Washington Post – by Robert O’Harrow Jr., Steven Rich

Police agencies have used hundreds of millions of dollars taken from Americans under federal civil forfeiture law in recent years to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear. They have also spent money on luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.

The details are contained in thousands of annual reports submitted by local and state agencies to the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, an initiative that allows local and state police to keep up to 80 percent of the assets they seize. The Washington Post obtained 43,000 of the reports dating from 2008 through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Continue reading “Asset seizures fuel police spending”

SIGINT_Collection_InterceptAmRRON – by JOHN JACOB SCHMIDT

Part-1 – An overview and some tools to get started

Besides being able to talk to your neighbors to the left and right, a very important part of the nationwide AmRRON/TAPRN Network is the sharing of news, information, and intelligence (not necessarily the same thing).  A critical skill that you, as a patriot, should be developing and regularly practicing is SIGINT/COMINT.  That is Signals Intelligence and Communications Intelligence.  Simply put, you need to have the skills and equipment to monitor, intercept, collect, and report information sent over the airwaves.   Continue reading “Intercept – Collect – Report (Part 1)”

Yahoo News

Washington (AFP) – A Texas health care worker who treated a man who later died of Ebola has tested positive for the disease in a preliminary test, doctors said Sunday, the second person to be diagnosed with the illness on US soil.

“We knew a second case could be a reality, and we’ve been preparing for this possibility,” said Dr David Lakey, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services.   Continue reading “Texas health care worker tests positive for Ebola”

Banks accept derivatives rule change to end 'too big to fail' scenarioInvesting – by Huw Jones

LONDON (Reuters) – The $700 trillion financial derivatives industry has agreed to a fundamental rule change from January to help regulators to wind down failed banks without destabilising markets.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and 18 major banks that dominate the market will now allow financial watchdogs to apply temporary stays to prevent a rush to close derivatives contracts if a bank runs into trouble, the ISDA said on Saturday.   Continue reading “Banks accept derivatives rule change to end ‘too big to fail’ scenario”

Inspired by the death of Michael Brown, demonstrators march through downtown to protest racial injustice in St Louis, Missouri. The Gaurdian

Thousands of people marched through downtown St Louis on Saturday, to demand the arrest of the white police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson two months ago and to condemn racial profiling.

The organisers claimed the protest drew about 3,000 people – far fewer than they had predicted – from across the country as part of a “Weekend of Resistance” against police forces in many parts of the country that are seen to target people of colour in general and young African Americans in particular.

“We’re fighting for our lives,” a St Louis rapper, Tef Poe, told the crowd.    Continue reading “Thousands march through St Louis to condemn police shootings of teens”

New Jersey high schoolLA Times – by James Queally

Seven high school football players have been arrested in a hazing scandal in central New Jersey, and three of them have been charged with sex crimes for assaults on freshman team members last month, prosecutors said.

Six of the defendants, whose identities were withheld because they are juveniles, were arrested by investigators with the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and the Sayreville Police Department on Friday night, according to a statement released by prosecutor Andrew Carey.   Continue reading “7 football players arrested in New Jersey hazing, sexual assault case”

The Chukchansi casino and resort was closed after armed tribal factions confronted each otherMercury News

COARSEGOLD, Calif. (AP) — A federal judge closed a Central California casino after an armed showdown between tribal factions caused many gamblers to flee with chips left on the tables.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence O’Neill, acting on an emergency request by the state attorney general, set no date for the possible reopening of the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino in Coarsegold, about 40 miles north of Fresno, The Fresno Bee reported (http://bit.ly/1syCiKE ). He scheduled a hearing for Wednesday.    Continue reading “California casino closed after armed standoff”

NRSF Gate

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — The Navajo Nation says a tribal police officer has been shot in northern Arizona and a suspect is in custody.

Navajo Nation spokesman Deswood Tome says Officer Joseph Gregg was shot in the face Saturday in Kaibeto and was in stable condition at a hospital in Flagstaff.   Continue reading “Navajo police officer shot in Arizona”

Marcel Hamer lies prone after being struck unconscious.New York Daily News – by Ryan Sit

A video showing an NYPD officer apparently knocking out a Brooklyn teen surfaced on Wednesday — the same day footage of another cop allegedly stealing more than $1,000 from a Brooklyn construction worker went viral.

