Officer Go Fuck Yourself Ray Albers Resigns Fired Ferguson | Mediaite

Officer Go Fuck Yourself Ray Albers Resigns Fired Ferguson | Mediaite

 
JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Police Lieutenant Ray Albers, better known by his nickname, Officer “Go Fuck Yourself,” has officially resigned from the St. Ann, Missouri Police Department, according to a new report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Albers came to prominence after he pointed his rifle at protesters, at least one of whom was live streaming coverage, in Ferguson on the night of August 19, yelling, “I will fucking kill you.” When the protesters asked for his name and he declined to provide it, instead saying “Go fuck yourself,” they decided to just call him that.

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Later, the ACLU succeeded in getting Albers removed from duty, at least temporarily, after writing a letter to the Missouri State Highway Patrol that described his actions. This week, according to the Post-Dispatch, the city’s board of police commissioners made the recommendation that Albers either be fired or resign. He chose to resign.

“I’m not condoning his behavior whatsoever,” Police Chief Aaron Jiminez told the paper. “It’s very hard because he is a good friend, he was a good boss. There’s going to be those who didn’t like him who are high-fiving now. Altogether it’s going to be a black eye on the city of St. Ann because he represented our department.”

At the same, he called the way Albers pointed his weapon at protesters “totally justifiable.” Jiminez explained that just before the damning video was shot, Albers had water and urine thrown at him and allegedly spotted man in the crowd holding a gun.

There were “a whole bunch of what you’d call citizen journalists, who were sitting with cameras recording, waiting for something stupid to happen, which they got. They won on this one,” Jiminez said. As for what Albers said to the protesters, the chief said he was afraid. “That’s why he used those words.”

Watch two videos of the officer below, captured by citizen journalists during the Ferguson protests:

Ferguson officer Twitter: Attacks Ron Johnson, Eric Holder, reportedly makes false accusation against specific group of protestors.

Ferguson officer Twitter: Attacks Ron Johnson, Eric Holder, reportedly makes false accusation against specific group of protestors.

 

 

Eric Holder and Ron Johnson

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
A St. Louis-area police officer who's been working in Ferguson falsely accused a group of protestors of shooting at police, said Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson holds a racial “double standard,” and asserted that he would like to punch attorney general Eric Holder, the St. Louis Riverfront Times reports via a survey of the officer's Twitter posts.

The Riverfront Times appears to have noticed Sgt. Mike Weston's account when Weston said that a group of individuals tear-gassed in their own backyard last week had fired gunshots at police. A Times reporter who witnessed and recorded the incident says none of the protestors were armed. Weston admitted he could not support the accusation when contacted by the reporter—and wasn't even at the scene he was describing:

       "There were shots being fired some yards, maybe not this particular one."

Weston then admitted that he wasn't in the group of police officers that was marching down the street and firing tear gas into yards. He said he was in the back closer to the command center, several blocks away.

The Times also found since-deleted tweets by Weston in which he says he's considering seeking out Eric Holder to punch him, accuses Ron Johnson of practicing a racial "double standard" in Ferguson, and characterizes Johnson's approach to protests as "Hug a Thug." Weston confirmed to the Times that the Twitter account in question was his.

White privilege: An insidious virus that’s eating America from within - Salon.com

White privilege: An insidious virus that’s eating America from within - Salon

 
JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
In one of the most famous passages of the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes to the Christians of Corinth, employing a complicated series of metaphors on the theme of transformation: from childhood to adulthood, from ignorance to knowledge, from sinfulness to a state of grace. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,” the epistle runs, in the memorable rhythms of the King James Version. “But when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I’m not a believer, in the ordinary sense of that word, and I’m aware that Paul is a problematic figure in theological history, to put it mildly. But those words have resonated with me over the last two weeks. Painful
recent events on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri — and the strongly divided national response to those events — offer us a chance to become aware of the ways we see race in America “through a glass, darkly,” and perhaps also the beginnings of a chance to see each other face to face, to know as we are known. Let me be clear that when I say “we” I am primarily addressing America’s white majority, to which I belong. We are the ones whose vision is occluded by the darkened glass of white privilege, and it’s up to us to do something about it. Black people can see white privilege pretty clearly, but from a different perspective, and it’s beyond their power to change it.

