caused by a cloud or rain echo.

"They don't take on S shapes and things like that," he said.

With meteorological causes debunked, some went as far to speculate that it could be a giant sea creature, dubbing it the "Rottnest Monster" or "Rottness Monster," a play off of the Loch Ness monster.

RT @weather_wa: Another #Perth Sighting Of The #RottNessMonster This Arvo: http://t.co/oKnlbf80vXFebruary 12, 2014 10:22am via Tweetbot for iOS ReplyRetweet Favorite@TheWAWGThe WA Weather Group

Our very own Sea Serpent; take that Nessie!!! #RottnessMonster#Rottnesthttp://t.co/2B5ARPfTRGFebruary 12, 2014 2:48am via web ReplyRetweetFavorite@CatholicBeauty_Emily.

#Rottnessmonster - Australia's Loch Ness!February 12, 2014 3:37am via Twitter for Android ReplyRetweetFavorite@floodxlandfloodland
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Rainbow

Gay rights in Russia and the former Soviet republics

David Masci
The Pew Center
Tue, 11 Feb 2014 00:00 UTC
Image
© AP
Laws aimed at LGBT community in the former Soviet Union

The sortable table below shows major laws aimed at the LGBT community in the 15 countries that once made up Soviet Union. The five categories are not intended to be comprehensive. Click on the column headers to sort the table.

The Winter Olympic Games in Sochi have brought attention to a recently enacted Russian law banning the distribution of gay "propaganda" to minors. The statute has been widely criticized by Western politicians, Olympic athletes, celebrities and others.

Among the 15 countries that used to comprise the Soviet Union, Russia is not the only state to restrict LGBT speech. Laws restricting "homosexual propaganda" also have been enacted in Lithuania and in parts of Moldova.

A number of former Soviet republics are generally more restrictive of LGBT rights. For instance, in the central Asian nations of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, sexual activity between men is banned and punishable by imprisonment. (The law does not address gay women.) And while Russia gives transgendered people the right to change their genders, sex changes are outlawed in six former Soviet republics.
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V

Perennial agitators 'Pussy Riot' attacked by Cossacks at Sochi Olympics


Raw Story
Wed, 19 Feb 2014 06:58 UTC
Image
© AFP
The two best known members of Pussy Riot said they clashed with plain clothes police and Cossacks Wednesday when they tried to stage an action in the centre of Winter Olympics host city Sochi.

The scuffles came a day after members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were detained by police in Sochi for several hours on Tuesday in connection with a theft case.

Cossacks, clad in their national clothes, are often seen helping the police with their work in the south of Russia in line with a tradition dating back to Tsarist times.

Plain clothed members of the security forces used tear gas in the clashes, Tolokonnikova's husband Pyotr Verzilov wrote on Twitter.

Comment: You've got to wonder, who's funding these unemployed artists' trips to New York, Europe and Sochi?...

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Health

Georgia man sets himself on fire in grocery store

David Ferguson
Raw Story
Wed, 19 Feb 2014 06:53 UTC
Image
Police officers in Covington, Georgia are being treated for minor burns after an unidentified man walked into a Kroger grocery store on Tuesday afternoon, doused himself in rubbing alcohol and set himself on fire.

WSB Channel 2 reported that the man entered the store just before 5:00 p.m. and immediately began to cause a disruption, pouring alcohol over himself and running through the store knocking items from the shelves.

Police were unable to use stun guns on the man to subdue him because of the risk of fire from the alcohol. When cornered in the back of the store, however, the man produced a cigarette lighter and set himself ablaze.
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Take 2

Ted Nugent calls Obama 'subhuman mongrel', CNN's Wolf Blitzer flips out

Tom Boggioni
Raw Story
Wed, 19 Feb 2014 06:41 UTC
Image
On Tuesday's edition of CNN's Wolf, host Wolf Blitzer addressed in great detail the Nazi past of 'subhuman mongrel' used by rocker Ted Nugent to describe President Barack Obama.

With Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott (R-TX) already facing criticism over campaigning with 'sexual predator' Ted Nugent at his side, Wolf Blitzer wondered if the Abbott campaign was aware of Nugent's use of racially loaded term 'subhuman mongrel'.

Speaking with Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, Blitzer pointed out, "That's what the Nazis called Jews to justify the genocide of the Jewish community."

"They called them 'untermenschen,' subhuman mongrels, if you read some of the literature that the Nazis put out there, there is a long history of that specific phrase he used involving the President of the United States."

Slater responded that it was a phrase that is "deeply offensive, to some voters, and not just Democratic voters, but other voters," before adding "might that phrase be a kind of dog whistle, and code to exactly some of the voters that Greg Abbott wants?"
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Bad Guys

Montana judge admits fault for blaming victim of rape


Raw Story
Wed, 19 Feb 2014 06:33 UTC
Image
© AFP
A Montana judge, under fire for suggesting a 14-year-old girl was partly to blame for being raped by a teacher, admitted on Tuesday that he violated judicial standards and invited censure from the state's highest court, documents show.

Judge G. Todd Baugh drew fierce public criticism last year when he sentenced the former teacher, 54-year-old Stacey Rambold, to just a month in prison for the 2007 sexual assault of his student, Cherice Moralez, who later killed herself.

In a complaint filed with the Montana Supreme Court earlier this month, a Montana panel that oversees jurists sought to discipline him over the sentence as well as for saying the girl appeared "older than her chronological age," and "as much in control of the situation" as her teacher.

The Montana Judicial Standards Commission said Baugh undermined public confidence in the judiciary, created an appearance of impropriety and "justified the unlawful sentence by blaming the child victim," according to papers from the commission.
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