Thursday, Dec 18th
Last update08:26:17 AM GMT
Domestic Glance
A former police detective testified Monday that he participated in a plot to fabricate witnesses, falsify reports and plant a gun to make it seem police were justified in shooting unarmed residents on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina.
Jeffrey Lehrmann, a government witness in the federal trial of five current or former officers, said he saw Sergeant Arthur 'Archie' Kaufman retrieve a gun from his home several weeks after the deadly shootings on the Danziger Bridge.
This story involves a woman named Julie Bass, whose front yard was dug up during sewer line construction. After the construction project was completed, instead of planting grass, she thought it would be far more practical to plant a vegetable garden.
None of this seems to matter to Kevin Rulkowski, the city planner for the city of Oak Park, Michigan. With a nasty arrogance that seems to be increasingly common among ignorant bureaucrats, he complains in a video news report that Julie Bass's garden is in violation of city code and Julie has to dig up her entire garden or face punitive enforcement actions by the city (which could include jail time).
Shockingly, paramilitary raids that mirror the tactics of US soldiers in combat are not uncommon in America. According to an investigation carried out by the Huffington Post's Radley Balko, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 30 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work. In fact, the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
While 76 per cent correctly said Great Britain, 19 per cent were unsure, and 5 per cent mentioned another country.
It was young people letting the side down with 67 per cent of those under 30 giving the right country.
This is against 80 per cent of those 60 and older, 77 per cent of those 45 to 59, and 77 per cent of those between 30 and 44.
This year, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would require women to prove their miscarriages “occurred naturally” and weren’t secret abortions. In a similar vein, the Guardian reports that states including Mississippi and Alabama are charging dozens of women with murder or other serious crimes who have miscarried or had stillbirths:
Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.
Members of the controversial Kansas church known for picketing military funerals have participated in training sessions with FBI recruits, officials say.
The Westboro Baptist Church was involved in four sessions this spring, National Public Radio reported Wednesday. The FBI then ended the relationship, which began in 2008.
The church in Topeka is led by Fred Phelps and most of the members are in his extended family. Phelps is anti-homosexual and argues that God is punishing the military for U.S. tolerance of gays.
An executive convicted of orchestrating a $3 billion fraud as chairman of one of America's largest private mortgage companies was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison. Federal prosecutors in northern Virginia had sought a life sentence for Lee Farkas, former chairman of Florida-based Taylor Bean & Whitaker.
They called the case against him one of the most significant arising from the nation's financial meltdown. A federal jury in Alexandria convicted Farkas in April of all 14 counts, including securities fraud and conspiracy.
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