reuters | The United States
and Israel have reached final agreement on a record new package of at
least $38 billion in U.S. military aid and the 10-year pact is expected
to be signed this week, sources close to the matter told Reuters on
Tuesday.
The deal will
represent the biggest pledge of U.S. military assistance made to any
country but also involves major concessions granted by Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to officials on both sides.
Those
include Israel’s agreement not to seek additional funds from Congress
beyond what will be guaranteed annually in the new package, and also to
phase out a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend part of
its U.S. aid on its own defense industry instead of on American-made
weapons, the officials said.
Israel’s chief negotiator, Jacob Nagel, acting head of Netanyahu’s national security council, arrived in Washington overnight in preparation for a signing ceremony with U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice, according to one source familiar with the matter.
Nearly 10 months of drawn-out aid negotiations have underscored continuing friction between U.S. President Barack Obama and Netanyahu over last year's U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran, Israel's arch-foe. The United States and Israel have also been at odds over the Palestinians.
But the right-wing Israeli leader decided it would be best to forge a new arrangement with Obama, who leaves office in January, rather than hoping for better terms from the next U.S. administration, according to officials on both sides.
theintercept | Could someone explain why it’s noble, enlightened, justifiable, and
progressive to boycott an American state, but hateful, bigoted,
retrograde, and evil to support a boycott of a foreign country that has
been imposing a brutal, discriminatory, and illegal occupation for many
decades, a boycott that is led by people with virtually no political
rights? How did that happen? Hillary Clinton is far from the only person
espousing this bizarre distinction — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as but
one example, is punishing companies that support a boycott of Israel while forcing state employees to honor the boycott of North Carolina — but what could possibly justify U.S. politicians drawing the moral and ethical lines about boycotts in this manner?
newyorker | At least since the
Moynihan Report, in 1965, Americans have tended to answer the question
“Why are people poor?” by choosing one of two responses: they can either
point to economic forces (globalization, immigration) or blame cultural
factors (decaying families, lack of “grit”). These seem like two
social-science theories about poverty—two hypotheses, which might be
tested empirically—but, in practice, they are more like political fairy
tales. As Kelefa Sanneh wrote earlier this year, the choice between
these two explanations has long been racialized.
Working-class whites are said to be poor because of outsourcing;
inner-city blacks are imagined to be holding themselves back with
hip-hop. The implicit theory is that culture comes from within, and so
can be controlled by individuals and communities, whereas economic
structures exert pressures from without, and so are beyond the control
of those they affect.
This theory
is useful to politicians, because political ideologies function by
identifying some people as powerless and others as powerful. The truth,
though, is that the “culture vs. economics” dyad is largely a fantasy.
We are neither prisoners of our economic circumstances nor lords of our
cultures, able to reshape them at will. It would be more accurate to say
that cultural and economic forces act, with entwined and equal power,
on and through all of us—and that we all have an ability, limited but
real, to harness or resist them. When we pursue education, we improve
ourselves both “economically” and “culturally” (and in other ways);
conversely, there’s nothing distinctly and intrinsically “economic” or
“cultural” about the problems that afflict poor communities, such as
widespread drug addiction or divorce. (If you lose your job, get
divorced, and become an addict, is your addiction “economic” or
“cultural” in nature?) When we debate whether such problems have a
fundamentally “economic” or “cultural” cause, we aren’t saying anything
meaningful about the problems. We’re just arguing—incoherently—about
whether or not people who suffer from them deserve to be blamed for
them. (We know, meanwhile, that the solutions—many, partial, and
overlapping—aren’t going to be exclusively “economic” or “cultural” in
nature, either.)
It’s odd, when
you think about it, that a question a son might ask about his
mother—“Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?”—is at the center of
our collective political life. And yet, as American inequality has
grown, that question has come to be increasingly important. When Rod
Dreher asked Vance to explain the appeal of Trump to poor whites, Vance
cited the fact that Trump “criticizes the factories shipping jobs
overseas” while energetically defending white, working-class culture
against “the condescenders” who hold it in contempt. Another way of
putting this is that, for the past eight years, the mere existence of
Barack Obama—a thriving African-American family man and a successful
product of the urban meritocracy—has implied that the problems of poor
white Americans are “cultural”; Trump has shifted their afflictions into
the “economic” column. For his supporters, that is enough.
Vance
is frustrated not just by this latest turn of the wheel but by the fact
that the wheel keeps turning. It’s true that, by criticizing “hillbilly
culture,” “Hillbilly Elegy” reverses the racial polarity in our debate
about poverty; it’s also true that, by arguing that the problems of the
white working class are partly “cultural,” the book strikes a blow
against Trumpism. And yet it would be wrong to see Vance’s book as yet
another entry in our endless argument about whether this or that group’s
poverty is caused by “economic” or “cultural” factors. “Hillbilly
Elegy” sees the “economics vs. culture” divide as a dead metaphor—a form
of manipulation rather than explanation more likely to conceal the
truth than to reveal it. The book is an understated howl of protest
against the racialized blame game that has, for decades, powered
American politics and confounded our attempts to talk about poverty.