White privilege is a term that sometimes gets thrown around too cavalierly, especially when people are having a fight on the Internet and want to shut each other up. (I find myself echoing here many of the things I wrote about masculinity and male privilege in the wake of the Elliot Rodger case in May. It’s been a tough summer in America.) Recognizing white privilege does not mean that white people don’t get to express our views on controversial racial topics, or that we have to defer to whatever a person of color may say. It does mean, however, that we have a responsibility to be alert to advantages we may possess, whether as ordinary citizens on the street, economic agents or wielders of rhetoric that appears neutral rather than “racial.” By definition, it means that some of those advantages are things we don’t notice, or take entirely for granted.

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My former Salon colleague Matt Zoller Seitz (now the editor of Roger Ebert’s website) wrote a memorable personal essay on this topic last week. It generated some heated discussion among my colleagues, because it’s arguably only half on-topic. It was partly a confession about a period of extreme disorder in Matt’s own life, when he did some foolish and destructive things, and partly a reckoning with the fact that the consequences of those actions could have been a whole lot worse if he hadn’t had white skin. I have no anecdotes anywhere near that dramatic in my past, but like many other white people who read Matt’s story, I was compelled to think about encounters with cops where I was treated courteously and given the benefit of the doubt, and where it never even occurred to me that the outcome might have been different for someone who didn’t look like me. (A traffic stop in suburban California at age 18: underage, probably over the limit and carrying both alcohol and marijuana. “Drive yourself straight home, son, and don’t let me see you out here again.”)

But the most insidious power of white privilege, the albatross effect that makes it so oppressive to white people themselves, is the way it renders itself invisible and clouds the collective mind. It’s like a virus that adapts in order to ensure its own survival and perpetuation, in this case by convincing its host it isn’t there. So we see polls suggesting that large percentages of white Americans believe that racism is not a significant factor in Ferguson or law enforcement in general, that cops are just doing their jobs, and that whatever bad things may have happened once upon a time in our beloved country, they’ve been locked away in the dusty cabinet of history and don’t matter anymore. We passed the Voting Rights Act and exiled the Ku Klux Klan to the margins of society (or at least to websites with really bad graphics). Ergo, white privilege obviously doesn’t exist anymore.

Among the “childish things” we need to put aside, white people, is the idea that America’s tormented racial legacy belongs to the past. You know exactly the attitude I mean: We have twice elected a biracial president
and LeBron James and Jay Z are zillionaires, so no more talk of racism, please. In the more paranoid formulation prevalent in the Fox News demographic (but not limited to it), this becomes the idea that the
federal government has spent the last 50 years giving away money, housing, education and other “free stuff” to black people who don’t work or pay taxes, while vigorously grinding down the white man. So either the vision of healing and reconciliation conjured up so eloquently by Martin Luther King, Jr. more than 50 years ago has now been fulfilled (and black people need to stop complaining), or America is being not so slowly turned into a gay-Muslim-socialist totalitarian state where every day is Kwanzaa. Both scenarios come up against the nettlesome fact that African-Americans stubbornly persist in being poor, living in disadvantaged circumstances, getting shot by the police for no particular reason and going to prison in large numbers.

This kind of white privilege is a willful blindness, along with a passionate embrace of exactly the kind of aggrievement and victimhood that white people often claim to resent in others. It’s found in Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity, of course, but also among people like hipster über-troll Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice, who wrote a piece not long ago explaining that racism, sexism and homophobia do not actually exist. But I’m not principally talking about Republican ideologues and their hardcore supporters, who have built their power and influence on thinly veiled racism over the past 40 years and barely even bother denying it. There is a much larger population of white Americans, I believe, who feel troubled by what they saw in Ferguson but are unable or unwilling to face the fact that it reflects a recurring historical pattern that has obviously not been exorcised, a pattern of power, privilege and domination in which they are complicit.

