Earlier this month, we reported that Textron Systems’ AAI Corporation delivered its Next Generation Squad Weapon-Technology (NGSW-T) prototype demonstrator to the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Armaments Center and Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP). A new report from Defense Blog shows the Army will purchase approximately 100,000 units of the next-generation weapon that fires 6.8-millimeter ammunition.
Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark A. Milley on April 10 announced the Army would order 100,000 units, mainly purchased for infantry units which engage in close-quarters combat.
U.S. Army Contracting Command (ACC) officials said the new weapons would include the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Rifle (NGSW-R) and the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Automatic Rifle (NGSW-AR).
The NGSW-R is expected to replace the M16 rifle and M4 carbine. The NGSW-AR is also expected to replace the M249 light machine gun in the Automatic Rifleman Role in the Close Combat Force.
The new rifles chamber a 6.8mm cartridge, known as the XM1186. The round has greater range, increased accuracy at longer distances, and better armor penetration capability than 5.56x45mm and 7.62x39mm ammunition. The 6.8mm round is expected to be the most advanced ammunition on the modern battlefield for the next 25 years.
In October, the Army selected the 6.8mm as the official requirements for the NGSW. The new bullet is designed to penetrate the world’s most advanced body armor at a range of up to 600 meters.
“Moving from contract award to delivery of a revolutionary, next-generation weapon in just 15 months not only demonstrates the maturity of our Cased-Telescoped technology, but also the project execution excellence our team possesses to rapidly fill critical warfighter needs on schedule,” said Textron Systems Senior Vice President of Applied Technologies & Advanced Programs Wayne Prender.
“Our Cased-Telescoped weapons and ammunition offer the growth path to a true next-generation small arms weapon for U.S. warfighters, including increased lethality at longer ranges, while also delivering significant weight reductions to the warfighter.”
The Pentagon’s current shift from urban warfare in Iraq and Syria to the mountains and open terrain of Afghanistan have been the driving force behind modernizing standard issue weapons for infantry units. While standard rifles are well-suited for close combat in cities like Mosul and Raqqa, it lacks the range to kill adversaries in open stretches.
The Army is expected to test AAI’s NGSW weapon at firing ranges this summer. Full contract award could be upwards of 250,000 units and 150 million rounds. The expected field date is early 2020.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2vi7eFC Tyler Durden
This teetering edifice of debt is going to collapse, and they know it.
Those with cash and precious metals are enemies of the state at this point.
They will be making an all-out effort to ban cash and force all transactions to be electronic. This will further enrich the banking cabal, as they get a hefty slice of every transaction.
It will also allow the ruling class to inflict negative interest rates on savings to force you to spend.
I don’t think there will be enough guillotines to dispense justice when the shit hits the fan.
Cashing In: How to Make Negative Interest Rates Work
Many central banks reduced policy interest rates to zero during the global financial crisis to boost growth. Ten years later, interest rates remain low in most countries. While the global economy has been recovering, future downturns are inevitable. Severe recessions have historically required 3–6 percentage points cut in policy rates. If another crisis happens, few countries would have that kind of room for monetary policy to respond.
To get around this problem, a recent IMF staff study shows how central banks can set up a system that would make deeply negative interest rates a feasible option.
How low can you go?
In a cashless world, there would be no lower bound on interest rates. A central bank could reduce the policy rate from, say, 2 percent to minus 4 percent to counter a severe recession. The interest rate cut would transmit to bank deposits, loans, and bonds. Without cash, depositors would have to pay the negative interest rate to keep their money with the bank, making consumption and investment more attractive. This would jolt lending, boost demand, and stimulate the economy.
When cash is available, however, cutting rates significantly into negative territory becomes impossible. Cash has the same purchasing power as bank deposits, but at zero nominal interest. Moreover, it can be obtained in unlimited quantities in exchange for bank money. Therefore, instead of paying negative interest, one can simply hold cash at zero interest. Cash is a free option on zero interest, and acts as an interest rate floor.