Often,
after a way of talking has obviously outlived its usefulness, a period
of inarticulateness ensues; it’s not yet clear how we should talk going
forward. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t provide us with a new way of talking
about poverty in post-globalization America. It does, however, suggest
that it’s our collective job to figure one out. As individuals, we must
stop thinking about American poverty in an imaginary way; we
must abandon the terms of the argument we’ve been having—terms designed
to harness our feelings of blame and resentment for political ends, and
to make us feel either falsely blameless
or absurdly self-determining. “I don’t know what the answer is,
precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or
faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things
better,” Vance writes. “We hillbillies need to wake the hell up.” As do
the rest of us.
So what are some of the wider implications of this morbid retreat
into the data of violent death? At the outset, it is a reminder that a
comparatively modest number of countries (and cities) are dramatically
more at risk of terrorist and homicidal violence than others. Clearly,
greater investment in diplomacy, crisis management and conflict prevention
is urgently needed, alongside improved intelligence sharing within and
between cities. This would certainly be more cost-effective – both
economically and in terms of live saved – than hardening potential
targets from asymmetric attacks in Western cities.
Perhaps even more important, the data shows that homicidal violence
is a much larger problem than terrorism. What is more, it is just a
handful of cities – most of them in Latin America, the Caribbean and parts of Africa
– that account for the lion’s share of murders globally. If lethal
violence is to be reduced in these areas, the issue must be prioritized
by national and municipal authorities, with a focus on driving down
inequality, concentrated poverty, youth unemployment and of course
corruption and political and criminal impunity. Doubling down on the
world’s most violent cities could do much to drive down the global
burden of violent death.
In the end, it is important to recall that the threats of urban fragility
are broader than a narrow focus on the prevalence of lethal violence.
If cities are to become more resilient – to cope, adapt and rebound in
the face of shocks and stresses – they will need to contend with a wide
range of threats, not just terrorism and homicide. This is as much about
promoting good governance as reducing structural social and economic
risks in cities that give rise to extremism and murder. At the very
least, it implies rethinking the role of cities as not just a site of
violence but a primary driver of security in our time.
thetimes | It’s the most exclusive party in the world — the Oscars of the
fashion industry and the red carpet with the highest stakes — but what
actually happens beyond the velvet rope at Anna Wintour’s Met Gala has
remained a mystery to the likes of you and me.
Until now. A new documentary, The First Monday in May, follows the Vogue editor
along with the fashion curator Andrew Bolton as they plan the
Metropolitan Museum’s 2015 costume exhibition and the party to end all
parties that will launch it to the rest of the world.
“There’s something surreal about the spectacle of all those people in
such a heightened atmosphere,” says Rossi. “One of the theses of the
film is that celebrity and haute couture combine to transcend their
individual parts and become something even more powerful together.”
Therein lies the event’s allure for the rest of us plebs: its mystique
and its sheer stardust quota. Does it live up to the hype?
The first rule of the Met Gala has always been that you don’t talk
about the Met Gala — or rather, you do, but only in suitably glowing
terms. The few celebrities who have offered any other opinion of the
annual bash haven’t been invited back.
Gwyneth Paltrow once
described it as “hot, crowded and un-fun”; the comedian Tina Fey called
it a “jerk parade” full of “all the people you would punch in the whole
world”. For the rebel comic Amy Schumer, it was “people doing an
impression of having a conversation, dressed like a bunch of f***ing
assholes”.
NewYorker | Police unions emerged later than many
other public-service unions, but they’ve made up for lost time. Thanks
to the bargains they’ve struck on wages and benefits, police officers
are among the best-paid civil servants. More important, they’ve been
extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working
conditions. All unions seek to insure that their members have
due-process rights and aren’t subject to arbitrary discipline, but
police unions have defined working conditions in the broadest possible
terms. This position has made it hard to investigate misconduct claims,
and to get rid of officers who break the rules. A study of collective
bargaining by big-city police unions, published this summer by the
reform group Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee
that officers aren’t interrogated immediately after use-of-force
incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after
three to five years.
Furthermore,
thanks to union contracts, even officers who are fired can frequently
get their jobs back. Perhaps the most egregious example was Hector
Jimenez, an Oakland police officer who was dismissed in 2009, after
killing two unarmed men, but who then successfully appealed and, two
years later, was reinstated, with full back pay. The protection that
unions have secured has helped create what Samuel Walker, an emeritus
professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha,
and an expert on police accountability, calls a “culture of impunity.”
Citing a recent Justice Department investigation of Baltimore’s police
department, which found a systemic pattern of “serious violations of the
U.S. Constitution and federal law,” he told me, “Knowing that it’s hard
to be punished for misconduct fosters an attitude where you think you
don’t have to answer for your behavior.”
