Officer Philip Brailsford was charged with murder and fired by the Mesa Police Department over a January incident where Brailsford shot and killed Daniel Shaver, an unarmed father of two from Texas. Brailsford is granted the privilege to appeal his termination with two weeks thanks to his status as a government employee.
This week, authorities released material related to the charges, including a transcript of the body cam footage, according to which Shaver begged for his life multiple times, telling Brailsford “please don’t shoot me” moments before he was shot and killed.
Shaver appears to have got caught in a civilian and police overreaction. Guests of the motel he was staying at called police and said they saw a man with a gun in a fifth-floor window. Police arrived at Shaver’s room, and ordered him and another person in the room with him to exit the room on their hands and knees. According to the county attorney’s report, Shaver “was cooperative, but sometimes confused by the commands… because of his possible intoxication. According to the report, Brailsford “told Shaver that if he put his hands behind his back then he would be shot.”
Brailsford was charged with second-degree murder. The fatal shooting was considered an unjustified use of force by the county attorney and his complaint accuses Brailsford of “manifesting an extreme indifference to human life recklessly causing the death of another.”
Transcripts of the 911 call as well as the police report were also released, but not the actual footage from Brailsford’s body camera.
Police found no weapon in Shaver’s room, only two pellet guns. Both pellet guns and real guns are legal in the state of Arizona.
Update: The latest poll from left-leaning Publi Policy Polling found that Cruz leads with 38 percent support, with Trump right behind at 37 percent — within the margin of error.
Amid campaign-manager-assault-gate and the abortion fiasco, Donald Trump appears to be facing his own Waterloo. Polls show Cruz up by 10 points in Wisconsin and that has sent the odds of a brokered convention soaring to almost 70% and pushed Trump's odds of gaining the nomination down to 50%.
Interestingly, Paul Ryan's odds are surging…
Of course some context shows that Trump is merely back to mid-February levels of support (from the bettors) but still this trend is not the friend of the disenfranchised in America.
It appears once again The Establishment is winning… even as The Hill reports, the GOP is at a breaking point…
"This race is kind of at its boiling point," said Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist and contributor to The Hill. "As ugly as it is now, the two losing candidates at the convention are going to feel even worse."
Instead of helping to unify the GOP behind a candidate, as the primary process typically does, the race has instead created deep wounds between the candidates that are unlikely to heal.
The antagonism has been heightened by a particularly vicious stretch of campaigning involving allegations of adultery and pictures of the candidates’ wives.
"I believe that we're beyond the point in the campaign where we feel we can unify. There’s been too much bad blood that's been created," said GOP strategist David Payne, who said he would like to see Cruz win the nomination before the convention.
Finally, it seems the American public is starting to get fed up with the constant mainstream media coverage of Trump's very utterance or mean glance… Most GOP voters (63%), incl. 33% of Trump supporters, say too much press coverage of Trump.
Lenders to the oil and gas industry have been extraordinarily lenient amid the worst downturn in decades, allowing indebted companies to survive a little while longer in hopes of a rebound in oil prices. But the screws are set to tighten just a bit more as the periodic credit redetermination period finishes up.
Banks reassess their credit lines to oil and gas firms twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. While the lending arrangements vary from bank to bank and from borrower to borrower, lenders largely punted on both redetermination periods last year, providing a grace period for drillers to wait out the bust in prices. But oil prices have not rebounded much since the original crash in late 2014.
Time could run out for companies that have been hanging on by a thread.
Debt was not seen as a big problem in the past, as triple-digit oil prices had both lenders and borrowers eager to see drilling accelerate and spread to new frontiers. Indeed, debt rose even when oil prices exceeded $100 per barrel. According to The Wall Street Journal, the net debt of publically-listed global oil and gas companies grew threefold over the past decade, hitting a high of $549 billion last year. In fact, debt accumulated in the sector at a faster rate between 2012 and 2015 – a period when oil prices were exceptionally high – than in previous years.
With oil prices down more than 60 percent from the 2014 peak, piling on ever more debt to a loss-making operation looks increasingly untenable. Distressed energy loans – loans in danger of default – account for more than half of the energy portfolio at several major banks.
“When oil was at $100 a barrel, debt was easy to get,” Simon Thomson, CEO of Cairn Energy, told the WSJ in an interview. “What we’re seeing today is a number of people suffering the hangover of having secured that debt and now possibly having trouble servicing it.”