Any white person who is being honest can understand this reluctance, and probably any other kind of person too. It’s a lot more comfortable to believe that equal opportunity has been pretty much afforded to all, allowing for some bumps in the road – or to believe that you yourself belong to the unfairly downtrodden and stigmatized group – than to consider the alternatives. It is not comfortable at all for any white American to read the case assembled by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his magisterial reported essay “The Case for Reparations” that American society has not done nearly enough to erase the cultural and historical debt left behind by 250 years of slavery followed by another century-plus of economic discrimination, political suppression, institutionalized theft and straight-up terrorism. “It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear,” Coates writes. “The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”

William Faulkner’s famous remark that the past is not dead, and isn’t even past, could not be more vividly illustrated than by the images from Ferguson: A black man shot dead in the street; angry African-American protesters facing impassive and heavily armed white police officers; tear gas, broken glass and the National Guard. But how to deal with these events that seem like nightmarish echoes of too many previous events? One way, the path of survival pursued by the virus of white privilege, is to detach each of these cases from history. Each of these inexplicably dead black men becomes an isolated phenomenon, with no reference to any discernible pattern. History is bunk, as Henry Ford and then the Gang of Four told us; there are no lessons in the past.

This urgent agenda of historical decoupling offers one reason why the specific details of each case become so fraught with meaning, and why the elaborate character assassination of every victim is so important to TV talking heads and Internet trolls. If Michael Brown was a thieving thug who made Darren Wilson fear for his life, if Trayvon Martin was a drug-dealing ne’er-do-well who was casing out potential burglaries (and probably high on “Purple Drank”), if Eric Garner was a bruising gangster who resisted arrest and stopped breathing because of asthma and cardiac arrest rather than an illegal chokehold, then their deaths were regrettable (or maybe non-regrettable) consequences of the system working as it should. Race was not a factor, the police and/or random armed citizens acted reasonably, the protesters are mobs of looters and law-breakers, and the liberal pantywaists crying about it on TV are the real racists.

That pathway remains highly seductive for white America, because it avoids any notion of collective or social responsibility and accesses the Calvinist myth of individualism that lies at the core of white American identity. A man makes his own fate or is elected by Providence – it comes to the same thing in the end – and if those young men and a distressing number of others met death in the street under unsettling circumstances, that can only have been their just deserts. Considering the possibility that they died because of a system of justice and law enforcement that skews heavily toward arresting, imprisoning and otherwise suppressing black and brown people, and that that system is itself embedded within much larger cultural and historical patterns, raises a lot of painful questions. What are we supposed to do about it, for one thing?

For starters, we can be honest with ourselves about white privilege, when we’re able to see it. That means being honest about how it benefits us and also how it imprisons us, which for me was the great public service of Matt Seitz’s article. Coates’ credit-card metaphor is particularly apposite, directed at the largely white readership of the Atlantic; what middle-class family these days does not understand the crippling effects of long-term debt? Resisting white privilege is not about “liberal guilt,” or donning sackcloth and ashes, or whatever Bill O’Reilly thinks happens in graduate seminars at elite universities. It’s about finding material ways to pay down that debt, and also about recognizing how much the debt has weighed us down – all of us, white and black and brown and all other shades.

As I said earlier, the virus of white privilege survives by convincing its host organism that it does not exist. That’s because the more clearly we see it the more likely we are to notice that its purported benefits have faded almost to nothing. Whites of the working and middle classes correctly perceive that their economic fortunes have deteriorated over the past half-century, even if the average white household is still 20 times wealthier than the average black household (an especially deleterious consequence of white privilege). An entire right-wing ideological empire remains devoted to convincing white people that benefit-sucking African Americans and job-stealing Latino immigrants are somehow to blame for their downward trajectory. White privilege is the solvent used, throughout American history, to dissolve multiracial coalitions of working people, and the drug used to brainwash whites into making common cause with the class of CEOs, financiers and landlords. Kicking that drug habit is the only way white America can ever set itself free from the past.

Missouri racial unrest mounts; U.S. leaders call for calm - Yahoo News

Missouri racial unrest mounts; U.S. leaders call for calm - Yahoo News

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday called for calm and a change in police tactics in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, which has been rocked by racially charged clashes and riots after a white officer killed an unarmed black teenager 10 days ago.

The violence has captured headlines around the world, raising questions about the state of U.S. race relations nearly six years after Americans elected their first black president.

Law enforcement has made various efforts to soothe angry demonstrators, but police said they had come under heavy gunfire overnight and arrested 31 people despite the deployment of Missouri National Guard troops and the lifting of a curfew to allow protesters to have more freedom to demonstrate.