Because of this floor, central banks have resorted to unconventional monetary policy measures. The euro area, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and other economies have allowed interest rates to go slightly below zero, which has been possible because taking out cash in large quantities is inconvenient and costly (for example, storage and insurance fees). These policies have helped boost demand, but they cannot fully make up for lost policy space when interest rates are very low.
Breaking through zero
One option to break through the zero lower bound would be to phase out cash. But that is not straightforward. Cash continues to play a significant role in payments in many countries. To get around this problem, in a recent IMF staff study and previous research, we examine a proposal for central banks to make cash as costly as bank deposits with negative interest rates, thereby making deeply negative interest rates feasible while preserving the role of cash.
The proposal is for a central bank to divide the monetary base into two separate local currencies—cash and electronic money (e-money). E-money would be issued only electronically and would pay the policy rate of interest, and cash would have an exchange rate—the conversion rate—against e-money. This conversion rate is key to the proposal. When setting a negative interest rate on e-money, the central bank would let the conversion rate of cash in terms of e-money depreciate at the same rate as the negative interest rate on e-money. The value of cash would thereby fall in terms of e-money.
To illustrate, suppose your bank announced a negative 3 percent interest rate on your bank deposit of 100 dollars today. Suppose also that the central bank announced that cash-dollars would now become a separate currency that would depreciate against e-dollars by 3 percent per year. The conversion rate of cash-dollars into e-dollars would hence change from 1 to 0.97 over the year. After a year, there would be 97 e-dollars left in your bank account. If you instead took out 100 cash-dollars today and kept it safe at home for a year, exchanging it into e-money after that year would also yield 97 e-dollars.
At the same time, shops would start advertising prices in e-money and cash separately, just as shops in some small open economies already advertise prices both in domestic and in bordering foreign currencies. Cash would thereby be losing value both in terms of goods and in terms of e-money, and there would be no benefit to holding cash relative to bank deposits.
This dual local currency system would allow the central bank to implement as negative an interest rate as necessary for countering a recession, without triggering any large-scale substitutions into cash.
Pros and cons
While a dual currency system challenges our preconceptions about money, countries could implement the idea with relatively small changes to central bank operating frameworks. In comparison to alternative proposals, it would have the advantage of completely freeing monetary policy from the zero lower bound. Its introduction would reconfirm the central bank’s commitment to the inflation target, rather than raise doubts about it.
Still, implementing such a system is not without challenges. It would require important modifications of the financial and legal system. In particular, fundamental questions pertaining to monetary law would have to be addressed and consistency with the IMF’s legal framework would need to be ensured. Also, it would require an enormous communication effort.
The pros and cons of the system are country specific and should be carefully compared to other proposals, such as higher inflation targets, for increasing monetary policy space in a low-interest environment. We consider these issues, and more, in our research.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2W8B0by Tyler Durden
Social Security will be insolvent and unable to pay the full value of promised benefits by 2035—that’s one full year later than previously expected—and Social Security’s costs will exceed its income by 2020, according to a new report published Monday by the program’s trustees.
At the end of 2018, Social Security was providing income to about 67 million Americans. About 47 million of them were over age 65, and the majority of the rest were disabled. If nothing changes, the Social Security Trust Fund will be fully depleted by 2035 and the program would impose across-the-board cuts of 20 percent to all beneficiaries. That may sound like it’s a long way off, but 51-year-old workers today will be just hitting retirement age when the cuts kick in. Some current retirees will still be younger than 80.
By that point, some parts of Medicare will already be unable to cover the full cost of benefits.
The trustees’ report released Monday shows that the trust fund for Medicare Part A, which covers hospital and nursing home costs, will be gone by 2026. Medicare Part B, which covers routine medical care like visits to the doctor, and Medicare Part D, which covers prescription drugs, are on more solid footing and will remain solvent “indefinitely.”
It is important to remember that insolvency is not the same as bankruptcy. By 2026 and 2034, respectively, Medicare and Social Security will not have enough money to pay the full cost of their obligations, but that’s not the same as saying they’ll have no money at all.
