From the Trenches World Report
Enforce our Bill of Rights
Ben McMahon’s parents were overjoyed when their son woke up after a week in a coma — but they were shocked when they learned he could no longer speak English.
“I kind of slowly came out of the coma and then set eyes upon an Asian looking nurse and then the first thing that came was natural was to come out and say in Chinese, ‘Excuse me nurse, I feel really sore here,'” which Ben McMahon said in fluent Mandarin. Continue reading “Australian Man Wakes Up From Coma Speaking Mandarin”
Sarasota Patch – by Sherri Lonon
A sleepy Nokomis man found himself in hot water Monday when Sarasota County deputies found him inside a home sleeping next to a bagful of stolen jewelry.
The sheriff’s office was called out to the Nokomis home by a cleaning lady who found him inside. Continue reading “Burglar Caught Sleeping on the Job”
Buckhead Patch – by Justin Ove
Atlanta-based The Home Depot has confirmed earlier reports that the company suffered a data breach which saw customers’ credit card information stolen by hackers and sold on the internet black market.
WSB-TV’s Jim Strickland reports via Twitter that the breach happened months ago, but officials only became aware of the situation earlier this month, when Krebs on Security announced batches of customers’ credit card information were released on an underground website that specializes in the buying and selling of personal information. Continue reading “Home Depot Confirms Security Breach; Credit Card Information “Dating Back Months” Stolen and Sold Online”
New York Post – by Kate Sheehy and Frank Rosario
A Queens garbage man impersonated his dead twin brother — even renting out two apartments and pawning himself off as his tragic sibling at one of the addresses — in an elaborate welfare scam that netted him more than half-a-million dollars, authorities said Tuesday.
City Sanitation worker Thomas Murphy’s twin, Robert, died a day after their birth in March 1962, officials said. Continue reading “Man impersonated his dead twin to get $500K in welfare”
Huffington Post – by Matt Ferner
A coalition of former international leaders gathered in New York City on Tuesday to discuss the release of their new report calling for a complete overhaul of drug policies around the world, including legalization of psychoactive substances like marijuana.
In a discussion moderated by The Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim, 10 members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy urged all governments to embrace models that include decriminalization of consumption, legal regulation of drug markets and strategic refocusing of criminal enforcement. Continue reading “World Leaders Condemn Failed Drug War, Call For Global Reform”
Are people waking up?
Did you vote today LOL? Primary day belongs to the tumbleweeds, who will once again vote for the same old corporate cactus to lead us into the sunset. Last year just 700,000 New York City voters decided to participate in democracy on primary day. And out of all voters registered Democrat or Republican, only 20% bothered to vote in the primary. Here’s a sobering look at how apathetic the electorate has become, as seen from polling places in NYC today: Continue reading “The Sad Deserted Polling Places Of NYC”
New York Post – by Michael Gartland
Mayor de Blasio has sent 1,412 homeless people packing since taking office in January — keeping pace with Mayor Bloomberg’s bum-banishment program despite lambasting his Republican predecessor’s homeless policies.
Liberal advocates for homeless New Yorkers slammed de Blasio for ignoring his own “Tale of Two Cities” campaign rhetoric to “push poor people out of the city.” Continue reading “De Blasio has sent 1,412 homeless packing”
The night Hurricane Sandy struck, Jayme and John Galimi swam out the front door of their home in Broad Channel, Queens, into the rising waters of Jamaica Bay with their five children, the youngest clinging to his father’s back.
Almost two years later, all seven remain jammed into a three-bedroom rental. Their debt is mounting. They applied to a federally funded New York City program for help rebuilding, but that devolved into an unending loop of lost documents, aborted meetings and frustrating exchanges with temporary workers handling their application. Continue reading “Storm Recovery Program in New York City Was Mired by Its Design”
New York Post – by Shawn Cohen and Rebecca Harshbarger
Smile, you’re on cop camera!
The NYPD on Thursday unveiled new cameras that officers will wear on their heads and shirts as part of a sweeping pilot program to test out the new technology.
Commissioner William Bratton on Thursday showed off the hands-free recording devices, which the department had been ordered by a judge to use as part of a federal lawsuit against stop-and-frisk. Continue reading “NYPD unveils cop body cameras”
New York Daily News – by ROCCO PARASCANDOLA
Has that broken window been fixed, Mrs. Johnson?
New Yorkers who dial 311 to complain about quality-of-life violations can expect a call back from police asking if they’re satisfied with how the problem was handled, the Daily News has learned.
In the wake of the Staten Island chokehold death of Eric Garner during his arrest for selling loose cigarettes, critics have called for the NYPD to abandon broken windows policing — cracking down on minor offenses to prevent more serious crime. Continue reading “NYPD will call back New Yorkers who complain about quality-of-life violations”
Guilty as Hell and will go scott free.
New York Times – by Stephanie Clifford
For three days, the former chief of the Israeli military’s Palestinian Affairs Department delivered important, if a bit dry, testimony in the terrorism financing trial of Arab Bank in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.
The witness, Arieh Spitzen, had highlighted bank records showing Arab Bank routing payments to people who, he said, were widely known to be terrorists or members of Hamas. Continue reading “At Trial, Arab Bank’s Lawyer Spars With Witness”
Daily News – by Dareh Gregorian
A former top lawyer for Public Advocate Letitia James isn’t exactly advocating for the NYPD’s policing practices.