"We overpoliced for a few days, and then we completely underpoliced," U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who was traveling to Ferguson on Tuesday, told cable channel MSNBC.

She said she was working with local leaders on ways to quell the violence. Possible methods include screening for weapons and moving protest areas away from the business district to open green spaces.

View gallery

Police officers point their weapons at demonstrators protesting against the shooting death of Michae …

Both she and U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver, another Missouri Democrat, said calm was needed to allow federal investigators to evaluate the evidence.

"What's happening now is damaging, or interfering, with what needs to be done," Cleaver told MSNBC.

On Monday, President Barack Obama said he told Missouri Governor Jay Nixon that use of the National Guard should be limited, and he also called for conciliation. Attorney General Eric Holder plans to visit
Ferguson on Wednesday.

Ferguson, a community of roughly 21,000 mostly black residents just outside St. Louis, has a long history of racial tension. Blacks have complained of police harassment and under-representation in city leadership.

Tension boiled over 10 days ago after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead while walking with a friend down a residential street on the afternoon of Aug. 9.

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Members of a rowdy group of demonstrators drag a portable toilet onto the roadway during protests in …

The police refused to immediately release the name of the officer who killed Brown. They later identified him as 28-year-old Darren Wilson but and still have not provided details about why he fired multiple rounds at Brown.

Both the U.S. Department of Justice and the St. Louis County Police Department are investigating the shooting. The county prosecutor's office said it could start presenting evidence to a grand jury Wednesday
to determine if Wilson will be indicted.

Since the killing, thousands of protesters have taken over the site of the shooting and the nearby business district each night, chanting anti-police slogans and carrying signs calling for Wilson's arrest.

Some journalists covering the confrontations have been hit by tear gas and arrested.

On Tuesday, the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, an intergovernmental security and human rights organization whose members include 57 countries including the United States and Canada, criticized the treatment of the journalists.

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A protester dons a gas mask on West Florissant during protests in reaction to the shooting of Michae …

'HEAVY GUNFIRE'

On Monday night, officials had hoped that the lifting of a curfew imposed over the weekend would cool tensions and end the looting and violence. Police also closed a roadway to traffic to provide a path for marchers.

But police said some in the crowd hurled bottles, rocks and petrol bombs at officers, who responded by firing gas-filled canisters and a noise cannon to try to disperse the throng.

State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who is overseeing security in Ferguson, said officers had come under "heavy gunfire" but did not return it. Riot police did confiscate two guns and what looked like a petrol bomb from protesters.

Four officers were injured, he said.

Johnson separately told CNN that two people were shot within the crowd, but not by police, and were taken to hospital. There was no immediate word on their condition.

"This has to stop," said Johnson, an African-American who grew up in the area. "I don't want anybody to get hurt. We have to find a way to stop this."

The disturbances are the worst since the angry but peaceful protests across the United States in July 2013, over the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic who killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin during a scuffle in Florida.

Boko Haram Abduct Dozens Of Boys In Nigeria

August 15, 2014 | Filed under: Africa | 

Misguided Arab slaves have turned against Nigeria

 JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Suspected Boko Haram terrorists have abducted dozens of boys and men in a raid on a remote village in northeast Nigeria, loading them onto trucks and driving them off, witnesses who fled the violence said on Friday.

The kidnappings come four months after Boko Haram abducted more than 200 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok.

Several witnesses who fled after the Sunday’s raid on Doron Baga, a sandy fishing village near the shores of Lake Chad, said the terrorists had burned several houses and that as many as 97 people were unaccounted for.

“They left no men or boys in the place; only young children, girls and women,” said Halima Adamu, sobbing softly and looking exhausted after a 180 km (110 mile) road trip on the back of a truck to the northern city of Maiduguri.

“They were shooting sporadically. There was confusion everywhere. They started parking our men and boys into their vehicles, threatening to shoot whoever disobey them. Everybody was scared.”

The villagers said six older men were also killed in Sunday’s raid.

Boko Haram, seen as the number one security threat to Africa’s top economy and oil producer, has dramatically increased attacks on civilians in the past year, and the once-grassroots movement has rapidly lost popular support as it gets more blood thirsty.

Its solution – kidnapping boys and girls – is chilling echo of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which has operated in the same way in Uganda, South Sudan and central Africa for decades.