For
the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block
policing reforms of all kinds. In the seventies, they opposed officers’
having to wear name tags. More recently, they’ve opposed the use of body
cameras and have protested proposals to document racial profiling and
to track excessive-force complaints. They have lobbied to keep
disciplinary histories sealed. If a doctor commits malpractice, it’s a
matter of public record, but, in much of the country, a police officer’s
use of excessive force is not. Across the nation, unions have led the
battle to limit the power of civilian-review boards, generally by
arguing that civilians are in no position to judge the split-second
decisions that police officers make. Earlier this year, Newark created a
civilian-review board that was acclaimed as a model of oversight. The
city’s police union immediately announced that it would sue to shut it
down.
Cities don’t have to concede
so much power to police unions. So why do they? Big-city unions have
large membership bases and are generous when it comes to campaign
contributions. Neither liberals nor conservatives have been keen to
challenge the unions’ power. Liberals are generally supportive of
public-sector unions; some of the worst police departments in the
country are in cities, like Baltimore and Oakland, run by liberal
mayors. And though conservatives regularly castigate public-sector
unions as parasites, they typically exempt the police. Perhaps most
crucial, Walker says, “police unions can make life very difficult for
mayors, attacking them as soft on crime and warning that, unless they
get their way, it will go up. The fear of crime—which is often a code
word for race—still has a powerful political impact.” As a result, while
most unions in the U.S. have grown weaker since the seventies, police
unions have grown stronger.
NYTimes | When
people begin to see the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and
broken, they feel unprotected from crime. That sense of threat makes
them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like the best
option for restoring order and protecting their personal safety.
Gema
Santamaria, a professor at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of
Technology in Mexico City who studies lynchings and other forms of
vigilante killings, and José Miguel Cruz, the research director at
Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center,
used survey data from across Latin America to test what leads people to
support extrajudicial violence.
The
data told a very similar story across all of the countries in their
sample. People who didn’t have faith in their country’s institutions
were more likely to say vigilante violence was justified. By contrast,
in states with stronger institutions, people were more likely to reject
extrajudicial violence.
People
turn to vigilante violence as a replacement for the formal justice
system, Ms. Santamaria said. That can take multiple forms — lynch mobs
in Mexico, for instance, or paramilitary “self-defense” forces in
Colombia — but the core impulse is the same.
“When
you have a system that doesn’t deliver, you are creating, over a period
of time, a certain culture of punishment,” she said. “Regardless of
what the police are going to do, you want justice, and it will be rough
justice.”
Surprisingly,
that includes increased support for the use of harsh extralegal tactics
by the police themselves. “This seems counterintuitive,” Ms. Santamaria
said. “If you don’t trust the police to prosecute criminals, why would
you trust them with bending the law?”
But
to people desperate for security, she said, the unmediated punishment
of police violence seems far more effective than waiting for a corrupt
system to take action.
And
so, over time, frustration with state institutions, coupled with fear
of crime and insecurity, leads to demand for authoritarian violence —
even if that means empowering the same corrupt, flawed institutions that
failed to provide security in the first place.
NYTimes | Once the paramilitary Colombians — several dozen, all told — have completed their American prison terms, they will have served on average seven and a half years, The Times found. The leaders extradited en masse will have served an average of 10 years, at most, for drug conspiracies that involved tons of cocaine.
By comparison, federal inmates convicted of crack cocaine trafficking — mostly street-level dealers who sold less than an ounce — serve on average just over 12 years in prison.
What’s more, for some, there is a special dividend at the end of their incarceration. Though wanted by the Colombian authorities, two have won permission to stay in the United States, and their families have joined them. Three more are seeking the same haven, and still others are expected to follow suit.
“In the days of Pablo Escobar, they used to say they preferred a tomb in Colombia to a prison in the United States,” said Alirio Uribe Muñoz, a member of the Colombian Congress. “But maybe now extradition is a good deal.”
For 52 years, with abundant American support, the Colombian government has been locked in a ferocious armed conflict with leftist insurgents. Though it initially empowered paramilitary forces as military proxies, the government withdrew official sanction decades later, long after landowners and cartels had co-opted them. Before their demobilization in the mid-2000s, the militiamen came to rival the guerrillas as drug traffickers and outdo them as human rights abusers.
Now, eight years after the paramilitaries were extradited, Colombia has reached a peace deal with their mortal enemies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC). Facing an Oct. 2 vote on the accord, the country is in the midst of a polarizing debate about crime and punishment for the FARC, informed by what went wrong during the paramilitary peace process. Nobody is advocating that justice be abdicated to the United States this time.
But the paramilitary chapter of the country’s history is not closed, and remains “totally full of blanks,” said María Teresa Ronderos, the author of “Recycled Wars,” a Spanish-language history of Colombian paramilitarism. “Nobody knows what happened to those guys.”