About 51 oil and gas companies from North America have filed for bankruptcy since early 2015, but there are 175 more that are in danger of not being able to meet debt payments. For context, 62 oil and gas companies fell into bankruptcy during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
Companies struggling with debt payments and shrinking revenue could see the taps shut off or at least reduced. Some analysts see cuts to credit lines on the order of 20 to 30 percent.
Whiting Petroleum, for instance, announced in early March that its credit line would be slashed by more than $1 billion, a reduction that could be one of the industry’s largest. Whiting had a $2.7 billion loan revolver at the end of 2015, and the company’s CEO expects to have “at least $1.5 billion” left after this spring redetermination.
Regulators are also pressing banks for more scrutiny, and lenders are increasingly using the metric of classifying loans to companies with debt exceeding four times EBITDA as “substandard” or lower. According to Oil & Gas 360, banks are moving loans with a debt-to-EBITDA ratio exceeding 4x to their workout units.
“This has the makings of a gigantic funding crisis,” the head of Deloitte’s restructuring department, William Snyder, told the WSJ.
Oil & Gas 360 says that banks are also marketing their troubled debt to hedge funds, marking down distressed debt to cents on the dollars. Hedge funds could buy up discounted debt in hopes of repayment.
Meanwhile, although the credit markets are squeezing drillers, equity markets remain open, at least to some. Reuters reported last week that about 15 companies have announced new equity offerings in 2016, and most have not been adversely impacted. Most of the 15 companies issuing new stock have performed better than an oil and gas producer index by about 3 percent on average. Of course, only relatively strong firms have decided that the equity markets would be open to them. Around $10 billion in fresh equity has been issued so far this year.
The credit redeterminations are currently wrapping up and the details of many of them could soon be released. The deeper banks cut their credit facilities, the more likely struggling oil and gas companies could be forced into bankruptcy.
Meet Deputy Robert Davis of the Wake County, North Carolina’s Sheriffs Department. Because he is a liar, a judge recently dismissed over 100 cases involving people charged with driving while intoxicated (DWI) and another 75 cases involving other traffic offenses.
Last week, District Court Judge Jacqueline Brewer disqualified Deputy Robert Davis as a witness after determining that he had lied in at least three cases. Freeman then dismissed other cases in which he was a witness.
“He violated the defendants’ rights,” Freeman said. “He was untruthful on the stand.”
Wake Sheriff Donnie Harrison said Davis, who had served more than a decade with the sheriff’s office, was fired after the information came to light.
The good news is that a lying cop is being held accountable for “testilying.” The bad news, as Popehat’s Ken White put it on Twitter, is that “legitimately drunk drivers he arrested now have a clean record. Because he lied. Thanks asshole.”
Back in 2005, I interviewed Fox News Senior Legal Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano for Reason. He talked about how his encounters with obviously lying police pushed him in a libertarian direction.
Reason: Let’s talk about the evolution of your views. During your college years in the late ’60s, you wore a “Bomb Hanoi” T-shirt and supported Richard Nixon’s law and order campaign. You write that eight years on the bench as a superior court judge in New Jersey turned you into a “born-again individualist,” and Fox News Channel viewers can see you regularly argue in favor of restrictions on cops and law enforcement more generally. How did serving on the bench change you?
Napolitano: I had a realization that many [law enforcement agents] were lying. Some of them would acknowledge, not to the extent that I would have them charged with perjury, but in the wink and the nod in a conversation with them afterwards, “Well, we almost don’t care if you found out that we kicked in the taillight.” “We knew,” they’d suggest, “from the profile–Mercedes Benz, New York plates, African-American driver, coming off the George Washington Bridge–it was more likely than not that drugs were in there, and we don’t even care.” They took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they’re violating that oath when they violate the rights of the driver of that car.
It was the most scandalous story of November 24: moments after Turkish forces had taken down a Russian fighter jet for allegedly violating Turkish airspace, Turkmen rebels in the region executed one of the parachuting pilots while he was descending to earth. As CNN Turk’s Foreign Editor tweeted at the time, Turkmen rebels said: “We hit at the two pilots after they parachuted.” This was a war crime.
