Tag: killed

Trump Admin Ignores Human Rights in Border Patrol Beating Death

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❝ Attorneys for the family of a man killed by Border Patrol agents said Monday the Trump administration will “lose badly” for failing to respond to the family’s petition regarding their loved one’s death at the border.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took up a petition filed by the family of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas in May claiming human rights abuses over Border Patrol agents’ extrajudicial killing of the San Diego man and what the family says was a botched investigation by U.S. government officials.

❝ The U.S. government had until Aug. 10 to respond to the petition but has remained silent – breaking decades of tradition of cooperating with the human rights agency even with regard to abuse of prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay.

Because the government has not responded to the petition, the commission can enter a default judgment against the United States – accepting the family’s claims as true.

❝ Earlier this year, the United States did not participate in hearings before the commission. Roxanna Altholz, associate director at UC Berkeley Law School’s International Human Rights Law Clinic and one of the attorneys on the Hernandez-Rojas case, said the government’s refusal to participate is unprecedented…

❝ Hernandez-Rojas was beaten by Border Patrol agents in 2010 when he was caught crossing the border. The beating put him in a coma before Hernandez-Rojas’ family decided to take him off life support.

The Feds have already agreed to a large settlement in the civil case brought by Rojas family; but, they still would like justice to be determined – charging the agents who beat Rojas. Understandable.

Doesn’t seem to affect our fake president’s comprehension of law and justice.

Ohio fossil fuel pimps pass anti-wind bill that costs schools hundred$ of thousand$ of dollar$

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Give frackers a chance to match Ohio earthquakes with Oklahoma 🙂

❝ Superintendent Ken Amstutz dreamed of propelling his rural Ohio school district into a high-tech future with nearly a million dollars in annual revenue from a single wind farm set to go online this year.

That was until the state legislature blocked wind development across Ohio, halting construction of the Long Prairie Wind Farm and leaving Amstutz’s district in financial limbo…

❝ Revenue from the Long Prairie Wind Farm in Van Wert City would have delivered Chromebooks to every student in the district, Amstutz said. It would have ensured existing programs stay in effect and allowed the school to expand its science, math, and performing arts curricula. Teachers would have gotten raises, and the district would have had the resources to support new, innovative programs…

❝ A short drive up the road from Van Wert City Schools, students of Lincolnview Schools saw a different ending to the same story. That district benefits from a program that allows wind companies to provide a portion of their revenue to the local community — 80 percent to schools, 20 percent to the township — instead of paying taxes. Lincolnview’s clean-energy benefactor is the Blue Creek Wind Farm, which went up before the setback rule was changed. The project, which consists of 152 turbines that can power up to 76,000 homes, contributes $400,000 annually to local schools, funding classes like pre-engineering and biomedical.

“Additional revenue allows us to think out of the box and do something new,” said Linconview Superintendent Jeff Snyder. “We’ve been able to pay for new programs, classes, and technologies as a one-time expenditure. We’ve hired a couple of additional teachers, as well as a Special Ed director and a curriculum director… That money is not leaving our area to go somewhere else. It’s staying in our district to benefit our kids and future generations of students as well.”

❝ Lawmakers and lobbyists have seized on local opposition to wind power to pass policies that favor oil and natural gas — despite the fact that infrastructure-related risks, infringement on property rights, and nuisance issues used to justify the state’s aggressive resistance to wind can be common with fossil fuel extraction.

This doesn’t faze Ohio State Sen. Bill Seitz (R), who says that “cheap and plentiful” natural gas doesn’t threaten homeowners because, unlike wind turbines, gas infrastructure operates underground.

Like many Republicans or Conservative Democrats, fracking, problems with gas pipelines are nothing to be concerned about. No doubt they get their campaign checks right on time, too.

❝ There is still hope for the landowners, farmers, families, and schools of northwest Ohio who have not reaped the benefits of wind power…House Bill 190, introduced in 2015, would give setback and siting decisions to individual counties. If that bill is signed into law, schools across the state could see decades of revenue they desperately need.

Ohio state Sen. Cliff Hite (R), who voted for the bill that pulled the plug on Van Wert’s school funding, hopes to revive commercial wind development with HB 190. “I believe these projects should have the chance to thrive where people want them,” he said. “And I believe they will live to fight another day.”

The concept of elected officials providing leadership to a better future – instead of marching lockstep back into some imaginary past – remains an alien concept to an awful lot of Americans. Time to get up off your rusty- dusty folks and fightback.

99% of Columbia and Snake River sockeye salmon killed by 2015 water temperatures

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❝ Ninety-nine percent of the Snake River sockeye counted at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River near Portland in 2015 died before reaching Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley.

Unprecedented and lethally high temperatures in the Columbia, Snake and even Salmon rivers killed all but a few dozen of Idaho’s 4,000 adult endangered sockeye that had returned to the Columbia last June and July. Most years, more than 50 percent of the adults that survive their early life in Redfish Lake, migrate to the Pacific as juveniles and spend two years in the ocean return to spawn.