The military did not respond to a request for comment. A security source said they were aware of the incident but were still investigating the details.

The Arab/Muslim Slave Trade In Africa – The Untold Story

Police: Teen shot by cop suspect in recent robbery - Yahoo News

Friday, August 15, 2014

Police: Teen shot by cop suspect in recent robbery - Yahoo News

Police: Teen shot by cop suspect in recent robbery - Yahoo News

 

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Folks, In light of this new information which still hasn't been substantiated concerning a robbery, I still hope the you don't let the conversation change or focus switch now from a unarmed black youth being killed to a criminal been shot and killed. "Why Should The Conversation Change".

A suburban St. Louis police chief on Friday identified the officer whose fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager ignited days of heated protests, and released documents alleging the teen was killed after a robbery in which he was suspected of stealing a $48.99 box of cigars.

Related Stories

• Missouri Highway Patrol seizes control of Ferguson Associated Press
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Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson released several police reports and documents during a news conference where he also identified the officer involved as Darren Wilson, who has been on administrative leave since he shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9.

Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, were suspected of taking a box of cigars from a convenience store in Ferguson that morning, according to police reports. Jackson said Wilson went to the area after a 911 call
reporting a "strong-arm" robbery just before noon. He said a dispatcher gave a description of the robbery suspect, and Wilson, who had been assisting on another call, was sent to investigate.

Wilson, a six-year veteran of the police department, encountered Brown just after 12:01 p.m., with a second officer arriving three minutes later, Jackson said.

Brown's uncle, Bernard Ewing, questioned whether Wilson really believed Brown was a suspect. He noted Johnson's account that the officer told the two young men to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk, and that Brown had his hands up when he was shot.

"If he's a robbery suspect, they would have had the lights on," Ewing said. "If you rob somebody, you would tell them, 'Get on the ground' or something, not, 'Get off the sidewalk.'"

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Pages from the police report of a robbery naming Michael Brown. (Ferguson Police handout)

"It still doesn't justify shooting him when he puts his hands up," he added. "You still don't shoot him in the face."

A phone message seeking comment from the family's attorney, Benjamin Crump, wasn't immediately returned.

Brown's death has sparked several days of clashes with furious protesters in the city. The mood was quelled on Thursday after the governor turned oversight of the protests over to the state Highway Patrol. State troopers walking side-by-side with thousands of peaceful protesters replaced the image of previous nights: police in riot gear and armored tanks.

But the police chief's announcement Friday was met with immediate disbelief and anger by several dozen community members who also attended the news conference, which was hastily held at a gas station burned during a night of looting earlier in the week in Ferguson, a town of 21,000 that is nearly 70 percent black and patrolled by a nearly all-white police force.

"He stopped the wrong one, bottom line," yelled Tatinisha Wheeler, a nurse's aide who was at the news conference.

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Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson releases the name of the the officer accused of fatally shootin …

A couple dozen protesters began marching around the charred gas station and in the street chanting, "Hands up, don't shoot," and, "What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!"

Police have said Brown was shot after an officer encountered him and another man on the street during a routine patrol. They say one of the men pushed the officer into his squad car, then physically assaulted him in
the vehicle and struggled with the officer over the officer's weapon. At least one shot was fired inside the car before the struggle spilled onto the street, where Brown was shot multiple times, according to police.

Dorian Johnson has told media a different story. He said he and Brown were walking in the street when an officer ordered them onto the sidewalk, then grabbed his friend's neck and tried to pull him into the car before brandishing his weapon and firing. He said Brown started to run and the officer pursued him, firing multiple times.

Tensions in Ferguson boiled over after a candlelight vigil Sunday night, as looters smashed and burned businesses in the neighborhood, where police have repeatedly fired tear gas and smoke bombs.

By Thursday, there was a dramatic shift in the atmosphere after Gov. Jay Nixon assigned protest oversight to Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, who is black and grew up near Ferguson. He marched alongside protesters, along with other high-ranking brass from the Highway Patrol and the St. Louis County Police Department.

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An incident in a store in Ferguson, Missouri August 9, 2014 is seen in these still images taken from …

"We're here to serve and protect," Johnson said. "We're not here to instill fear."