It’s also important to keep in mind that these projections are constantly shifting based on economic data, demographic trends, and actuarial projections. Last year, Social Security was supposed to hit insolvency in 2034. The year before, the trustees said insolvency wouldn’t hit until 2037. It’s a moving target, but time keeps on slipping and ignoring the looming crisis won’t make it go away.
Still, Congress could be spurred to action by the threat that Social Security will post losses in just two years. The last time that happened, in 1982, it provided an impetus for federal policymakers to make several changes, including an increase to the payroll tax, that kept the federal old-age pension program solvent. Without policy changes, the new report shows that Social Security would start losing money in 2020 and would continue to operate in the red for decades to come—long past the point when the program would be able to fund its promises to retired Americans.
Right now, there’s not much evidence that federal policymakers are ready for that challenge. President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised not to touch Social Security while he’s in office, while Democrats in Congress are eyeing Medicare for All proposals that would likely pile massive new obligations onto a federal entitlement program that’s already struggling under its own weight.
“That fact that we now can’t guarantee full benefits to current retirees is completely unacceptable, and it should be cause enough for every policymaker to rally around solutions to restore solvency to those programs,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates for balanced budgets, in a statement. “Certainly we should be focused on saving Social Security and Medicare before we start promising to expand these programs.”
What’s really needed is a complete reconsidering of the relationship between older Americans and those entitlement programs. Both Social Security and Medicare were designed more than half a century ago for an entirely different workforce and population. When Social Security launched in 1935, the average life expectancy for Americans was 61—that means the average person died four years before qualifying for benefits.
Meanwhile, demographics are blowing up the basic premise of how Social Security is funded. There were 2.8 workers for every Social Security recipient in 2017. That’s down from 3.3 in 2007, and that’s way down from the 5.1 workers per beneficiary that existed in 1960.
When and if Congress gets around to doing anything, both programs should be restructured to ensure they take care of the truly needy, rather than being benefits for anyone who has reached an arbitrary age. As Reason‘s Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy wrote in a still-very-relevant 2012 feature on the future of America’s entitlements, “Focusing on those truly in need instead of automatically shoveling out larger and larger amounts to well-off senior citizens is the best way to avert looming fiscal catastrophe and restore some morality to an indefensible system.”
Those entitlement programs are also the primary drivers of our national debt, which just hit $22 trillion and is on pace to reach levels not seen since World War II by the end of the next decade.
“Every day that passes, the problem gets bigger and the solutions become more difficult to implement,” said MacGuineas.
About the only way Congress will get off the hook is if climate change kills everyone in the next 12 years.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2INiEt6
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Social Security will be insolvent and unable to pay the full value of promised benefits by 2035—that’s one full year later than previously expected—and Social Security’s costs will exceed its income by 2020, according to a new report published Monday by the program’s trustees.
At the end of 2018, Social Security was providing income to about 67 million Americans. About 47 million of them were over age 65, and the majority of the rest were disabled. If nothing changes, the Social Security Trust Fund will be fully depleted by 2035 and the program would impose across-the-board cuts of 20 percent to all beneficiaries. That may sound like it’s a long way off, but 51-year-old workers today will be just hitting retirement age when the cuts kick in. Some current retirees will still be younger than 80.
By that point, some parts of Medicare will already be unable to cover the full cost of benefits.
The trustees’ report released Monday shows that the trust fund for Medicare Part A, which covers hospital and nursing home costs, will be gone by 2026. Medicare Part B, which covers routine medical care like visits to the doctor, and Medicare Part D, which covers prescription drugs, are on more solid footing and will remain solvent “indefinitely.”
It is important to remember that insolvency is not the same as bankruptcy. By 2026 and 2034, respectively, Medicare and Social Security will not have enough money to pay the full cost of their obligations, but that’s not the same as saying they’ll have no money at all.
It’s also important to keep in mind that these projections are constantly shifting based on economic data, demographic trends, and actuarial projections. Last year, Social Security was supposed to hit insolvency in 2034. The year before, the trustees said insolvency wouldn’t hit until 2037. It’s a moving target, but time keeps on slipping and ignoring the looming crisis won’t make it go away.
