Society's ChildS


Bullseye

Johnny Bobbitt, homeless veteran involved in GoFundMe scheme, gets 5 years probation

Aaron Katersky
ABC News
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 12:43 UTC
Johnny Bobbitt, from left, Katelyn McClure and Mark D'Amico.
© Burlington County Prosecutors office/APThis November 2018 combination of photos provided by the Burlington County Prosecutors office shows Johnny Bobbitt, from left, Katelyn McClure and Mark D'Amico.
Johnny Bobbitt, who concocted a feel-good story with a woman and her boyfriend to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of a GoFundMe campaign, has been sentenced to five years probation.

Part of the terms of the probation sentence, which was handed down in a New Jersey court Friday, include that he attend a drug treatment program and cooperate with prosecutors in their case against his co-conspirators, according to ABC station WABC.

If the probation is violated, however, he will be sentenced to five years in prison, WABC reports.

The veteran pleaded guilty in March to the state charges of conspiracy to commit theft by deception. Bobbitt faces an additional, separate federal sentencing at a later date for one count of money laundering conspiracy, which he also pleaded guilty to in March.
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Eye 2

Ohio becomes the latest state with a heartbeat abortion ban, but will likely face legal challenges

Meghan Keneally
ABC News
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 12:26 UTC
Gov. Mike DeWine signs a bill
© Fred Squillante/The Columbus Dispatch via APGov. Mike DeWine signs a bill imposing one of the nation's toughest abortion restrictions, April 11, 2019 in Columbus, Ohio. DeWine's signature makes Ohio the fifth state to ban abortions after the first detectable fetal heartbeat. That can come as early as five or six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they're pregnant.
None of the six-week abortion bans have been enacted due to legal challenges.

Ohio has now added itself to a growing list of states where the governor has signed a ban on abortions after a heartbeat can be detected.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the controversial ban, which is one of the most stringent in the country, on Thursday.

Similar bills had been proposed in Ohio in the past, but the state's last Republican governor, John Kasich, vetoed those saying that they were unconstitutional.

The legality of abortion bans that start at the point of a detectable heartbeat - which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy when some women may not know that they are pregnant - has been challenged in a number of other states.
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USA

Judge Andrew Napolitano calls Julian Assange a hero

Talia Kaplan
Fox News
Thu, 11 Apr 2019 16:50 UTC
Assange and Andrew Napolitano
Judge Andrew Napolitano called Julian Assange a "hero" after the WikiLeaks founder was arrested by British police Thursday moments after Ecuador withdrew his asylum for "repeatedly violating international conventions and protocol."

"I have to tell you, in my opinion Julian Assange is a hero. What he published was truthful information that the American public and the world had the right to see," Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst, said on "Fox & Friends" Thursday about an hour after Assange was arrested.

The 47-year-old Australian native has been in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 when British courts ordered him extradited to face questioning in a sexual assault case. That matter has since been dropped, but Wikileaks, an anti-secrecy site, is facing a federal grand jury investigation over its publication of American diplomatic and military secrets during the Iraq War.

Moments before he was arrested, Ecuador announced it had withdrawn Assange's asylum for "repeatedly violating international conventions and protocol."
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Dollar

'How about paying your taxes?': Amazon and Walmart engage in war of words over worker pay

Lauren Thomas
CNBC
Thu, 11 Apr 2019 16:39 UTC
Jeff Bezos and Doug McMillon
© Getty Images | CNBCAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart.
Amazon and Walmart are in war over worker pay - and now corporate taxes.

After Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match Amazon's pay and benefits, Walmart has responded, albeit quietly.

"Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It's a kind of competition that will benefit everyone," Bezos wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Walmart's executive vice president of corporate affairs, Dan Bartlett, then shared an article Thursday morning on Twitter about Amazon paying $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profits last year. He wrote: "Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?"

Comment: See also:

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Bomb

At Least 20 killed In Pakistan market bombing, Taliban affiliate group claims responsibility


REF/RL
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 05:22 UTC
deadly bomb blast
© Banaras Khan / AFPPakistani security officials inspect the site of a deadly bomb blast at a fruit market in Quetta on April 12.
At least 18 people were killed and 48 injured in a bombing claimed by an affiliate of the Pakistani Taliban in Quetta, southwest Pakistan on April 12, police said.

Police chief Abdur Razzaq Cheema told RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal that explosives were packed in a car parked at a busy vegetable market.