That means the 2015 return would have been the highest in more than 50 years, had temperatures been normal.

❝ The sockeye would have gone extinct in the 1990s if not for the successful captive broodstock program created after the fish was declared endangered in 1991.

Just 2 percent of the 475,000 Okanagon River sockeye seen at Bonneville returned to their spawning grounds in Washington. Most of both populations died in the Columbia beginning in June when the water warmed to above 68 degrees, the temperature at which salmon begin to die. It got up to 73 degrees in July.

No sockeye that reached the Columbia River after July 16 completed the trip to Idaho.

Don’t worry, folks. Climate change is only something that eggheads care about. Folks who fish the great Western rivers will adjust quietly, quickly.

Surely, they will be as happy forking for carp as catch-and-release fly-fishing for salmon. 🙂

They sent robots in to clean up Fukushima – it was too dangerous for humans. The robots died!

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❝ The robots who went into Fukushima’s no-man’s land have not returned after radiation levels in the power plant proved too strong for their circuit boards to handle.

❝ The clean-up continues almost five years to the day after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station experienced three meltdowns after a tsunami crashed into the coastal power plant in 2011. The deathly high levels of radiation means it’s impossible for humans to go into areas of the plant to dispose of or contain the radioactivite materials. And it turns out, robots don’t fare much better either.

❝ TEPCO and Toshiba developed a series of robots that were able to go underwater in the plant’s damaged cooling pools to remove the radioactive nuclear rods.

Five of the custom-built robots have been sent into the plant to work their magic. So far, none of them have returned. As soon as they get close to the reactors, their wiring becomes destroyed by the high levels of radioactivity and they are unable to move.

❝ “It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant,” said Naohiro Masuda, TEPCo’s head of decommissioning. “The biggest obstacle is the radiation.”

Yup. No one at TEPCo figured that out before they spent five years and lots of money on 5 custom robots.

Anyone surprised their safety systems failed during the tsunami?

NYC settles Eric Garner case for $5.9 Million

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New York City reached a settlement with the family of Eric Garner on Monday, agreeing to pay $5.9 million to resolve a wrongful death claim over his killing by the police on Staten Island last July…

The agreement, reached just a few days before the deadline to file suit, headed off one potentially fractious legal battle over Mr. Garner’s death even as a federal inquiry into the killing and several others at the state and local level remain open and could provide a further accounting of how he died.

Still, the settlement was a pivotal moment in a case that has engulfed the city and the Police Department since the afternoon of July 17, 2014, when two officers approached Mr. Garner as he stood unarmed on a sidewalk and accused him of selling untaxed cigarettes.

The death of Mr. Garner, 43, followed by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August, set off a national debate about policing actions in minority communities and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Mr. Garner’s final words — “I can’t breathe” — repeated 11 times as one officer held him in a chokehold, became a national rallying cry. A Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, fueled weeks of demonstrations…

“The City of New York has agreed to pay $5.9 million to resolve the Garner case,” said Jonathan C. Moore, the lawyer for Mr. Garner’s family…

The resolution is among the biggest reached so far as part of a strategy by the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, to settle major civil rights claims even before a lawsuit is filed. Mr. Stringer has said the aim is to save taxpayers the expense of a drawn-out trial and to give those bringing the suits and their families a measure of closure.

…The settlement did not provide any greater clarity on the actions of the officers that day or the policing strategies that have come under criticism in the year that has followed…

The city medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, citing the chokehold and the compression of Mr. Garner’s chest by other officers who held him down.

Several inquiries into Mr. Garner’s death were still pending, including investigations by the United States attorney’s office, the Civilian Complaint Review Board and state health officials, who are looking into the actions of emergency medical responders in treating Mr. Garner.

The Police Department has concluded its internal investigation but has yet to say whether any officers would be disciplined.

IMHO, the relationship between most American police departments and the communities they’re supposed to serve is a criminal farce. That criminality is doubled and tripled when victims are non-white and other minorities.

In general, too many coppers behave like they are above the law – they are judge, jury and executioner. And if a confrontation involves a non-white civilian the operative word is executioner.

Yes – there are good cops. I’ve known more than a few including members of my extended family. If they stand up for honest community relations, too often, they get screwed over for doing just that.

Mexico — Evidence of the missing

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memories of murder

The view from the hills around Iguala, Mexico, was stunning. But the more Christopher Gregory walked along the paths, the more his eye was drawn to the objects scattered along the way: scraps of clothing, beer bottles, trash. To him, these castoff items were possibly linked to the hundreds of people reported missing — presumably kidnapped, if not killed — by drug cartels that have long operated with impunity…

Little more than six months after 43 students were abducted and presumably killed in Iguala in Guerrero State, Mr. Gregory is wondering about all the other people who have vanished in that region. He had wanted to do a project on the missing students, but abruptly changed his mind when, during the early stages of the search, a mass grave was found with the remains of 28 people.

None of them were the students.