Now, over four months later, Alparslan Celik, the man suspected of shooting a Russian pilot as he parachuted from a downed jet over Syria, has finally been arrested by Turkish police in the city of Izmir and is being questioned, Hurriyet newspaper reports.
According to Bloomberg, Celik was detained while at a restaurant in the city on Turkey’s Aegean coast; 14 others also detained.
Celik was fighting with anti-Assad regime Turkmen militants in Syria.
Footage of the incident showed a man, believed to be Celik, shooting and killing one of the Russian pilots after he ejected from the jet as he was parachuting to the ground.
Why now? Is Erdogan trying a gentle pivot to Russia now that his western allies are sending increasingly more troubing signals about their support of his presidency.
It remains to be seen if he will be extradited to Russia.
Last week, Bashar al-Assad celebrated one of the most significant (at least from a symbolic perspective) military victories in the history of his government’s campaign against opposition groups battling for control of Syria.
With the help of Russia and Hezbollah, Assad’s army liberated the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State. Palmyra is a UNESCO world heritage site and over the course of the last nine or so months, ISIS has obliterated a number of priceless artifacts on the grounds that they are monuments to paganism.
Needless to say, it’s better that Assad control the city than ISIS. Even the US State Dept. was forced to (begrudgingly) admit as much.
But Washington’s reluctance to celebrate the liberation of Palmyra reflects growing concerns that Assad, Hezbollah, and other Iran-backed Shiite militias are now poised to march on Deir ez-Zor – and then on Raqqa.
With the “moderate” opposition in the west subdued, a victory in the east would mean Assad has conquered the entire country. Clearly, that raises the question of what happens next. That is, it’s rather difficult to depose someone who has just vanquished the last vestiges of the opposition. Still, you shouldn’t expect Washington, Riyadh, Doha, and Ankara to give up on the effort to oust the Alawite government just yet, which is why we weren’t surprised when London-based al-Hayat reported that the US and Russia had agreed on a plan that would see Assad take refuge in an as-yet unnamed country once a political transformation has had time to take hold.
On Thursday, The Kremlin denied the report. “Al-Hayat published information which does not correspond to reality,” Dmitry Peskov said, in a call with journalists.
“Al-Hayat reported that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had told several Arab countries that Russia and the U.S. reached an understanding on the future of Syria’s peace process, including Assad’s departure to another country at some unspecified stage,” Reuters writes, recounting the story. “Russia is advantageously different from other nations because it does not discuss the issue of the self-determination of third countries either through diplomatic or other channels,” Peskov added, in what amounted to a pot shot aimed at deriding Washington’s interventionist Mid-East foreign policy.
For his part, Assad says he’s prepared for snap elections – depending on the “will of the people” of course. Here’s what he told Sputnik in an interview published this week:
“This depends on the Syrian people’s stance, on whether there is a popular will to hold early presidential elections. If there is such a will, this is not a problem for me. It is natural to respond to the will of the people and not to that of certain opposition forces. This issue concerns every Syrian citizen because every citizen votes for the president.”
“But I have no problem with this in principle because the president cannot work without the people’s support. And if the president is supported by the people, he must always be ready for such a step. I can say that this is no problem for us in principle, but in order to take such a step, we need the Syrian public opinion and not the opinion of the government or the president,”
“It has been proposed to hold parliamentary elections after the new constitution [has been adopted]. These elections will show the balance of powers on the political arena. Then, a new government will be formed in accordance with the representation of political forces in the new parliament… As for presidential elections, that is a an entirely different issue.”
Sure. While we’ll be the first to decry Washington’s efforts to destabilize the Syrian government by playing on Sunni fears of Shia proselytizing and highlighting the autocratic tendencies of the Alawite government in Damascus, we’d also note that the idea of Bashar al-Assad agreeing to hold free and open snap elections that could potentially see him lose the presidency is patently absurd. Government representatives in Geneva have continually said that discussions about Assad’s grip on power are a red line.
The only question would seem to be this: does Assad really want to be President in perpetuity given the distinct possibility that guerilla efforts to overthrow him will persist as a war of attrition between government forces and the opposition drags on for years? One certainly wonders if perhaps there’s some truth to Al-Hayat’s report. That is, if Assad can restore his government and claim a military victory over all of those who opposed him, why not simply handpick a successor and live happily ever after in Moscow or Tehran? After all, no one wants to end up like those other two guys…
From a distance, it looks like the shoe is on the other foot, but it’s really not. Now that the FBI, with the assistance of an undisclosed third party, has successfully cracked the security of the work iPhone of San Bernardino, California, terrorist Syed Farook, can Apple demand that the FBi show them how?