The streets were filled with music, free food and even laughter. When darkness fell — the point at which previous protests have grown tense — no uniformed officers were in sight outside the burned-out QuikTrip
convenience store that had become a flashpoint for standoffs between police and protesters.

"All they did was look at us and shoot tear gas," Pedro Smith, who has participated in the nightly protests, said Thursday. "This is totally different. Now we're being treated with respect."

The more tolerant response came as President Barack Obama spoke publicly for the first time about the shooting — and the subsequent violence that shocked the nation and threatened to tear apart Ferguson.

Obama said there was "no excuse" for violence either against the police or by officers against peaceful protesters.

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An incident in a store in Ferguson, Missouri August 9, 2014 is seen in these still images taken from …

Attorney General Eric Holder has said federal investigators have interviewed witnesses to the shooting.

Renewed rioting after killing of black Missouri teen - Yahoo News

Renewed rioting after killing of black Missouri teen - Yahoo News

 

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
Rioting broke out for a second night in Ferguson, Missouri, despite calls on Monday for calm from the mother of a black teenager who was shot to death by police during the weekend.

Police clad in riot gear released tear gas to disperse a crowd estimated in the hundreds gathered near a building that burned during Sunday night's rioting, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said.

Jackson said officers were focused on dispersing the crowd, which was much smaller than the night before, but were making arrests and reported being fired on at some locations.

"They are shooting at us now," Jackson said, adding that officers from 10 to 15 jurisdictions were assisting Ferguson.

Michael Brown, 18, was shot to death in the mostly black St Louis suburb of Ferguson on Saturday afternoon after what police said was a struggle with a gun in a police car. The FBI opened a probe into the racially charged case.

A witness in the case told local media Brown had raised his arms to police to show he was unarmed before being killed.

"He just graduated and was on his way to college," said Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, speaking through tears at a news conference. She said her first-born son's first day back at school would have been Monday.

"We can't even celebrate," she said.

Brown's family has hired Benjamin Crump, the attorney who represented the family of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was shot to death by a community watch volunteer in 2012.

The FBI opened a concurrent federal inquiry into the case intended to supplement the main investigation by St. Louis County police, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. It was not immediately clear from police why Brown was in the police car. At least one shot was fired during the struggle, and then the officer fired more shots before leaving the car, police said.

OFFICER NOT IDENTIFIED

The officer, who was not identified, is a six-year veteran and has been put on administrative leave, police said. The officer's race has not been disclosed.

Dorian Johnson told television station KMOV that he and Brown had been walking when an officer confronted them, drew a weapon and shot. Johnson said that Brown put his hands in the air and started to get down, but the officer kept shooting.

Jackson said there was plenty of physical evidence and witness testimony. "I really believe we can get to the truth of what happened here," he said.

Demonstrations to call for justice for Brown turned violent Sunday night, with crowds breaking the windows of cars and stores, setting a building on fire and looting shops. At least two dozen businesses were damaged, 32 people were arrested, and two police officers were injured.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the town's police station on Monday to demand murder charges against the officer responsible for the shooting. Police arrested up to 15 people on Monday during the mostly
peaceful demonstration in which protesters put their hands in the air as if surrendering and chanted, "Stop the killer cops."

"I think it is crazy. It's nonsense. What does it bring back? It's not going to bring the man back," said Adrian Brewer, 30, an African American from a city near Ferguson.

Brown's mother said her son had been planning to study heating and air conditioning repair at a technical college.

Michael Brown, Sr., the teen's father, told reporters his son was "silly" and "could make you laugh." "We need justice for our son," he said.

Three of the Ferguson Police Department's 53 members are black, Jackson said. About two-thirds of Ferguson's population of about 21,000 are black, according to U.S. Census figures.

Ferguson's median household income is $37,517, less than the Missouri average of $47,333.

Most of the communities around Ferguson have gone from white to mostly black in the last 40 years, said Terry Jones, political science professor at University of Missouri-St. Louis.

"There's a long history of racial injustice," said Jones. "Slowly and not so surely, the St. Louis metropolitan area has been trying to figure out a way forward. As the Michael Brown shooting indicates, there are often setbacks."

Reagan aide Jim Brady's death ruled homicide - Yahoo News

Reagan aide Jim Brady's death ruled homicide - Yahoo News



JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
This week's death of former White House press secretary James Brady, who survived a gunshot wound to the head in a 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, has been ruled a homicide, District of Columbia police said Friday.