For years, the Justice Department shrouded the militiamen’s cases in secrecy, not only sealing sensitive documents but also hiding basic information and sometimes even erasing defendants like Mr. Giraldo from the public docket.
NYTimes | In 2015, Baltimore’s murder rate not only increased the most among the 100 top cities, it also reached a historic high of 55 homicides per 100,000 residents. Its previous record high was in 1993, when the rate was 48.
Some experts attribute thesudden spikein violence largely to a flood of black-market opiates looted from pharmacies during riots in April 2015. The death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury in police custody, hadset off the city’s worst riotssince the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
During the riots, nearly 315,000 doses of drugs were stolen from 27 pharmacies and two methadone clinics, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, a number much higher than the 175,000 doses the agency initially estimated.
Most of the homicides in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade, and what happened in 2015 was a result of more people “getting into the game of selling drugs,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore.
Police commanders have said that an oversupply of inventory from looting resulted in a violent battle for customers among drug gangs.
“This would have caused a disruption in drug markets, with more people trying to maintain or increase their market share,” Dr. Ross said. “You have new entrants coming into the field, altering the supply and demand of illegal drugs in those neighborhoods,” often leading to increased violence.
If the drug theory holds true, the killings in Baltimore should subside this year. A midyear violent crime survey by theMajor Cities Chiefs Police Associationshowed that while killings were up among 60 large cities, they were slightly down in Baltimore.
“I’m not going to say they’re going to return to historic lows, but we hit a peak last year and things are settling themselves out,” Dr. Ross said.
nwaonline | No industry is immune to thievery. But the owners of Colorado's 978
marijuana shop licenses and 1,393 marijuana grow licenses are
particularly vulnerable. Because the federal government considers
marijuana illegal, many banks won't work with cannabis businesses,
forcing them to deal in mountains of cash.
Perhaps more significant, their product is also lucrative for
criminals: A pound of marijuana worth $2,000 in Colorado can be sold for
$4,000 or $6,000 across state lines. Stores and grow houses are often
soft targets in darkened parts of town. And unlike cash, marijuana is
untraceable, easily sold on Craigslist or driven to dealers in Chicago
and New York.
"The black market is still booming," said Cmdr. James Henning of the
Denver Police Department. Contrary to the popular narrative, marijuana
is a burglar's typical prize. "They don't get cash," the commander said.
"That's usually in the big old safe, and they can't get into that.
Usually, it's plants and finished product."
The department said it believes that the city's marijuana businesses
have been targeted by organized groups, though it has no evidence that
the groups are linked to foreign cartels.
Surveillance videos of some burglaries show thieves sawing through
the roofs of businesses, tracking law enforcement with police scanners,
and tying up employees. In one case, in southern Colorado, a pair of
guards spotted four men in tactical gear carrying AR-15 rifles through a
field. The watchmen, former Marine snipers wearing night-vision
goggles, scared them away with warning shots.
Denver, one of the few jurisdictions compiling data on crimes at
marijuana businesses, has 421 pot-growing houses and shops. It recorded
192 burglaries and thefts at such businesses in 2015. In Aurora, a
suburb with 19 operating pot shops, 18 burglaries and robberies have
occurred since 2014.
But some business owners do not report break-ins, because they worry
that they will be seen as targets or attract inspectors who will find a
violation.
Criminals have netted anything from a few marijuana-laced sodas to a
quarter-million dollars in plants. In June, much worse occurred: Two
armed men entered a pot shop in Aurora, called Green Heart, and killed a
guard, Travis Mason. The police called it a botched robbery.
Mason, 24, a former Marine and father of three, was believed to be
the first cannabis employee to die on the job in Colorado, and the
episode alarmed the industry. Some security businesses reported a rush
of requests for armed guards.
"Thieves in this industry are getting much more brazen, much more
aggressive," said Ryan Tracy, 38, general manager at the Herbal Cure,
which now has a guard on duty every night.
chicagomag | JAMES MONTGOMERY VIVIDLY RECALLS THE first time he met Jeff Fort. The
year was 1971. Richard Nixon was in the White House and the U.S.
attorney for northern Illinois was a young, ambitious Republican named
James R. Thompson. The War on Poverty was over; the war on the Left was
in full swing. Just two years earlier, Senator Charles Percy had praised
Jeff Fort as a bright young man who should enter politics and had
invited him to Nixon’s inauguration. (Fort sent two lieutenants in his
place.) But by 1971, the party was over.
Montgomery would later serve as Mayor Harold Washington’s corporation
counsel, but in 1971 he was a young lawyer in what he calls his “black
rage” days, defending Black Panthers and civil rights leaders. One day,
Montgomery recalls, he held an impromptu press conference on the
courthouse steps, lashing out at the white Establishment. Afterwards, he
was approached by two young black men.
“Jim, you hate those motherfuckers as much as we do,"]eff Fort said. “Why don’t you represent us?”
