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Texas city pays Ted Nugent $16k to not perform at Fourth of July celebration

Richard Yeakley
news-journal.com
Sat, 22 Mar 2014 15:08 UTC
Image
© Torin Halsey
Longtime rocker Ted Nugent speaks to a crowd of Greg Abbott supporters during a campaign stop in Wichita Falls, Texas on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2014
The city of Longview put the stranglehold on "Cat Scratch Fever" - but it cost thousands of dollars.

The city paid out $16,250 last month to end contract negotiations with rocker Ted Nugent, who was under consideration as the headliner for the city's Fourth of July celebration.

The payoff came as Nugent's earlier incendiary comments and song lyrics became an issue during a campaign swing with Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott.

City spokesman Shawn Hara said the campaign-trail controversy was just one of several factors that led to the city pulling the plug.

"(There were) a variety of reasons. Cost, structure, is it the right musical act for this type of event - a city-sponsored, family-oriented overall event," Hara said. "They decided no, we don't want to move forward, it is not the right act for this. At that point we decided to end discussions."

Comment: One has to think that the city had second thoughts after reading a host of inflammatory comments Ted Nugent has made, including calling President Obama a "chimpanzee and sub-human mongrel", that Hillary Clinton had "spare scrotums", and that apartheid wasn't "cut-and-dry".

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Gear

Scarce in Venezuela: Flour, cooking oil, butter, milk, diapers, toilet paper

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
NPR
Sun, 16 Mar 2014 12:56 UTC
Image
© Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images
People line up to buy goods at a store in Caracas, Venezuela.
Alvaro Villarueda starts his morning the same way every day - putting in a call to his friend who has a friend who works at a Caracas, Venezuela, supermarket.

Today, he's looking for sugar, and he's asking his friend if he knows if any shipments have arrived. As he talks on the phone, his wife Lisbeth Nello, is in the kitchen.

There are 10 mouths to feed every day in this family - five of them children. The two youngest are still in diapers.

"The things that are the scarcest are actually what we need the most," Nello says. "Flour, cooking oil, butter, milk, diapers. I spent last week hunting for diapers everywhere. The situation is really tough for basic goods."

Student-led demonstrations have been roiling Venezuela for more than a month. At least 28 people have been killed and dozens wounded in confrontations between security forces and those who have taken to the streets.

The list of grievances - rising crime, inflation - is long, but the main one for many is the scarcity of basic foodstuffs.

Comment: Food prices skyrocketed 72% in Venezuela in 2013: International financiers' currency speculation to blame?

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Eggs Fried

White House pastry chef resigns: 'I don't want to demonize cream, butter, sugar and eggs' - He's right

Patrick Howley
The Daily Caller
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:55 UTC
Image
© Daily Caller
White House executive pastry chef Bill Yosses is resigning after First Lady Michelle Obama fundamentally changed his job duties to focus on healthier food.

Yosses is leaving the White House in June to work on a new project focusing on "food literacy" and The New York Times says Michelle is "partly to blame." The openly gay chef was hired by Laura Bush in 2007 to make his trademark cookie plates and sugar sculptures. Mrs. Obama took over in 2009 and ordered Yosses to make healthier plates in smaller portions.

Yosses began replacing butter with fruit puree and sugar with honey and agave. But Yosses was never fully committed to the new policy.

"I don't want to demonize cream, butter, sugar and eggs," Yosses said, noting that his departure from the White House is a "bittersweet decision."
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MIB

Two million square miles to be searched, 26 countries involved - and still not a trace of Flight MH370

Richard Shears and Leon Watson
The Daily Mail
Mon, 17 Mar 2014 22:36 UTC
Image

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed that the plane could have travelled, undetected, for a further seven hours.
  • Kazakhstan says there was no 'unsanctioned use' of its air space
  • Malaysia appealed for radar data and search planes to help the hunt
  • 26 countries have answered the call, including the U.S. and France
  • Australian PM Tony Abbott agreed to help after talking to Malaysia's leader
  • Six Australians were on board the flight carrying 239 passengers
  • India rejects fear it could have been intended target of 9/11-style attack
  • Indian security sources 'rubbish' idea that plane flew near an Indian city
  • Searchers still don't know if the aircraft has come down on land or sea
  • Total area now being examined amounts to 28million square miles
  • That is equivalent to twice the size of Africa or a tenth of the planet
Australia has taken the lead in the hunt for the missing Boeing 777 over the southern Indian Ocean as the list of countries providing assistance rose to 26 today.

The move came as Malaysia's transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein revealed that two million square miles still need to be searched.

Malaysia has appealed for radar data and search planes to help in the unprecedented hunt through a vast swath of Asia stretching north-west into Kazakhstan.

It said searches have begun in both the northern and southern corridors of a vast swath of Asia where the jet may have ended up.

The Malaysian government has revealed an investigation indicates the jet was deliberately diverted and flew for several hours after leaving its scheduled flight path.
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Snakes in Suits

Whitewash! Malaysian Prime Minister sez Flight 370 crashed in Indian Ocean

Thomas Fuller and Chris Buckley
NY Times
Mon, 24 Mar 2014 12:26 UTC
Image
© Credit Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
A relative of a Chinese passenger on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in Beijing after being told of the latest news on Monday.
Malaysia's prime minister said Monday that further analysis of satellite data confirmed that the missing Malaysian airliner went down in the southern Indian Ocean. The announcement narrowed the search area but left many questions unanswered about why it flew to such a remote part of the world.

