Tag: copper

These boots were made for walking…

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Henry Leutwyler

The boots of Port Authority Sgt. John McLoughlin, who was buried for 22 hours in the 9/11 rubble before his rescue.

Photographer Henry Leutwyler was nearby, too…He watched the first World Trade Center tower fall from his rooftop at Broadway and Bleecker in Lower Manhattan. His direct connection to this moment in history, combined with his ability to imbue simple objects with emotion, made him the ideal photographer, years later, for a unique project.

Over the course of two weeks, with unprecedented access to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, he combed through hundreds of dusty boxes in the archive, each with close to 20 objects inside. Henry made thousands of photographs. They carry a power and dignity of their own—and some are featured…in September’s issue of National Geographic.

I appreciate walking shoes, hiking boots, work shoes. Never forgot my first pair of steel toe safety shoes. GE Apprentice Dept. got me a discount.

I even talked my way into a shoemaking apprenticeship once. The boss paid such crap wages I just couldn’t afford to stay there and work for him.

He gets job after copper gives him a ride to interview – instead of a ticket

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Photo courtesy of Ka’Shawn Baldwin

❝ An Illinois man starts a new job Tuesday and he has a police officer to thank for getting him to his interview.

Ka’Shawn Baldwin, of East St. Louis, was pulled over Wednesday in Cahokia by officer Roger Gemoules for allegedly having expired license plates. Baldwin also did not have a valid driver’s license…

❝ “The routine thing is to tow the car and take the person to jail who is driving the car,” Baldwin said.

He told the officer that he did not have any other way to get to his interview at an area FedEx facility and that’s why he was driving illegally.

❝ Gemoules explained to Baldwin that the car could not be driven any further.

With no other option, Baldwin then asked the officer if he would give him a ride to his interview. To his surprise, Baldwin said Gemoules followed him home where he parked the car and took him to his interview.

❝ Gemoules said he could tell Baldwin really wanted the job.

“He was polite when I pulled him over and he seemed like a good young man, so I wanted to give him a chance,” Gemoules told NBC affiliate KSDK in St. Louis. “I knew if I gave him a bunch of tickets and towed his car, it would be tough to recover from.”

RTFA for more of the details. And, yes, as often as we have to blog about some creepy racist cop there are folks with a badge who are ahead of that curveball. Gotta get the right one is all. 🙂

Confused and afraid – no more

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By Antwon Rose

I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK!

I am confused and afraid
I wonder what path I will take
I hear that there’s only two ways out
I see mothers bury their sons
I want my mom to never feel that pain
I am confused and afraid

I pretend all is fine
I feel like I’m suffocating
I touch nothing so I believe all is fine
I worry that it isn’t though
I cry no more
I am confused and afraid

I understand people believe I’m just a statistic
I say to them I’m different
I dream of life getting easier
I try my best to make my dream true
I hope that it does
I am confused and afraid

Antwon Rose, unarmed, was shot and killed by an East Pittsburgh police officer as he ran from a car that officers had stopped.

❝ The officer fired three shots at Rose, hitting him in the back and killing him.

Sometimes it’s just too much work for a copper to run after an unarmed kid, especially if the kid is Black. Shooting him is so much easier. No worries about justice for the kid. Not in Amerika.

AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home rollout: 1Gbps for the rich, 768kbps for the poor — surprised?

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❝ AT&T’s deployment of fiber-to-the-home in California has been heavily concentrated in higher-income neighborhoods, giving affluent people access to gigabit speeds while others are stuck with Internet service that doesn’t even meet state and federal broadband standards, according to a new analysis…

❝ California households with access to AT&T’s fiber service have a median income of $94,208…By contrast, the median household income is $53,186 in California neighborhoods where AT&T provides only DSL, with download speeds typically ranging from 768kbps to 6Mbps. At the low end, that’s less than 1 percent of the gigabit speeds offered by AT&T’s fiber service.