Fort needed a good lawyer. The TWO job training program had turned
into a scandal, and in March, Jim Thompson had indicted Fort and 23
Stones on conspiring to defraud the U.S. Government. Montgomery was
intrigued by the government’s case. It read like a blueprint for a
right-wing counterattack on the liberalism of the 1960s: Destroy one of
the last vestiges of the War on Poverty and put away a young man who
posed a threat to Mayor Daley’s tight rein on black Chicago—all in one
neat, orderly showcase of a trial.
THE TWO PROGRAM WAS IN TROUBLE FROM the start. Mayor Daley,
reportedly furious that the Feds had bypassed City Hall and funded TWO
directly, refused to approve the organization’s choice of a director.
“Daley knew how gangs operated. He had been in one himself,” says
Kenneth Addison, an associate professor of education at Northeastern
Illinois University and an expert on Chicago gangs. “Fort had
circumvented the Machine. Daley knew the threat Fort and his followers
represented, so he stayed on their asses.”
Daley’s strategy was to harass the gangs at every turn and jail their
leaders. The Gang Intelligence Unit staged repeated raids on TWO’s
training centers. Fort was arrested for murder and kept in jail for five
months, until March 1968, when the charges against him were dropped.
More important, in December 1967, the Chicago Tribune,
acting on a police tip, charged TWO with mismanagement and the
Blackstone Rangers with extortion. The stories scared off corporations
that had pledged to hire the program’s trainees, its supporters say.
In the summer of 1968, Senator John McClellan (D-Arkansas) held
dramatic hearings on the TWO program. When Fort was called as a witness,
his attorney, Marshall Patner, advised him not to testify. Fort rose,
clenched his fist, and stalked out of the room. He was cited for
contempt of Congress, and later convicted.
Criminal charges seemed imminent. But in fact it took nearly four
years and a Republican administration to indict anybody. And then the
grand jury brought charges only against Blackstone Rangers. Some of the
East Side Disciples became key witnesses for the prosecution.
NO ONE REALLY DISPUTED THE ALLEGATION that the Rangers had been
pocketing government money. That was the point of the program,
Montgomery argued. Gang bangers were being paid to stay off the streets
and to stop killing one another, he said at the trial. How can you
charge the gangs with extortion when the program intended all along to
transfer money from the Feds to the gang? Assistant U.S. attorney Samuel
K. Skinner, a protégé of Jim Thompson, argued otherwise. He produced
evidence that gang members had falsified attendance sheets and turned
over stipend l checks to their leaders. Little if any learning had taken
place in TWO’s training centers, Skinner said. In fact, many gang
members were placed in decent jobs, and many more would have i been
helped if the city had not been so hellbent on discrediting TWO, says
Anthony Gibbs who served as TWO’s acting director of the training
program. (He is now an aide to Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer.)
“We knew what we were dealing with,” Gibbs says. “This was no
Sunday-school class. The way to destroy the gang was to wean the members
away from the gang. That was my philosophy. And the way to do that was
to provide them with another alternative. Not say, ‘Be a nice little boy
and go back to high school and get your GED.’ No, we’re gonna get you a
J-O-B, ’cause this little training stipend I’m giving you, $45 a week,
ain’t shit. I’m going to get you a job that makes you $150 a week and
will buy you a new pair of shoes, sweater, everything. You’l1 get used
to that, and you won’t have time for no gang.”
Others say the flood of grant money overwhelmed the gang.
“The money was coming so fast and so rapidly, the Rangers couldn’t
sort out the good offers from the bad,” says Dan Swope, the former Boys
Club director. “Ultimately, by not having that kind of guidance, they
began to make their own choices, and they obviously made bad ones.
“People were fighting over them for grants. Jeff Fort and his group
became ‘tough guys’ for hire. People made all kinds of offers, and they
learned how to get everything they wanted. That’s what corrupted them,
so much money being available. Everyone wanted to save the poor.
Everyone had the perfect answer.”
"Every
cop saw that video," O'Connor said. "One big difference is that now, on
the street, there is no fear. Even in the '90s, with all the killing,
the gangs feared the police. When we'd show up, they'd run. But now? Now
they don't run. Now, there is no fear."
Until
recently, the ability of cops, to freely delete an occasional low-life
extreme street scum, has been necessary to preserve polite society.
Now, (BodyCams, Dashcams, BLM, big settlement$$$) nobody is safe....
chicagotribune | Manpower shortages combined with too much overtime lead to
exhaustion. And loss of morale from the mayor's botched handling of the
Laquan McDonald fiasco have wreaked havoc with command, with street
stops down markedly. Yet taxpayers don't have a true picture of how thin
that thin blue line has become.
All these problems have deep
roots. Daley was at war with his Police Department and demanded a
thorough house cleaning. There was a purge of district commanders and
other leaders under former police Superintendent Jody Weis, and that
created havoc throughout the command structure.
Earlier, the large
gang crimes units — south, west and north — which provided valuable
human intelligence and interaction with the gangs, were disbanded and
remade.