Experts had previously held out the possibility that the jet could have flown north instead, toward Central Asia, but the new data showed that it could have gone only south, said the prime minister, Najib Razak.

Mr. Najib appeared eager to bring closure to the families of the passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, two-thirds of whom are Chinese. The families have grown increasingly angry about the lack of clear information about the plane's fate. The Boeing 777, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members onboard, was headed from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared on March 8.

The aircraft's last known position, according to the analysis, "is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites," Mr. Najib said. "It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

The new analysis of the flight path, the prime minister said, came from Inmarsat, the British company that provided the satellite data, and from Britain's air safety agency. The company had "used a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort," he said.
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Wall Street

Western debt-slavery: Half of UK graduates cannot pay back student loans


RT
Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:42 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo / Leon Neal
In a dramatic reassessment of UK student finance, the government estimates around 45 percent of graduates will be unable to pay back their loans. The shortfall could cancel out the profits made by the disputed tripling of tuition fees in 2012.

British Universities Minister David Willetts has said that the amount of graduates who will fail to pay back their student loans has greatly exceeded previous estimates. Before tuition fees were increased threefold in 2012, the government predicted that only 28 percent of loans would ever be paid back. However, in light of projections for the coming years, the government has reassessed this figure and almost doubled it to 45 percent.

This increase could potentially nullify the 10 billion pounds ($16 billion) in profits made by increasing tuition fees to 9,000 pounds ($15,000) a year in 2012. If the amount of students unable to pay back their loans grows to 48.6 percent, economists predict the government will start losing more money.

When the tuition fee hikes came into effect, the Conservative government hailed them as progressive and a way of allowing universities to make the money back they had lost in state funding. Rival party Labour condemned the move as a "tragedy" for a generation of young people, while the National Union of Students called the threefold increase an "outrage." The reform triggered widespread protest across the country.
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Magnet

Thirty-two hurt in train derailment at Chicago's O'Hare airport

Mary Wisniewski
Reuters
Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:22 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Jim Young
A worker puts up a tarp to cover the scene where a Chicago Transit Authority subway train crashed into a platform at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago March 24, 2014.
Thirty-two people were injured after a Chicago Transit Authority train derailed and hit a platform at O'Hare International Airport early on Monday, with its front car landing on an escalator and stairs, a city fire official said.

It was not immediately clear how fast the train was moving, but authorities were looking at speed as a possible factor, said transit authority spokesman Brian Steele.

"It's evident the train was going faster than it should," he said at the scene.

The female train operator was among those hurt, though neither she nor any of the passengers faced life-threatening injuries, said Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

"Fortunately nobody was on the staircase," he said. "Anybody on the staircase probably would have been killed."

Langford said the eight-car train jumped a bumper at the end of the line just before 3:00 a.m. Chicago time.
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Smoking

Fascist West: Ireland follows Britain with smoking ban in people's own cars

Genevieve Carbery
The Irish Times
Mon, 24 Mar 2014 12:56 UTC
Image
© Chris Radburn/PA Wire
Legislation to ban smoking in cars where children are present will be ready in the next number of weeks, Minister for Health James Reilly said today.
Legislation to ban smoking in cars where children are present will be ready in the "next number of weeks", Minister for Health James Reilly said today.

There were "major difficulties" in preparing the legislation because of the many departments involved and a "whole host of issues" which had not been foreseen.

"One last issue" to be resolved was a "finer legal point" which the Attorney General was dealing with, he said. "I think they are nearly there and I look forward to it very shortly".
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Target

Why is police aggression increasing when crime is down?

Dave Lindorff
Who What Why
Wed, 19 Mar 2014 08:07 UTC
Tompkins square 1874
© unknown
New York police attack unemployed workers in Tompkins Square, 1874

You might not know it from watching TV news, but FBI statistics show that crime in the U.S. - including violent crime - has been trending steadily downward for years, falling 19% between 1987 and 2011. The job of being a police officer has become safer too, as the number of police killed by gunfire plunged to 33 last year, down 50% from 2012, to its lowest level since, wait for it, 1887, a time when the population was 75% lower than it is today.

So why are we seeing an ever increasing militarization of policing across the country?

Given the good news on crime, what are we to make of a report by the Justice Polivcy Institute, a not-for-profit justice reform group, showing that state and local spending on police has soared from $40 billion in 1982 to more than $100 billion in 2012. Adding in federal spending on law enforcement, including the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Agency and much of the Homeland Security Department budget, as well as federal grants to state and local law enforcement more than doubles that total. A lot of that money is simply pay and benefits. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that the ranks of state and local law enforcement personnel alone swelled from 603,000 to 794,000 between 1992 and 2010. That's about two-thirds as many men and women as the entire active-duty US military.

Comment: For more on the militarization of the police:

Militarization of local police means that now cops kill 8 times more Americans than terrorists do

Why Do the Police Have Tanks? The Strange and Dangerous Militarization of the US Police Force

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People

Dangerous precedent: Alabama woman to be tried for murder for stillbirth when she was 16

Nina Martin
Alternet
Wed, 19 Mar 2014 07:46 UTC

fetus
© Zfotto/Shutterstock.com
Rennie Gibbs's daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant's most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.

But within days of Samiya's delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi's de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya's blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by "cocaine toxicity."

In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for "depraved heart murder" - defined under Mississippi law as an act "eminently dangerous to others...regardless of human life." By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had "unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously" caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
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