In a blistering lawsuit filed late Tuesday in Manhattan Federal Court, Chaumtoli Huq, 42, says NYPD officers used “unreasonable and wholly unprovoked force” when they arrested her without cause while she was leaving a pro-Palestinian protest in July.
The bust was “characteristic of a pattern and practice of the NYPD in aggressive overpolicing of people of color and persons lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights,” the suit says. Continue reading “Former top lawyer for city Public Advocate says NYPD cops roughed her up during unwarranted arrest: suit”
Protect and defend may have turned into pervert and defraud, according to federal prosecutors. The US Attorney’s Office charged that former Lee, Massachusetts police chief Joseph Buffis diverted $51,044 in donations for a toy fund to his family’s bank account for their personal use over a five year period, as a press release explained.
The 56-year-old Buffis faces “three counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, and four counts of money laundering.” He allegedly asked the public for donations on Lee Police Department letterhead for the Edward J. Laliberte Toy Fund. The fund was supposed to raise money to buy toys for local needy children and provide assistance during the holidays for their families. People donated cash, checks, and toys. Prosecutors say that the physical toys gave Buffis a “reserve” that he could distribute while skimming money out of the fund for himself and his family. Continue reading “Former Cop Chief Allegedly Scammed Christmas Fund for $51K”
On the Friday before Labor Day — in the form of an age-old “Friday News Dump“ — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) handed a permitto Enbridge, the tar sands-carrying corporate pipeline giant, to open a tar sands-by-rail facility in Flanagan, Ill.by early-2016.
With the capacity to accept 140,000 barrels of tar sands product per day, the company’s rail facility serves as another step in the direction towards Enbridge’s quiet creation of a “Keystone XL Clone.” That is, like TransCanada’s Keystone Pipeline System sets out to do, sending Alberta’s tar sands all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico’s refinery row — and perhaps to the global export market. Continue reading “FERC Hands Enbridge Permit for Tar Sands by Rail Facility”
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is known as one of the poorest areas of one of British Columbia’s best-known cities, its reputation one of forgotten souls. But a pile of sockeye salmon changed all that on Saturday August 23, when a First Nations fisherman donated 500 of the fish to organizations and a homeless encampment in the downtrodden neighborhood.
“It’s been a long time for a lot of those people to have salmon in East Vancouver and a lot of those people are First Nations,” said Joshua Duncan, a commercial fisherman with R.A. Roberts Fishing Ltd. in Campbell River, to The Province. “I was doing this as a gesture to people who really would like and appreciate the fish, and are trying to make a stand for themselves in their small part of the world.” Continue reading “First Nations Fisherman Donates 500 Sockeye to Vancouver Homeless”
Indian Country – by Simon Moya-Smith
On Monday, a 5-year-old Native American boy was sent home on his first day of school and ordered to cut his hair short because it allegedly violated district policy, the boy’s mother said.
The child, Malachi Wilson, an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation, had been looking forward to his first day of kindergarten at F.J. Young Elementary in Seminole, Texas.
“After we had enrolled him he was excited. He was ready to go. Everyday it was—the question, ‘Mom, [am I] going to school?’” his mother, April Wilson, told CBS-affiliate Channel 7. Continue reading “Navajo Kindergartner Sent Home from School, Ordered to Cut His Hair”
As immigration debates continue on the U.S.-Mexico border, the most infamous and oldest hate group in the country appears to be using the issue as a platform to step up its recruitment across the country.
Multiple CNN affiliates report the Ku Klux Klan has been spreading its message using flyers and candy stuffed in zip-lock bags to attract new recruits. Continue reading “Ku Klux Klan steps up recruitment, focuses on immigration”
What have we come to? This story bothers (I have other words I could use) me in So many ways..
Unintended consequences abound when it comes to emerging technology, and self-driving cars are no exception. Numerous ethical and legal dilemmas associated with autonomous vehicles are currently being explored and have been well documented, but it seems there is one drawback that has been missing from the conversation: where are we going to get our extra organs? Continue reading “Driverless Cars Could Lead To Organ Donor Shortage”
Physicists at Fermilab in Illinois have turned on a laser-based experiment that could reveal whether the three-dimensional world we perceive is merely a “Matrix”-style illusion generated by a cosmic two-dimensional hologram.
The Holometer experiment is the result of years of work by particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan and his colleagues at the federally funded Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and it could provide the first clear evidence for the existence of the holographic universe. The concept has been debated for decades, but it’s devilishly difficult to show whether it can ever be anything more than a concept. Continue reading “Do We Live in a 2-D Hologram? Physicists Aim to Find Out”
ST. LOUIS (AP) – Lamont Jones and Keith Stephens stood 60 feet from each other, separated by four lanes of pavement and a thousand miles of perception.
Stephens was wearing a T-shirt printed with a police shield bearing the phrase “OFFICER DARREN WILSON I STAND BY YOU,” as part of a rally supporting the white policeman who killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was unarmed. Jones was across the street, holding up a sign that said, in blood-red letters: “Darren Wilson is a Murderer.”
There was no overlap in the facts as seen by Jones and Stephens at the demonstrations staged a few miles from suburban Ferguson, where Brown was killed. Like many who have closely followed the case, which sparked riots and yet another national racial conflagration, Jones and Stephens had made up their minds. Continue reading “No gray area: Beliefs shape view of Brown killing”
AOL
The New York Times – by 
AOL – by Erik Sherman
DeSmog Blog
Indian Country
AOL
NBC News – by Alan Boyle
AOL – by Jesse Washington