Two children were among the dead and seven were rushed to hospital with injuries, he said.

The bombing appeared to target members of the Shi'ite ethnic Hazara community, Cheema added.

Provincial police chief Mohsin Butt said eight Hazara were among the victims.
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Light Saber

Alone among the media, Tucker Carlson lays out the true facts about Assange and Wikileaks

Seraphim Hanisch
The Duran
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 16:19 UTC
assange poster messanger
Tucker Carlson puts Assange's deeds and arrest in perspective, standing almost alone in telling the truth about Julian Assange, both what he did - and did not do.

Fox News' Tucker Carlson offered his own analysis regarding the arrest of Julian Assange. Mr. Assange was arrested yesterday, April 11, 2019, after the Ecuadoran Embassy agreed to evict him from their building in London where he lived over the last seven years, a refugee from the American and Western European governments.

This was extensively reported by the mainstream press, but it was done so dishonestly. Tucker Carlson puts the facts back into the equation with his presentation:
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Attention

Lawsuit filed after Chicago police drag, punch and tase high school girl without provocation

Matthew Hendrickson
Chicago Sun Times
Thu, 11 Apr 2019 16:04 UTC
Dnigma Howard
© Matthew Hendrickson/Sun-TimesDnigma Howard (center) leaves the Cook County Juvenile Center on Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019 with her father Laurentio Howard (left) and attorney Andrew M. Stroth after a hearing where charges were dismissed against her in an incident last month at Marshall High School.
A new surveillance video shows Chicago police officers push and drag a student down a set of stairs at Marshall High School on the West Side before punching her and shocking her with a stun gun multiple times.

The video, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, appears to contradict the officers' statements on how the incident unfolded, including that the student initiated the violent encounter - again raising questions of the oversight, training and stationing of police officers in Chicago Public Schools.

The two officers involved in the incident also held the student down while stepping on her chest, but they didn't seek help from her father or other school personnel who were nearby, according to an amended lawsuit filed Thursday by the girl's attorney, Andrew M. Stroth.

"The Board of Education and CPD continue to fail our children. An unarmed 16-year-old girl was beaten, kicked, punched and tasered by officers," Stroth said in a statement.
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Arrow Up

Russian MPs mull complete ban on plastic bags


RT
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 10:39 UTC
Plastic bags
© Global Look Press / Marios Lolos
Russia may completely ban the use of plastic bags by 2025, according to an eco-friendly initiative proposed by a senior MP in the national parliament's Lower House.

In his letter to the deputy prime minister of Russia, MP Vasily Vlasov stressed that due to their slow rate of decomposition, plastic bags are a "key issue" in regards to the pollution problem in the country and that it becomes "more acute every year."

According to Greenpeace, some 26 billion plastic bags are used in Russia each year.
And Vlasov considers "a complete ban on plastic bags an appropriate measure" to tackle the problem. "I'm convinced that this transitional period would be enough to prepare the economy for it," he stressed in a letter.

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Yoda

A message? The book Julian Assange was reading during his arrest


RT
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 13:51 UTC
Assange book arrest
© RuptlyJulian Assange being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy
As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy by British police, he emerged clutching a single book: Gore Vidal's The History of the National Security State.

Later, as he sat in the dock at Westminster Magistrates Court, Assange silently read through the book, before he was found guilty of skipping bail in 2012 and remanded in custody.

Was Assange trying to send a message? Through a collection of interviews with Vidal, the book covers themes dear to Assange and WikiLeaks, tracing the historical events that gave rise to the military-industrial-security complex, as well as the expansion of executive powers that led to what the author calls "the imperial presidency."
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No Entry

Censorship on vaccine information is failing...what to expect next

Jeffery Jaxen
jeffereyjaxen.com
Wed, 03 Apr 2019 12:48 UTC
censored
Representatives from government and the corporate media will have you believe that due to an unsensational number of measles cases in the U.S., the fabric of American society must take historically dangerous and authoritarian measures. According to both media and government talking points, in order to combat an ambiguous specter of 'misinformation,' America must rapidly sink into a communist-slanting, medical corporatocracy. In the age of information, is censorship really that effective? In 2003 Barbra Streisand attempted to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California. Her efforts had the exact opposite effect by inadvertently drawing further public attention to it. The phenomenon is now coined the Streisand effect whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the internet.
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