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Federal prosecutors said only that they are reviewing the ruling. But a law professor and an attorney for John Hinckley Jr., who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the shooting, said bringing new charges against the 59-year-old in Brady's death seemed unlikely.

"I think it (the medical examiner's ruling) will mean nothing," long-time Hinckley attorney Barry Levine told The Associated Press. "No prosecutors will bring such a case. The notion that this could be a successful prosecution is far-fetched. There is no legal basis to pursue this."

Brady lived through hours of delicate surgery and further operations over the past 33 years, but never regained normal use of his limbs and was often in a wheelchair.

An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a gunshot wound and its health consequences, and the manner of death was ruled a homicide, according to a news release Friday from District police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump. Nancy Bull, district administrator for the Virginia medical examiner's office, which made the ruling, declined to disclose any more results of the autopsy and referred inquiries to District police.

Besides partial paralysis from brain damage, Brady suffered short-term memory impairment, slurred speech and constant pain. His family said he died Monday at age 73 at his Virginia home from a series of health issues.

 
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FILE - This Jan. 6, 1981 file photo shows James Brady, selected by president-elect Ronald Reagan to  …

William Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said the office "is reviewing the ruling on the death of Mr. Brady and has no further comment at this time." District police and the FBI are also reviewing the case.

Tung Yin, a professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, said Friday that it's rare that the act that could be considered the cause of a homicide occurred so long ago.

"It seems a little bit unprecedented," Yin said of the Virginia medical examiner's ruling. He said such cases more likely involve a person in a coma who dies some time later.

He said bringing such a case could cause problems for prosecutors, because Hinckley Jr. was found was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

"A jury has already concluded on the same incident that he (Hinckley Jr.) was not guilty. Nothing today changes that," Yin said, even if prosecutors say Hinckley is no longer insane. "That doesn't change what he was 33 years ago."

James Brady, Ronald Reagan's Former Press Secr … Play Video

Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981, just two months into the new president's term. Reagan nearly died from a chest wound. Three others, including Brady, were struck by bullets from Hinckley's handgun.

In 1982, Hinckley Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity of all charges in a 13-count indictment, including federal counts of attempted assassination of the president of the United States, assault on a federal officer and use of a firearm in the commission of a federal offense, as well as District of Columbia offenses of attempted murder, assault and weapons charges. The District of Columbia offenses included charges related to the shooting of Brady.

Levine said prosecutors would have the additional challenge of proving that Brady's death this week was the result of an act 33 years ago. "How do you prove causation beyond a reasonable doubt?" he asked.

Gail Hoffman, a spokeswoman for Brady's family, said the homicide ruling "is not a surprise to any of us." She said the family would respect whatever prosecutors think is appropriate in dealing with the ruling.

Levine said Hinckley wanted to express his deep sympathy for Brady's family. "He has the highest regard for (James) Brady," he said.

Officials at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, where Hinckley is a patient, have said that the mental illness that led him to shoot Reagan in an effort to impress actress Jodie Foster has been in remission for decades. Hinckley has been allowed to leave the hospital to visit his mother's home in Williamsburg, Virginia, and can now spend more than half of his time outside the hospital on such visits.

Levine doesn't expect the homicide ruling to affect Hinckley continuing to be allowed to continue the visits.

Brady undertook a personal crusade for gun control after suffering the bullet wound. The Brady law, named after him, requires a five-day wait and background check before a handgun can be sold. President Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1993.

American Forces Said to Bomb ISIS Targets in Iraq - NYTimes.com

American Forces Said to Bomb ISIS Targets in Iraq - NYTimes.com

 

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
American military forces bombed at least two targets in northern Iraq on Thursday night to rout Islamist insurgents who have trapped tens of thousands of religious minorities in Kurdish areas, Kurdish officials said.

Word of the bombings, reported on Kurdish television from the city of Erbil, came as President Obama was preparing to make a statement in Washington.

Kurdish officials said the bombings targeted fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria who had seized two towns, Gwer and Mahmour. Residents who had fled those areas by car were heard honking their horns in approval. But Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Twitter that the reports of the bombings were false.