Still, Congress could be spurred to action by the threat that Social Security will post losses in just two years. The last time that happened, in 1982, it provided an impetus for federal policymakers to make several changes, including an increase to the payroll tax, that kept the federal old-age pension program solvent. Without policy changes, the new report shows that Social Security would start losing money in 2020 and would continue to operate in the red for decades to come—long past the point when the program would be able to fund its promises to retired Americans.
Right now, there’s not much evidence that federal policymakers are ready for that challenge. President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised not to touch Social Security while he’s in office, while Democrats in Congress are eyeing Medicare for All proposals that would likely pile massive new obligations onto a federal entitlement program that’s already struggling under its own weight.
“That fact that we now can’t guarantee full benefits to current retirees is completely unacceptable, and it should be cause enough for every policymaker to rally around solutions to restore solvency to those programs,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates for balanced budgets, in a statement. “Certainly we should be focused on saving Social Security and Medicare before we start promising to expand these programs.”
What’s really needed is a complete reconsidering of the relationship between older Americans and those entitlement programs. Both Social Security and Medicare were designed more than half a century ago for an entirely different workforce and population. When Social Security launched in 1935, the average life expectancy for Americans was 61—that means the average person died four years before qualifying for benefits.
Meanwhile, demographics are blowing up the basic premise of how Social Security is funded. There were 2.8 workers for every Social Security recipient in 2017. That’s down from 3.3 in 2007, and that’s way down from the 5.1 workers per beneficiary that existed in 1960.
When and if Congress gets around to doing anything, both programs should be restructured to ensure they take care of the truly needy, rather than being benefits for anyone who has reached an arbitrary age. As Reason‘s Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy wrote in a still-very-relevant 2012 feature on the future of America’s entitlements, “Focusing on those truly in need instead of automatically shoveling out larger and larger amounts to well-off senior citizens is the best way to avert looming fiscal catastrophe and restore some morality to an indefensible system.”
Those entitlement programs are also the primary drivers of our national debt, which just hit $22 trillion and is on pace to reach levels not seen since World War II by the end of the next decade.
“Every day that passes, the problem gets bigger and the solutions become more difficult to implement,” said MacGuineas.
About the only way Congress will get off the hook is if climate change kills everyone in the next 12 years.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2INiEt6
via IFTTT
There was a postwar order, but was it liberal? Like most political orders, it looked much better on paper than it did in practice and to the core members of the order than those on the margins…
Liberal values were only remotely attached to the postwar institutions. Sovereign equality did not translate into a liberal world order. The postwar institutions were run by the most powerful countries, with middle and lesser powers either shunted to the back of the room or locked out altogether…Third World now comprised most of the world’s states, but it was on the outside looking in. Western states enjoyed democracy and the rule of law, but the U.S. and the former colonial masters undermined rather than supported democracy and human rights elsewhere. Some Western states and analysts presumed that the global order must have some legitimacy because there were no great (or at least successful) revolts by the Third World, but they mistook coercion and the lack of alternative for consent…
The suggestion, then, is that if the international order is having greater difficulty creating rule-based governance, it might have less to do with the weakening of liberalism and more to do with the fact that the rules that have been in place for decades were overdue for an overhaul, and especially given a shift in power from the West to the East.
A primary focus of my writing of late centers around the idea that the policies of the Trump administration, and the neocons in control of it, will hasten the decline of U.S. imperial power and more rapidly usher in a multi-polar (and possibly bifurcated) world. Today’s news regarding the elimination of waivers on Iranian oil imports provides another perfect example.
Specifically, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier today that waivers which allowed eight countries to import Iranian crude oil without being subject to U.S. sanctions would expire on May 2 without extension. The eight countries included are China, India, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, Greece, Italy and Taiwan.