❝ The income difference is even more stark in some parts of California. “For example, in Los Angeles County, the median income of households with fiber-to-the-home access is $110,474, compared with $60,534 for those with U-verse availability, and $47,894 for those with only DSL availability,” the report said.

❝ In 4.1 million California households, representing 42.8 percent of AT&T’s California service area, AT&T’s fastest speeds fell short of the federal broadband definition of 25Mbps downloads and 3Mbps uploads…

❝ As copper networks increasingly become outdated, the FCC is seeking to eliminate regulations to make it easier for ISPs to retire copper networks. However, the copper could be replaced by wireless networks instead of fiber in areas where fiber rollouts aren’t cost-effective. AT&T is deploying a 10Mbps fixed wireless service in order to meet its Connect America Fund obligations.

As if AT&T cared a rat’s ass about service to folks in rural America. They won’t even sort out democratic access in urban areas – and if the experience in other Western nations is a model, that’s simply short-term greed overcoming good sense.

Copper parks in tall grass after stopping motorcycle — car goes up in flames

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A witness to the intense fire said the police officer pulled over a speeding motorbike rider at the intersection of Wivenhoe-Somerset Drive and Northbrook Parkway near Mount Glorious but when the bike took off again, it looked like the officer tried to give chase.

“Next minute the bloody cop car drives down the bank,” truck driver David Hunn said…

The Logan resident, who’d been out for a ride on his own motorbike, said the bike rider had stopped about 50 metres up the road.

He said by the time the police officer had “scrambled” up the bank and yelled at the rider to stop, there was smoke coming from the long grass under the unmarked car, likely from the hot exhaust pipe.

The 65-year-old said it was only minutes before flames had completely engulfed the car, which was eventually left a blackened shell.

“It was long grass so the car was basically nestled in the grass,” Mr Hunn said.

“It just caught fire straight away basically.”…

Mr Hunn described the stretch of road coming down from Mount Glorious as “a racetrack at the best of times” and accused both the motorcyclist and policeman of driving like maniacs.

“The bike came around me and I thought ‘shit he’s going quick’,” he said,

“The next minute, the bloody car came past me with no siren on. He was going like a bat out of hell.”

Mr Hunn said according to the rider’s friends they were going as much as 180km/h and the police car was catching up with the bike.

He said the officer caught up with the bike at the T-intersection, where he cut him off and attempted to block him in…

“If he’d kept the speed down a bit and saw which way it was going, he could have had the posse out and waiting for him because a bloody radio’s quicker than a bloody motorbike.”

A mate of mine down in Oz sent me this. Don’t know how he stopped laughing long enough to press the send key.

Yes, he’s a biker.

Thanks, Honeyman

NYC copper arrested woman for prostitution because he didn’t approve of her clothing

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policeman1896

A New York City judge dropped a prostitution case against a young woman, saying she was clearly not wearing the outfit of a prostitute.

Felicia McGinnis, 26, was arrested in the early hours of Jan. 9 after police saw her talking to a passersby on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s Midtown area, and charged with loitering for the purpose of prostitution…

Police noted that McGinnis was wearing a “black pea coat, skinny jeans and platform shoes.”

…Judge Felicia Mennin wrote that McGinnis’ outfit did not warrant a prostitution charge and tossed the case out.

“Any current issue of a fashion magazine would display plenty of women similarly dressed,” Mennin wrote. “However, the choice of such outfit hardly demonstrates the wearer’s proclivity to engage in prostitution.”

Mennin also slammed the police officer for noting that McGinnis’ pants were “revealing” because they “outlined” her legs.

“[The] characterization of the jeans as ‘revealing’ because they ‘outlined the defendant’s legs’ seems more to be expected in the dress code of a 1950s high school than a criminal-court pleading,” Mennin wrote.

“Granted, this incident occurred in the middle of winter,” Mennin added. “However, a pea coat is still standard issue to members of the US Navy … and blue jeans, skin-tight or baggy, are practically an American icon.”

The copper who promoted this bust deserves to spend the rest of his career stuck somewhere in a Tea Party time warp – rounding up Beatles records and copies of Catcher in the Rye for burning, arresting people for shopping on a Sunday and, of course, shutting down pharmacies that sell condoms.