Obama administration officials had said earlier in the day that Mr. Obama was considering airstrikes or airdrops of food and medicine to address a humanitarian crisis among as many as 40,000 members of religious minorities in Iraq, who have been dying of heat and thirst on a mountaintop where they took shelter after death threats from ISIS.<iframe width="480" height="373" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" id="nyt_video_player" title="New York Times Video - Embed Player" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000003044294&playerType=embed"></iframe>

Conservatives get their Obamacare wish — and now condemn their own sabotage - Salon.com

Conservatives get their Obamacare wish — and now condemn their own sabotage - Salon.com

 

JohnButts@JBMedia - Reports:
There was once a time – five months ago, to be precise – when the big fear surrounding the Affordable Care Act was that it would cause health insurance premiums to “skyrocket.” That, at least, was the terminology the Hill used in a headline for a story on its health policy blog, which quoted a handful of anonymous insurance executives in reporting that “ObamaCare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country, countering claims recently made by the administration.” The Hill’s report was eagerly shared and promoted by conservative and Republican opponents of the ACA, who waved it around as proof that the law was a disaster.

Despite all the fanfare, there was little reason to believe the Hill’s reporting. The ACA’s first open enrollment period was still going at that point, so there was no way to know how many Obamacare enrollees there were, their ages, their health status – all factors that go into calculating rate increases. Getting a better picture of what the rate adjustments for 2015 would like required waiting, and patience.

Well, now we’re starting to see the picture develop, and it looks very different from the 100-percent increases conservatives were secretly (or overtly) hoping for just a few months ago. PricewaterhouseCoopers put together a “preliminary look at 2015 individual market rate filings,” and they found that, for the 27 states for which data are available, the average premium increase will be 7.5 percent. It’s all preliminary, of course, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the Hill’s citation of a former insurance executive’s “gut” feeling. The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn writes that “the experts I consulted all saw the available information as relatively encouraging, particularly in comparison to what many were predicting just a few months ago.”

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So where are conservatives looking for proof that the Affordable Care Act is not living up to its moniker? Florida. The Miami Herald reported earlier this week that “Floridians who buy health insurance on the individual market for next year will face an average increase of 13.2 percent in their monthly premiums, according to rate proposals unveiled Monday by the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation.” That isn’t anywhere near the “skyrocketing” that Republicans assured us was coming, but 13.2 percent would qualify as a “double-digit rate increase,” and conservatives were quick to point that out. (Consumer health advocates in the state accused regulators of employing a flawed methodology, as the Herald notes.)

One loud critic of the Florida premium increase is the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, who said in a statement that “Obamacare is a bad law that just seems to be getting worse,” and “Florida families are going to be slammed with higher costs. Obamacare has failed to live up to its promises in nearly every way.” That’s an audacious statement for Scott to make, given that he and the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature did everything in their power to make it as difficult as possible for the Affordable Care Act to function in the state. They set out to sabotage the law, and now they’re trying to score political points off the fruits of their sabotage.

Florida was one of the many states that refused to expand Medicaid and refused to build their own health insurance exchange. But Rick Scott went a step further and turned the state into a laboratory of anti-Obamacare activism. He and the state Legislature passed a law last June that temporarily suspended the ability of state regulators to negotiate with insurance companies on premiums for individual insurance plans. At the time, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson accused Scott of doing pretty much exactly what he’s doing right now: “Nelson … contended in his veto request that legislators removed state rate regulation in order to blame the health care overhaul if rates go up.”

Scott’s opposition to Obamacare and his commitment to its failure were such that he actively worked against the interests of his constituents. He and the Legislature passed another law in 2013 that “made it more difficult for Floridians to obtain the cheapest insurance rates under the exchange and to get help from specially trained outreach counselors.” All this despite the fact that Florida, at the time of the ACA’s rollout, had the second highest uninsurance rate in the country.

Generally speaking, Obamacare is performing well in the states that embraced the law, and not as well in the states that rejected expanded Medicaid and declined to build their own insurance exchanges. It’s a simple bit of cause-and-effect logic: cooperation with Obamacare produced better outcomes, while opposition made the law less effective. But the Republicans and conservatives who fought desperately against the law’s success are now professing to be absolutely shocked and appalled that the Affordable Care Act isn’t able to fully make good on its promises. That’s about as disingenuous an argument as you can make.