A common theme recently is that people in the most violent
neighborhoods don't cooperate with police, but the fact is they won't
talk to cops they don't know. And they won't talk with others listening.
The gang members, and their families, knew officers in the old gang crimes units.
"They'd
catch a two-time loser with a gun, put the cuffs on, and he'd know what
to do," said Bob Angone, who spent 30 years as a street cop, as a
tactical lieutenant and commander of the hostage barricade team.
"That
loser will say, I know who shot victim so-and-so. They'll give you
information, but they'll only tell the police they trust, the
specialists, because they know they'll get their break in court, that
the specialists would keep your word. That's how it's done. And the city
lost a lot when we lost the gang crimes units."
There is another
thing to consider about the differences between August 1991 and now. It
isn't quantifiable; it won't fit on a mayoral white paper, there are no
numbers to it.
But it was reported,
with a video, by Tribune journalists Megan Crepeau and Erin Hooley a
few days ago under the headline: "Heckling and gunfire as police
investigate shooting: 'We're just playing.'"
Police were
investigating reports of a shooting in bloody Englewood when about 10
young men confronted them, harassed them, mocked them on the street,
hurling epithets, angry, defiant.
abcnews | Two men are still on the loose in Chicago today after robbing and shooting a senior citizen in broad daylight as the man was watering his front lawn.
A recording of the incident caught by a neighbor's security camera shows
two men riding bicycles past 71-year-old Federico LaGuardia as he
watered the lawn of his Marquette Park neighborhood home police said.
Shortly after the men pass, one of them turns around, wrestles LaGuardia
to the ground and shoots him once in the abdomen after he fell to the
ground. The man then rifles through LaGuardia’s pockets and takes his
wallet before fleeing on his bike.
Despite his injuries, LaGuardia was able to stagger to his neighbor’s
door and call for help. He was taken to Holy Cross Hospital and then
transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital where he underwent surgery. Police
said he is in fair condition but remains in intensive care.
"I heard the gunshot and I ran out here and he was, like, dazed in the street," said neighbor Lois Walker.
This is the latest attack in Chicago's deadliest summer in two decades,
and community activists and members of the public are outraged.
"It's just absolutely ridiculous, you're not even safe in your own yard," said neighbor Teryeyah Griggs.
theintercept |A Google-incubated program that has been targeting potential
ISIS members with deradicalizing content will soon be used to target
violent right-wing extremists in North America, a designer of the
program said at an event at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday.
Using research and targeted advertising, the initiative by London-based startup Moonshot CVE
and Google’s Jigsaw technology incubator targets potentially violent
jihadis and directs them to a YouTube channel with videos that refute
ISIS propaganda.
In the pilot program countering ISIS, the so-called Redirect Method
collected the metadata of 320,000 individuals over the course of eight
weeks, using 1,700 keywords, and served them advertisements that led
them to the videos. Collectively, the targets watched more than half a
million minutes of videos.
The event at Brookings was primarily about the existing program aimed
to undermine ISIS recruiting. “I think this is an extremely promising
method,” said Richard Stengel, U.S. undersecretary of state for public
diplomacy and public affairs.
Ross Frenett, co-founder of Moonshot, said his company and Jigsaw are
now working with funding from private groups, including the Gen Next
Foundation, to target other violent extremists, including on the hard
right.
“We are very conscious as our own organization and I know Jigsaw are
that this [violent extremism] is not solely the problem of one
particular group,” Frenett said.
“Our efforts during phase two, when we’re going to focus on the
violent far right in America, will be very much focused on the small
element of those that are violent. The interesting thing about how they
behave is they’re a little bit more brazen online these days than ISIS
fan boys,” Frenett said.
He noted that this new target demographic is more visible online.
npr | As we just discussed, Zika is a serious concern for expectant mothers
living in places where they might be exposed. But there's another
threat that's making some people think hard about starting a family, and
that's the changing climate. NPR's Jennifer Ludden has this story.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: In Keene, N.H, a dozen people have
scooched folding chairs into a circle in the spare office of an
environmental group. The meeting's organized by a nonprofit called
Conceivable Future, one of more than a dozen such meetings across the
country. The topic? It's not melting ice sheets or solar power. It's
something deeply personal. This group has gathered to ask - with a
climate crisis looming, is it a good idea to have children?
MEGHAN KALLMAN: I've probably been thinking about it as long as I've been thinking seriously about having a family.
LUDDEN: Meghan Kallman is 32. A year and a half ago, she
co-founded this group with Josephine Ferorelli, 33. Both are in
committed relationships. Both worry that any children they have would
live long enough to see devastating climate impacts from flooding
coastal cities to more intense super storms to shortages of fresh water.
JOSEPHINE FERORELLI: If you're in your 20s or 30s, thinking about
maybe having a kid, digging into the science and understanding what
we're looking at - like, it's not an intellectual problem at that point.