Then, forced to stand before a judge who comprehends civil liberties and roasts this anal Sluggo for having the brain power of a sawhorse.

Someone remind this NYC copper that “serve and protect” doesn’t include a béchamel sauce

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A New York City police officer was charged on Thursday with conspiring to kidnap, torture, cook and eat women whose names he listed in his computer.

In a criminal complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court, Gilberto Valle III, 28, of Forest Hills, Queens, was charged with conspiring to cross state lines to kidnap the women and with illegally accessing a federal database…

Investigators uncovered a file on Valle’s computer containing the names and pictures of at least 100 women, and the addresses and physical descriptions of some of them, according to the complaint. It said he had undertaken surveillance of some of the women at their places of employment and their homes…

Valle’s court-appointed attorney, Julia Gatto, had vigorously argued to the judge that her client, a 6-1/2 year NYPD veteran who appeared before the judge in a red T-shirt and jeans, was all talk and deserved to be released on bail.

“The best this complaint alleges is talk, just idle talk,” Gatto said. “There is no actual crossing the line from fantasy to reality, your honor…”

Federal prosecutors, in announcing the charges, said Valle had created a document called “Abducting and Cooking: A Blueprint.” Valle also told an unnamed co-conspirator he would kidnap another woman for $5,000, they said.

“This case is all the more disturbing when you consider Valle’s position as a New York City police officer and his sworn duty to serve and protect,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

His estranged wife is the one who turned him in – after wandering uninvited through his computer.

I think she’s lucky she didn’t end up as his first choice for an entree.

Greek claiming welfare for most children in the country – has none!

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A former Greek policeman who invented 19 fictional offspring to claim benefits for what would have been the largest family in Greece has been arrested for benefit fraud…

The former police officer, divorced and with no children of his own, quit his 1,000-euro-a-month job in 2001 and has been living solely on benefits ever since, police said on Thursday. Using photographs of children he found online, the 54-year-old man forged birth certificates and other documents needed to claim benefits for at least one child a year since 1996.

Police estimate he made at least 150,000 euros in claims over 15 years, but the actual amount is probably much higher.

The fraud was so expert, police said, that they only realized something was amiss when they noticed his was the only Greek family with that many children. The average Greek family usually has two or three children.

Truly sharp coppers, eh?

“We have never seen a scam like this before,” said a police official who declined to be named…

The former policeman, who under Greek law cannot be named, was arrested Wednesday as he was about to collect 8,000 euros in benefits from an Athens branch of Greece’s employment agency OAED. He was taken to the prosecutor’s office Thursday.

Widespread fraud, a generous welfare state and a notoriously inefficient public sector have been blamed as root causes of Greece’s financial trouble that threatens to break apart the euro zone.

Relying on coppers who commit fraud themselves might be part of that equation, as well.

Little old lady cuts off web access to whole country of Armenia

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An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper to sell as scrap when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to all of neighbouring Armenia…

The woman, 75, had been digging for the metal not far from the capital Tbilisi when her spade damaged the fibre-optic cable on 28 March.

As Georgia provides 90% of Armenia’s internet, the woman’s unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours as the country’s main internet providers – ArmenTel, FiberNet Communication and GNC-Alfa – were prevented from supplying their normal service. Television pictures showed reporters at a news agency in the capital Yerevan staring glumly at blank screens.

Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected…

Dubbed “the spade-hacker” by local media, the woman – who has not been named – is being investigated on suspicion of damaging property. She faces up to three years in prison if charged and convicted.

A spokesman for Georgia’s interior ministry said the woman was temporarily released “on account of her old age” but could face more questioning…

Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making money in the former Soviet Union. Some entrepreneurs have even used tractors to wrench out hundreds of metres of cable from the former nuclear testing ground at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

Yup. Let’s wander around a nuclear-testing site trying to find something worth scrounging.

Then, complain to the government a week later about glowing in the dark.