The officer stopped 17-year-old Marcel Hamer on June 4 in Clinton Hill on suspicion of smoking marijuana, police said.

The video begins showing Marcel Hamer lying on his back, shouting in pain with the cop’s left foot planted on Hamer’s stomach. He then pleads repeatedly with the cop, saying he wasn’t smoking marijuana.    Continue reading “NYPD officer knocks teen unconscious with punch over suspicious cigarette”

image001 (1)I am over 65 and the Armed Forces thinks I’m too old to track down terrorists. You can’t be older than 42 to join the military. They’ve got the whole thing ass-backwards.

Instead of sending 18-year olds off to fight, they ought to take us old guys. You shouldn’t be able to join a military unit until you’re at least 35.

For starters, researchers say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds. Old guys only think about sex a couple of times a month, leaving us more than 280,000 additional seconds per day to concentrate on the enemy.   Continue reading “Drafting guys over 65”

AOL

MADRID (AP) – Three more people were under observation for Ebola in a Madrid hospital, boosting the number being monitored for symptoms to 16. A nursing assistant infected with the virus remained in serious but stable condition Saturday.

The latest three are a nurse who came into contact with nursing assistant Teresa Romero, a hairdresser who attended to her and a hospital cleaner, all of whom were admitted to Madrid’s Carlos III hospital late Friday.   Continue reading “Ebola: 3 more people under observation in Spain”

93112733-student-sits-next-to-a-statue-depicting-luitpold-princeSlate – by Rebecca Schuman

Last week, Lower Saxony made itself the final state in Germany to do away with any public university tuition whatsoever. You read that right. As of now, all state-run universities in the Federal Republic—legendary institutions that put the Bildung in Bildungsroman, like the Universität Heidelberg, the Universität München, or the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin—cost exactly nichts. (By the way, they weren’t exactly breaking the bank before, with semester fees of about EUR 500, or $630, which is often less than an American student spends on books—but even that amount was considered “unjust” by Hamburg senator Dorothee Stapelfeldt.)

Continue reading “You Can Now Go to College in Germany for Free, No Matter Where You’re From”

CBS New York

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Police said a man climbed out of a sidewalk grate and hurled a smoke bomb into a Greenwich Village restaurant Friday evening, before climbing back underground and vanishing.

The incident happened around 5:45 p.m. Friday at Bar Pitti, at 268 Sixth Ave. between Bleecker and Houston streets, police told CBS 2.

The suspect emerged from the grate that leads up from the subway system and threw the device, police said.   Continue reading “Police: Man Climbs Out Of Grate, Throws Smoke Bombs In Greenwich Village Restaurant”

F-15E Strike Eagle.(AFP Photo / Russ Scalf)RT

American intelligence officials are trying to blame news reports for failed military attacks against shadowy jihadist groups, arguing that the articles alerted a new terror group to impending air strikes.

Last month, the United States fired 46 cruise missiles at eight locations in northern Syria to target the Khorasan group’s training camps, a munitions center and other sites. However, the attacks only killed one or two key militants, US officials told the Associated Press.   Continue reading “US blames news reports for air strike failures”

image from www.buzzfeed.comRT

Pornhub has been forced to remove a giant billboard it had erected in New York’s Times Square, with it mysteriously disappearing from the area just hours after it was put up.

In May, Pornhub launched a headline-grabbing design competition, with entrants submitting a variety of images and slogans for their forthcoming adverts, including one depicting a woman questioning a man: “What are you watching?” with the response “Nothing,” prompting the tagline: “The world’s biggest archive of nothing.”    Continue reading “Down and out: Pornhub forced to take down controversial billboard in Times Square”

Edward Snowden (AFP Photo / NBC News / Handout)RT

Edward Snowden may not have a Nobel Prize or be able to go home, but he’s got a statue in Manhattan and a blockbuster new documentary, where he tells the behind the scenes story of his decision to go public with terabytes of classified government docs.

New Yorkers got a strange surprise on Friday when a 9-foot hunk of white drywall appeared in Union Square in an art piece dedicated to Edward Snowden, the man who told the world just how much the US government is watching and listening in on our every move.   Continue reading “‘Seen’ in New York: Edward Snowden on the run again”