It's really a life problem, like a heart problem.
LUDDEN: Though not a problem likely to come up in casual
conversation or one that many with pressing daily struggles may feel
able to focus on. But for those here steeped in scary science,
passionate about the environment, it's a relief to know they're not
alone.
MEGHAN HOSKINS: It's kind of, you know, emotionally difficult to deal with.
post-gazette | While countries across Europe and East Asia grapple with declining
birthrates and aging populations, societies across the Middle East,
Africa, and South Asia face youth booms of staggering proportions: More
than half of Egypt’s labor force is younger than age 30. Half of
Nigeria’s population of 167 million is between the ages of 15 and 34. In
Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, East Timor, Niger, Somalia and Uganda, more
than two-thirds of the population is under the age of 25.
How well these young people transition to adulthood — and how well
their governments integrate them economically, politically and socially —
will influence whether their countries thrive or implode. Surging
populations of young people will drive political and social norms,
influence modes of governance and the role of women in society, and
embrace or discredit extremist ideologies. They are the fulcrum on which
the future rests.
These young people could transform entire regions, making them more
prosperous, more just and more secure. Or they could unleash a flood of
instability and violence. Or both. And if their countries are unable to
accommodate their needs and aspirations, they could generate waves of
migration for decades.
In the face of this deluge of young people, world leaders should be
steering us all toward the former and away from the latter. But as
serial acts of global terrorism, large-scale humanitarian disasters,
perplexing political trends in Europe such as Brexit and persistent
economic fragility demand urgent attention, the question emerges:
Is anyone even paying attention?
Consider India. More than 300 million Indians are under the age of
15, making India home to more children than any country, at any time, in
all of human history. If these children formed a country, it would be
the fourth-largest in the world.
Every month until 2030, one million Indians will turn 18 years old,
observes Somini Sengupta, the author of a compelling new book, “The End
of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young.” These young people will
need education and jobs in a global economy that will feature more
automation and fewer of the semi-skilled manufacturing jobs that
absorbed earlier youth surges in Asia. India’s demographic bonanza
nevertheless holds the potential to create unprecedented economic growth
— or it could rock the world’s largest democracy and second-largest
population with sustained instability.
Africa’s population of 200 million young people is set to double by
2045. In the Middle East, a region of some 400 million people, nearly 65
percent of the population is younger than 30 — the highest proportion
of youth to adults in the region’s history.
In Pakistan, two-thirds of the population is under 30. Many of these
young people will grow up in a Pakistan that appears to be growing more
democratic but that also is rife with corruption, extremist violence and
dire shortages of energy and water.
In Iran, two-thirds of the population is under 35. These young people
are educated, tech savvy and full of potential. Whereas the Islamic
revolution will be something they learned about in school, many will
remember Iranians pouring into the streets during the Green Movement or
to celebrate the nuclear deal with the United States. And they will
watch to see whether engagement with the West benefits them or not.
Will young Iranians and Pakistanis uplift or splinter the politics,
economies, cultures and security of their countries? Will they engage
the world productively and peacefully, turn inward or pick fights with
neighbors? Given the size, strategic position and military capabilities
of these two geopolitical heavweights, the answers will determine
whether they export vitality or violence.
Unfortunately, the countries with most of the world’s young people
are the ones most ill-equipped to grapple with their needs, ambitions,
expectations and inevitable frustrations — let alone capitalize on their
potential. Developing countries are home to 89 percent of the world’s
10- to 24-year-olds; by 2020, they will be home to nine out of every 10
people globally.
Given these conditions, it is easy to conjure a dystopic future, a
Hollywood caricature of lawless developing countries dominated by gangs
of young men brandishing firearms.
But what if the world invests in these young people? These countries
are capable of pulling themselves out of poverty and instability within a
generation — the way China did, the way India might. But if the
international community fails to act now, we will all suffer the
consequences.
socialethology | There is a hypothesis
according to which the lack of accessible women for sexual relationships
and marriage in Moslem polygamous societies would be one of the causes
of the spread of suicidal terrorism’s phenomenon in our times.
A lot of young men who have an insufficiently high status to get women
chose the path of suicidal terrorism, because they have the conviction
that, after their death, according to the Quran, they would get into
Heaven, where they would enjoy the company of 72 virgins. Given the fact
that a lot of men are practically excluded from the reproductive
process, even a vague promise regarding the access to women, as that
from the Islamic precepts is, is pretty persuasive.
Our brains are designed to work after the same principles as they were
100.000 years ago, when there were only real things; today, when we have
to face abstract or artificial things, our brains keep perceiving them
as being real and touchable. This is why the abstract promise of the
life to come is perceived as being realistic and those 72 virgins are
seen as an authentic war trophy that is offered to the bravest martyrs
[ibid., p. 12].