This move is an extraordinarily foolish and reckless act which illustrates the extreme hubris and short-sightedness of those running American foreign policy under Trump. What the U.S. is decreeing to the entire world with this action is that the U.S., and the U.S. alone, decides who gets to trade with who. The U.S. is telling China, the second largest economy in the world and home to over one billion people, that it lacks the sovereign authority to buy oil from Iran if it so desires. If the U.S. can unilaterally play boss on the trade decisions of foreign countries, national sovereignty does not exist in practice anywhere on the planet. There is only empire.
The 19th century had opium dens. We have Starbucks.
A little over half a year after it became the “world’s biggest public toilet“, Starbucks’ efforts to address the resulting spiraling drug use (including opioids) in its bathrooms – while alienating as many of its legacy clients as possible – are expanding.
According to Business Insider, Starbucks – which is now moonlighting as a safe house for both needles users across the country – will install needle-disposal boxes in bathrooms in stores in at least 25 US markets in the coming months. By this summer, the chain aims to have installed sharps boxes in bathrooms in all regions where such action has been deemed necessary. In other words, every Starbucks (public) bathroom will soon become a congregation space for both drug users and, soon after, their dealers.
“We are always working and listening to our partners on ways we can better support them when it comes to issues like these,” is how Starbucks representative Reggie Borges explained the company’s new drug-friendly strategy to Business Insider.
Photo via Getty Images
Starbucks has been testing solutions in recent months as workers’ safety concerns have mounted, with thousands of employees signing a petition calling for Starbucks to place needle-disposal boxes in high-risk bathrooms. The issued emerged in late 2018, after two employees in a Eugene, Oregon store were stuck with hypodermic needles within a month of each other, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) documents obtained by Business Insider through a Freedom of Information Act request. The stabbing led to a government investigation.
“I think the biggest and boldest move that Starbucks leaders can do right now is step aside from the potential political problems behind needle-disposal boxes in restrooms and give it a nationwide launch,” said one Seattle Starbucks worker whose location recently installed boxes in bathrooms. “We have had zero toilet clogs and zero needles found in an unsafe place since we had them installed last month,” the worker said. “It’s been really wonderful.”
“Wonderful” indeed, and now that needle-users know just where to go, the experience for all Starbucks users will be doubly as wonderful.
A Seattle Starbucks worker and other employees at the coffee giant who have worked in urban locations, described how they have encountered syringes on the job is often a fact of life.
“They generally appear in bathrooms, either wrapped up in paper towels or lurking at the surface of the garbage,” the Seattle employee said. “We are responsible for removing them from public spaces and placing them in a sharps-disposal kit, always with gloves if not with tongs. Less often, they are poking out of the bottom of the bag when changing.”
While messy bathrooms and drug use can create an uncomfortable work environment, most employees’ top fear is an accidental needle prick. Being stuck by a hypodermic needle means risking exposure to HIV and hepatitis, and it requires workers to immediately visit a hospital or urgent-care unit for testing and treatment.
“It is a scary situation to see because we don’t have needle-proof gloves and the only protection we have against any sharp objects is ‘double bagging’ a trash can with two bags instead of one, which is a ridiculous thing to actually think two plastic bags can stop a sharp needle,” said a Nashville, Tennessee, Starbucks employee who has worked at the chain for more than a decade.
Starbucks provides training for employees on how to safely deal with hypodermic needles, including instructions for how to safely dispose of garbage and what to do in case of a needle-prick injury. Sharps kits have long been available in Starbucks locations – albeit not installed in bathrooms – as stores have the option to order a sharps kit along with their first-aid kits.
According to Starbucks, any employee who feels unsafe performing a task is encouraged to speak with his or her manager and will not be made to perform the action. Apparently that includes cleaning up the local trash which may or may not be overflowing with potentially infected needles.
“These societal issues affect us all and can sometimes place our [employees] in scary situations, which is why we have protocols and resources in place to ensure our partners are out of harm’s way,” Borges said to Business Insider.
While Starbucks has established safety procedures, government documents and conversations with workers reveal that Starbucks has recently been forced to find new solutions in response to employees’ growing concerns about needle-stick injuries on the job.
