Society's Child
It's been a bad week for the IPRA, according to some, and just a bad agency to others.
Inspector General Joseph Ferguson found that in the agency's most recent quarterly report, they had no evidence showing they looked into six shootings by police officers, which did not hit anyone.
The agency also had no records regarding 14 incidents of police using Tasers between 2007 and 2014, the Chicago Tribune reported.
This is super weird, because there have only been 157 recorded blooms ever between 1889 and 2008. But this year in the US alone, at least seven flowers have bloomed.
Before we dive headfirst into this foul-smelling mystery, what's a corpse flower, and why are botanists so into them?
The scientific name for corpse flowers is Amorphophallus titanium, which literally means "giant misshapen penis" in Latin (no, really).
They not only produce one of the biggest flowering structures in the world, sometimes reaching heights of over 1.8 metres (6 feet), their scent happens to mimic the distinct stench of decomposing flesh, with a bit of old fish mixed in.
Native to parts of western Sumatra, these gigantic flowers bloom about once every six years, giving everyone in their vicinity a good whiff of their natural perfume.
Zucker went on to say that the two aren't worthy of being called journalistic outlets.
"I don't think Vice and BuzzFeed are legitimate news organizations," Zucker said, reportedly cracking a "mischievous" smile, as reported by Variety on Tuesday.
"They are native advertising shops. We crush both of them. They are not even in our same class," he added.
That said, CNN has been using Vice and Buzzfeed quite a lot in their broadcasts, and doesn't hesitate to refer to them as sources.
Lynsi Price, Lovelace's sister, told the Virginian-Pilot that when she learned her brother died in May, she did not receive much in terms of answers.
"We were told and made to believe that this was a tragic accident. ... we trusted these men," she said.
Emirates said flight EK521 was involved in an "accident" that occurred at 12:45pm local time (08:45 GMT) on Tuesday.
Photos on social media showed smoke billowing from the aircraft, which crash-landed on arrival from Thiruvananthapuram, India.
The fire has since been completely extinguished, according to the Dubai government's press office.
Emirates has also confirmed that "all passengers and crew are accounted for and safe."
The special operation, executed over a period of five days, saw 104 labs, which had been producing some 100 tons of narcotics annually, go up in flames. The production facilities, authorities say, belonged to Los Urabenos, also known as Clan Usuga, a drug trafficking neo-paramilitary group that is believed to have a close connection to the notorious FARC rebels.
"This is a structural blow to the finances of drug trafficking," anti-narcotics police director General Jose Angel Mendoza told Reuters in the jungles of Guaviare province.
Last week, for instance, a U.S. appeals court struck down a North Carolina voter ID law that it said was specifically designed to lower turnout among black voters. And now the New York Times is reporting that a town in Georgia is using its police department to challenge the rights of its black residents to vote.
The 180 black residents make up roughly one fifth of Sparta's total registered voters, the Times notes.
According to George Washington University law professor, Jonathan Turley, the boy was acting like a class clown, doing what many class clowns do: disrupting class. Because of his loud burps, his teacher, Margaret Mines-Hornbeck, reported the boy to Officer Arthur Acosta. The seventh grader was then taken to an administrative office after being searched for drugs, as the assistant principal accused the 13-year-old of participating in a marijuana transaction.
During the search, the boy was asked to remove his jeans and shoes, then flip the waistband of the shorts he had been wearing underneath. This was all in vain considering no drugs were found.
After the traumatizing experience, the boy was suspended for the remainder of the year, all because he burped too loud. But sure enough, that wasn't the end of it.
Instead of letting this matter go after such a harsh punishment, Cleveland Middle School decided to charge him criminally using a provision that says "[n]o person shall willfully interfere with the educational process of any public or private school by committing, threatening to commit or inciting others to commit any act which would disrupt, impair, interfere with or obstruct the lawful mission, processes, procedures or functions of a public or private school."
Making matters even worse, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit decided to uphold the Albuquerque school officials' action by claiming police and school leadership were justified in sending the 13-year-old to juvenile jail.
Some of the former soldiers, who served in a crack paramilitary force, were once listed as alleged war criminals by the Soviet Union. However, the Foreign Office granted 8,000 of them permission to reside in the UK. Today, the last surviving veterans are spread across the country.
Some have admitted to suppressing rebellions and to handing over communists to the German police.
Two survivors, Myron Tabora, 90, and Ostap Kykawec, 92, were both listed as suspected war criminals by the USSR in 1948. SS personnel cards for the pair can still be found in archives. Both were lieutenants in the SS Galizien and were of interest to famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Comment: Project Paperclip was just the tip of the iceberg. Nazis were recruited, protected, and coddled by the victors of WWII in their own interests. Nuremberg was a parade, but in the background, the Nazis just put on new hats after the war.
The figures were calculated from statistics that were gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Election Commission, Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, The Sentencing Project, and the Pew Research Center.
The figures illustrate that scores of people living in America are not allowed to vote, they are considered ineligible due to their age, prior arrests, or incomplete citizenship applications.
In total, there are 103 million people who are essentially banned from voting, so this demographic would technically fall into the category of people who did not support Trump or Clinton in the primaries, although their actual preference can't be determined.
Furthermore, there is an increasingly significant portion of the US population that is deciding not to vote on principle, because they don't feel particularly enthusiastic about any of the candidates.















Comment: What's also interesting about the timing is 4 of the 7 flowers bloomed within days of Killary's nomination as the Democratic party's presidential candidate. The stench of death is in the air, literally and figuratively.