It is curios the fact that the terrorist organization Al Qaeda has had
the greatest support in the most polygamous countries: Afganistan,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, but not in Turkey, where polygamy is forbidden
since 1920. It is considered that one way to diminish the support for
terrorism in those countries is to emancipate the women and to gradually
liquidate polygamy, in order to reduce the number of men who are
excluded from the reproductive process [4].
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, made once an eccentric comment, is
his unique way, as regarding the factors that motivate young men to
become terrorists. Referring to the fighters for the Islamic State
(ISIS), Johnson said that, if one were to study carefully the
psychological profile of jihadis (presented in a report from British
secret service MI5), one would notice that they are obsessed with
pornography.
Johnson said: “If you look at all the psychological profiling about
bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally wankers.
Severe onanists”. He continued: “They are just young men in desperate
need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who
feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong – like
winners.” [5].
In general, the role of sexual frustration in the genesis of terrorist
behavior is intensely analyzed in the writings of evolutionary
psychology and they will produce a change of perspective in assessing
the phenomenon of terrorism [Thayer, Hudson, 2010; Caluya, 2013].
thomsonreuters | According to our new study, released in conjunction with The Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at
West Point, connectivity between terrorist and criminal activity is
highest in developed, resource-rich countries, and those with policies
actively supporting criminal elements, countering previous assumptions.
The study, Risky Business: The Global Threat Network and the Politics of Contraband, uses information from our Thomson Reuters World-Check database
to examine the relationships of those who produce and profit from
illicit activities that include terrorism, the illegal narcotics trade,
organized crime, human smuggling and political corruption. The network
analysis includes 2,700 individuals linked by 15,000 relationships
spanning 122 countries.
Key findings include:
Connectivity among actors within the illicit marketplace is relatively high. This
should not be construed to say that the network is a cohesive
organizational entity. Rather, the phenomenon is a self-organizing
complex system built through social connections from the bottom up.
By most measures of connectivity, terrorists are more
interconnected than almost all other types of criminals, second only to
narcotics smugglers. The transnational nature of terrorist actors allows them to link disparate criminal groups.
An analysis of social connections shows that 35 percent of the
links that criminals and suspicious individuals maintain cross into
terrorism.
Connectivity between terrorists and criminals is highest in resource-rich countries. This
challenges conventional wisdom that assumes this is a product of failed
or economically poor states. However, the study found there is
connectivity among poor countries that use criminality as an economic or
national security tool.
Identifying financial irregularities is critical to tracking dirty money, questionable transactions and illicit actors. Many
government agencies are not training analysts in the intelligence or
defense communities to think about the convergence of commerce,
economics and threats. This skill gap represents a challenge confronting
law enforcement and national security authorities.
guardian | About a dozen armed protesters have shown up to the house of convicted sex offender Brock Turner with signs calling for the castration and killing of rapists, and some say they plan to frequently return to make him “uncomfortable in his own home”.
Turner, who wasreleased from California jailon Friday after serving three months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman at Stanford University, has returned to his family’s home in Bellbrook, Ohio, where some activists with assault rifles have gathered to criticize thelight punishment.
“With an extremely lenient sentence, he can think ‘I can get away with this,’” Daniel Hardin, who carried an M4 assault rifle, said in an interview. “The message we want to send is … ‘If you try this again, we will shoot you.’”
Turner, a 21-year-old former swimmer at the elite northern California university, was caughtassaultinga woman by a dumpster outside a fraternity party in January 2015. After a jury convicted him of multiple felonies, Judge Aaron Persky decided in June not to send him to prison, instead sentencing him to six months in a county jail.
When Turner was released early on Friday for good behavior, a standard practice inCalifornia, he rushed past a mob of news cameras without commenting.
Back in Ohio, the former athlete also faced crowds of reporters at the localsheriff’s officewhen he showed up on Tuesday toregister as a sex offender, a requirement of his sentence.
Jaimes Campbell, who brought an AR-15 rifle to the rally outside the family’s home and helped organize the action, said he wanted the protests to impede Turner’s life.
NYTimes | The body of an activist from St. Louis who led protests about the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 was found with a gunshot wound in the charred remains of a vehicle on Tuesday morning, according to the police and news accounts.
The activist, Darren Seals, 29, was found inside the vehicle on Diamond Drive in Riverview in St. Louis County around 1:50 a.m., the St. Louis County Police Department said in a statement. The vehicle had been on fire and he was found after the flames were extinguished.
The police said Mr. Seals had lived at an address on Millburn Drive in St. Louis, about 12 miles from where his body was found. The case is being investigated as a homicide by the department’s Bureau of Crimes Against Persons. The motive for the killing was unknown.
The police identified Mr. Seals as Daren Seals, although other records listed the spelling of his first name as Darren,The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
On hisTwitter account, Mr. Seals described himself as a businessman, revolutionary, activist and “Unapologetically BLACK, Afrikan in AmeriKKKa, Fighter, Leader.”
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4/3
43
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What day?
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64th day is March 5
My birthday
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