As noted above, in October 2018, the Oregon OSHA opened an investigation into a Eugene, Oregon, Starbucks location, after an employee filed a complaint with the administration. The reason: two employees had recently been stuck by hypodermic needles at the store, the OSHA investigation confirmed. As Business Insider notes, fears over needle sticks had reached such intensity at the Eugene Starbucks that a second employee filed a complaint after the Oregon OSHA had already begun investigating the situation.
“The manager confirmed two employees had received needle stick injuries within the last month from hypodermic needles left uncapped in the bathroom, and stated needles and blood had been found in the bathroom at this location for over a year, but the frequency of needles being left in the bathrooms had increased significantly in recent months,” the Oregon OSHA inspection narrative states.
“During interviews, employees expressed frustration that a sharps container was not in the bathrooms for guests to use,” according to the OSHA inspection narrative. “Employees who received a sharps injury stated that they had not been contacted by anyone from Starbucks’ corporate office regarding their injuries.”
Starbucks was penalized $3,100 in the investigation, according to documents viewed by Business Insider, with the Oregon OSHA issuing fines for five violations in January 2019.
To address what appears to have been a makeshift opium den in its bathroom, Starbucks made a number of changes at the location: the location removed fixtures in the bathroom, including the large trash cans, diaper-changing stations, paper-towel dispensers, and toilet-seat-liner holders, and it moved a portable sharps container closer to the area where sharps had been found. According to the letter of corrective action, there have not been any needles found in the location’s bathrooms since it made the changes.
The good news: for workers at the needle-challenged establishment, there was a tangible improvement. Prior to the redemia actions, three Starbucks employees in Seattle told local news outlets last October that they encountered hypodermic needles on the job nearly every day. They said they had to take antiviral medications to protect themselves from HIV and hepatitis.
“My coworkers and I had all experienced needles left behind in the bathroom, store, and even in our drive-thru,” one person who signed the petition to install needle-disposal boxes after working at a Starbucks location in Lynnwood, Washington, told Business Insider in January.
“My primary fear when I worked there would be taking out the bathroom garbages,” said the former employee, who quit in 2018 after three years at the chain. “I was terrified that if I went to take the bag out, I would get poked by a needle I didn’t know was there.”
Needle boxes are not the only way that Starbucks has sought to address unsafe needle disposal in stores. In January, Business Insider reported that the chain was also testing using heavier-duty trash bags to prevent needle pokes and removing trash cans from certain bathrooms. Social-media reports revealed that in Philadelphia, some locations have added blue lightbulbs in an effort to make it more difficult for people to find veins to inject drugs.
“We are constantly thinking through different ways to address these societal issues, including heavier-duty bags among other options,” Borges told Business Insider on Monday.
Oddly enough, barely anywhere in the report was there any discussion of just why Starbucks trash cans are overflowing with used needles. And the reason is simple: the company’s own idiotic decision to become the world’s biggest public bathroom. Starbucks workers said they did not feel that issues grew worse after Starbucks announced anyone could use its bathrooms, whether or not they had made a purchase at the stores.
In other words, the company is now scrambling to undo the damage that its own liberal, virtue signaling policies created. Even more ironic: the liberal audience that Starbucks sought so hard to “impress” are those who don’t actually purchase the company’s products but merely take advantage of what has now become the world’s largest public toilet chain.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XE5vXx Tyler Durden
A case of mistaken identity left a Brown County, Ohio, mother without her job or her children.
Aberdeen, Ohio, police are searching for two people accused of trafficking heroin and fentanyl and possessing drug paraphernalia. They identified two suspects a Facebook post on the department’s page, including a woman named Ashley Foster. About a week after making the post, a deputy in Hamilton County found an Ashley Foster outside of a Target.
It was the wrong woman.
FOX 19 reports that the warrant used to arrest the wrong Foster contained the correct picture, birthday, and Social Security number, but had the wrong address. Though Foster insisted that the officers were mistaken, she was still handcuffed. Her two sons were in the vehicle and Foster said that she was not allowed to feed or change her 8-week-old as he cried. Child protective services took her children after the arrest.