That became a flash point for him and Jeremy Relph, a writer with whom he had teamed up for the story. Once they got to Iguala, they discovered that disappearances had been going on for years, and on an alarming scale. While the government has put the tally of missing people in Guerrero State at about 120 from January to November of last year, local advocates working with families reported that some 400 people had been reported missing in Iguala alone in recent years.

“The photo is an evidentiary document,” he said. “There is no way to witness these kidnappings or document these violations of human rights, other than to point at the residue and try to have a conversation about what it means, how it looks like and how do we navigate these complex social and political issues, as well as the psychological issues. You can’t believe anybody or trust anybody in these areas because for all intents and purposes, they’re lawless.”

RTFA. Take a good look at what lawless means. You don’t need to go to the Arabian Peninsula or the Horn of Africa.

Reality TV – coppers kill “COPS” crew member

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Omaha police say officers who opened fire while disrupting a robbery killed a crew member with the Cops television show and the suspect, who was carrying a pellet gun.

Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said Wednesday that witnesses and officers thought the robbery suspect’s Airsoft handgun was real, but that it fires only plastic pellets.

Schmaderer said he believes the three officers involved acted properly during the attempted robbery Tuesday at a fast-food restaurant in midtown Omaha.

Schmaderer says 38-year-old Bryce Dion who worked for Langley Productions and the suspect, 32-year-old Cortez Washington, were killed…

Schmaderer said the incident will be investigated and all three officers are on leave.

Using a realistic pellet gun wouldn’t be any defense for the robbery – or the police response to what looked like an armed and dangerous robbery in progress.

What will be truly important to deal with is that now investigators know the thief was using a pellet gun – the bullet that killed a member of the film crew could only have come from one of the patrolmen.

Obscure UMass employee stole $3.4 million in state funds

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He was a $46,000-a-year financial analyst in an obscure office of the University of Massachusetts Medical School who somehow managed to drive a Porsche, collect Salvador Dali paintings, and build a palatial home for himself. When people asked about his sudden, showy affluence, Leo Villani would explain that he had inherited money.

But it turns out that Villani came into his wealth quite another way: He stole it, quietly siphoning off nearly $3.4 million from payments intended for the state Medicaid insurance program over the past five years, an internal investigation has found. It may be the biggest theft by a state employee in more than a decade.

Officials at the Worcester medical school discovered the alleged scam only after Villani died in a one-vehicle accident in late December and a review of his work found discrepancies in the account where he was supposed to deposit checks for the Medicaid program, called MassHealth. They eventually learned that Villani had set up a dummy corporation to which he had been diverting state funds for years.

But the fact that the alleged theft went on for so long without being detected is raising troubling questions about how well UMass Medical safeguards its vast public resources. Villani’s office, part of the school’s Commonwealth Medicine division in Shrewsbury that provides consulting services, collected more than $500 million on behalf of MassHealth over the past decade…

So far, one Commonwealth Medicine supervisor has been dismissed while several other workers have been disciplined, and the medical school has called in an outside auditor to figure out what went wrong…State officials also say they hope to recover some of the stolen money from Villani’s widow…

And UMass’s Keohane defended the quality of Commonwealth Medicine’s work for MassHealth, stressing that Villani’s case was unique and not a reflection on their management of public money.

It’s a long and detailed article, wandering through just some of the twists and turns of the embezzled funds. Nothing outstanding in terms of techniques. Just the record of a state not up to modern standards of either bookkeeping or record-keeping.

His widow is responding to all enquiries through her lawyer. Of course.

Express train kills pilgrims – pilgrims kill engineer, burn trains

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A speeding train has run over a group of Hindu pilgrims at a crowded station near Dhamara, a small town in Bihar state, killing at least 28 people.

Railways spokesman Anil Saxena said that some of those hit by the express train were Hindu pilgrims who had left two trains.

“Passengers got out of the train, came on the track and they were moving on that track. That is the time they got run over,” Arunendra Kumar, chairman of the Railway Board, told a news conference in New Delhi.

After the incident, a mob reportedly assaulted the train driver to death and set two trains on fire.

Many railway personnel have run away and left the station completely unmanned, according to officials…

About 40 people on average die every day on India’s vast but decrepit railway network. Some passengers fall off overcrowded commuter trains.

The train was an express – express by Indian standards since it was proceeding at 48mph – not scheduled to stop at the station. The death of the pilgrims was a tragedy though not unusual among folks who apparently think every train stops at every station.

Which logically precedes the vigilante behavior after the accident.

Brazilian man killed by 1½ ton cow falling through the roof of his bedroom

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Killed by falling cow

A Brazilian man has died after a 1.5 tonne cow crashed through his roof as he slept in bed with his wife.

Joao Maria de Souza, 45, was killed by the animal, which narrowly missed his wife, as he slept at his home in the town of Caratinga on Wednesday.

A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the animal, which was grazing on a hill behind the small house, stepped onto the thin corrugated asbestos roof causing it to immediately give way. The officer said Souza died of internal bleeding at a nearby hospital…

Press reports have also claimed this is the third such incident in the region in just three years – in both previous incident there were no casualties.

How about making it more difficult for cows to step from a hillside onto your roof, eh?