Police booked Foster into jail, where she remained for a week. County rules allowed Hamilton County, to hold Foster for up to three business days until she could be transferred to Aberdeen police custody in Brown County. Because she was arrested on a Thursday, she remained in jail for an additional two days over the weekend. She sat in the Hamilton County cell for five days. While she was jailed, officers were unable to provide Foster with information since the charges were issued outside of their jurisdiction.
Foster struggled to find an explanation even after she was transferred to Brown County. The officers in charge of her transfer were not over the drug case.
When Aberdeen Police Chief David Benjamin finally interviewed Foster in the jail, he concluded that his officers had made a mistake. She was released and all of the charges were dropped.
Brown said that the ordeal caused her to lose her job.
Foster has since been reunited with her children, but not before Clermont County Job & Family Services interviewed her to determine her competency as a mother and inspected her home.
BREAKING NOW & ONLY ON @FOX19 Clermont mom gets custody of her two sons back after being mistakenly jailed 7 days “I got custody back!!! Everything went so smoothly! Were doing family easter tomorrow with both boys!!” – Ashley Foster #PrayersAnswered on this #GoodFridaypic.twitter.com/zOuOassbRX
A case of mistaken identity left a Brown County, Ohio, mother without her job or her children.
Aberdeen, Ohio, police are searching for two people accused of trafficking heroin and fentanyl and possessing drug paraphernalia. They identified two suspects a Facebook post on the department’s page, including a woman named Ashley Foster. About a week after making the post, a deputy in Hamilton County found an Ashley Foster outside of a Target.
It was the wrong woman.
FOX 19 reports that the warrant used to arrest the wrong Foster contained the correct picture, birthday, and Social Security number, but had the wrong address. Though Foster insisted that the officers were mistaken, she was still handcuffed. Her two sons were in the vehicle and Foster said that she was not allowed to feed or change her 8-week-old as he cried. Child protective services took her children after the arrest.
Police booked Foster into jail, where she remained for a week. County rules allowed Hamilton County, to hold Foster for up to three business days until she could be transferred to Aberdeen police custody in Brown County. Because she was arrested on a Thursday, she remained in jail for an additional two days over the weekend. She sat in the Hamilton County cell for five days. While she was jailed, officers were unable to provide Foster with information since the charges were issued outside of their jurisdiction.
Foster struggled to find an explanation even after she was transferred to Brown County. The officers in charge of her transfer were not over the drug case.
When Aberdeen Police Chief David Benjamin finally interviewed Foster in the jail, he concluded that his officers had made a mistake. She was released and all of the charges were dropped.
Brown said that the ordeal caused her to lose her job.
Foster has since been reunited with her children, but not before Clermont County Job & Family Services interviewed her to determine her competency as a mother and inspected her home.
BREAKING NOW & ONLY ON @FOX19 Clermont mom gets custody of her two sons back after being mistakenly jailed 7 days “I got custody back!!! Everything went so smoothly! Were doing family easter tomorrow with both boys!!” – Ashley Foster #PrayersAnswered on this #GoodFridaypic.twitter.com/zOuOassbRX
Illinois Republicans push to be rid of Chicago by making it the 51st state – but will that help the conservative cause, or hurt it?
Illinois just tried to jump on the newest trend of separating cities from states with a new proposal, HR101. If approved, this would detach the city of Chicago and make it the 51st state. While this is nothing new for Illinois, which has been fighting for years to distance itself from the more liberal and powerful city, the idea is growing in popularity.
Chicago Vs Illinois
Republicans who pushed for the House Resolution argue that the city ends up controlling the rest of the state. “Our traditional family values seem to be under attack at every angle,” said Rep. Brad Halbrook.
“The issue of life, the issue of marriage, the school curriculum. Everything these people hold near and dear to their hearts — our hearts — is under attack by far-left legislators from the city.”
The potential loss of traditional values isn’t the only reason many seek to separate city from state. Chicago has a population of approximately 2.7 million and a very different political stance.
“The reality is the city of Chicago is competing with New York City and L.A. and San Francisco, and (downstate is) competing against rural Indiana and rural Missouri,” Rep. C.D. Davidsmeyer said. “The policies that come down from Chicago are actually pushing our economic opportunity away.”
The Windy City also differs on important issues such as gun control and illegal immigration. Chicago wants stricter firearm regulation while the rural state supports sanctuary for gun owners. And, when it comes to open borders, the more conservative state pushes for immigration control while the blue city follows the Democrats’ lead.
Proponents for the split claim their tax dollars go mostly toward the city, while opponents say the rest of the state receive more in federal and state grants for low income families because the majority of low to moderate income households are outside Chicago.
Pros And Cons
Probably one of the biggest advantages in favor of the separation is more representation for the state’s conservative populous when it comes to local and state elections and laws since Chicago’s massive population heavily sways the outcome. According to HR101:
“WHEREAS, The divide between the City of Chicago and downstate Illinois is frequently manifested in electoral results such as the 2010 gubernatorial election in which the Democrat candidate won the election despite only carrying four counties out of 102 counties, and, if fact, did not need to carry any other counties to win because of the margin of victory in Chicago and Cook County; and
“WHEREAS, The City of Chicago is frequently treated as a separate region of the State and has often been exempted from major legislative initiatives the General Assembly enacts in law because of this fact.”
Separating the city from the state is worrisome, however, for those on both sides of the political aisle. While it may help rural Illinois to have more control in local lawmaking, some conservatives fear the move will just create another Democratic seat which would end up usurping even more of the Republican power. Consider that each state gets two senators in Congress. If the issue is that Chicago is a liberal hotbed while the rest of the state leans conservative, then creating two more seats in the U.S. Senate that seem destined to be ever filled by progressive Democrats hardly seems a viable long-term solution.
Economically speaking, Chicago has much more industry and business opportunities that the state could lose out on if the split becomes a reality. Professor John Jackson explained that they “don’t have anything close to that in the more rural parts (of downstate).”
“People say Chicago’s a huge economy, there’s no way you can survive without them, (but) I have people on the other side saying Chicago’s killing us with their policies, we need to separate,” Davidsmeyer said. “I’m one of the people in the middle saying let’s see both sides of it.”
Illinois isn’t the only state to consider kicking out one of its powerful and influential cities. New York residents have been fighting to make New York City the next new state. Washington state recently suggested splitting the east from the west so that the extremely liberal city of Seattle would not have so much say in the governing of more conservative areas in the eastern region. California has been trying for years to split the Golden State into three separate entities, while another group seeks complete secession. Could the fracturing of these states be the solution that best serves the most people, or would it, at best, be only temporary fix – until the newly minted progressive senators start to turn the tide of Congress?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2W1vIyC Tyler Durden
“Worse than Watergate” is how Rep. Adam Schiff described the Mueller Report’s findings as he doubled-down (or is it quadrupled?) on his fantasy dissonance about The Man In The White House.
“Well, I think it’s clear from the Mueller report that that’s exactly right. The obstruction of justice in particular in this case is far worse than anything that Richard Nixon did. The — the break-in by the Russians of the Democratic institutions, a foreign adversary far more significant than the plumbers breaking into the Democratic headquarters. So yes, I would say in every way this is more significant than Watergate. And the fact that a candidate for president and now president of the United States would not only not stand up and resist Russian interference in our election but would welcome it goes well beyond anything Nixon did.
The fact that the president of the United States would take Putin’s side over his own intelligence agencies go well beyond anything Richard Nixon did. So yes, I think it is far more serious than Watergate.“
So, it is with great irony that the previously outspokenly anti-Trump journalist, and Watergate exposer, Bob Woodward, sees things quite differently to Schiff.
During an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Woodward said Sunday that the FBI and CIA’s reliance on the Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” now that the Mueller reported has undercut many of the salacious document’s claims.
“What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really has got a lot of garbage in it and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box.”
“I think it was the CIA pushing this. Real intelligence experts looked at this and said no, this is not intelligence, this is garbage and they took it out,” said Woodward.
“But in this process, the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable.”