The story we all know by now is that the FBI and the Department of Justice had gone to federal court to try to force Apple to write code that would help weaken the phone’s security and let them try to brute force their way through Farook’s passcode. Apple resisted the demand, claiming that providing such information, even if it remained in Apple’s hands, could potentially weaken the cybersecurity of all its customers’ data, opening them up to potential hackers or cybersurveillance.
We don’t know whether Apple would have won that fight in California because FBI withdrew its demand after figuring out on its own how to break into Farook’s phone. But now the big question is whether the information will flow back in the other direction. Typically when the U.S. government uncovers a security vulnerability in the private sector, it has a process of letting these businesses know so that it can be fixed. But we have a surveillance security state where transparency and your privacy and cybersecurity ranks second behind the feds trying to keep its processes secret because of the war on terror. So we don’t know whether the FBI will have to provide this info to Apple. Reuters explains:
The referee is likely to be a White House group formed during the Obama administration to review computer security flaws discovered by federal agencies and decide whether they should be disclosed.
Experts said government policy on such reviews was not clear-cut, so it was hard to predict whether a review would be required. “There are no hard and fast rules,” said White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel, in a 2014 blog post about the process.
If a review is conducted, many security researchers expect that the White House group will not require the FBI to disclose the vulnerability it exploited.
Some experts said the FBI might be able to avoid a review entirely if, for instance, it got past the phone’s encryption using a contractor’s proprietary technology.
Explaining the policy in 2014, the Office of the Director of National Security said the government should disclose vulnerabilities “unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need.”
One analyst predicted that the FBI might not have to reveal the vulnerability if it required that physical possession of the phone was needed in order to crack it, because then that hacking method wouldn’t be a threat to general phone users.
It creates an unusual tension because technically this is how we want the federal government to handle encryption in order to fight terrorism or major crimes. Nobody is arguing that the FBI doesn’t have the authority to try to get access to the data on Farook’s phone. The argument has been whether it could draft Apple to assist and to compromise its own security system. But once the FBI does it on its own (or with the help of a third party), there’s still the matter of compromised security.
Though the dynamic is reversed, with the Apple requesting information from the FBI, the underlying issue remains the same: Can the government deliberately compromise the data security and privacy of American citizens simply by claiming it’s necessary to fight crime and terrorism? Heaven knows they seem to be trying. Stay tuned. The FBI has agreed to help prosecutors in Arkansas attempt to gain access to another iPhone and an iPod to try to help solve a double homicide.
“Everyone—even pro-lifers—hated Donald Trump’s comments about abortion,” reports Vox. In a televised interview with Chris Matthews Wednesday, the Republican presidential frontrunner suggested that if abortion were banned, then “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who terminate their pregnancies illegally.
People on all sides of the abortion debate promptly freaked out, with women’s groups and pro-lifers alike condemning Trump’s statements. And Trump quickly shifted his position, saying in a statement later that day that if abortion were illegal, “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb.”
Trump’s initial, off-the-cuff statements were in response to Matthews pressing him: “If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under the law. … Do you believe in punishment for abortion—yes or no—as a principle?”
Trump: The answer is there has to be some form of punishment.
Matthews: For the woman?
Trump: Yeah, there has to be some form.
Matthews: Ten cents, 10 years, what?
Trump: That I don’t know.
These comments run counter to the mainstream pro-life spin on criminalizing abortion, which is that women would never be punished, just those wiley abortionists who prey on them. “We know how much women suffer from abortion, and how they are lied to by the abortion industry,” said Eric Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, in a typical pro-life response to Trump’s comments. “Any penalty for illegal abortion should fall on abortion providers, not the women who turn to them in desperation.”
Mollie Hemingway, writing at The Federalist, called Trump’s position “a betrayal of pro-lifers,” who “understand that abortion is a violent act against women and children.” As a new convert to the anti-abortion side, Trump shows “no understanding of the debates about how to protect vulnerable women and their children from the evil pressure to abort,” writes Hemingway. She also heralds a piece by Charles Camosy, in which he argues that “legal abortion is the product of privileged men” and that “our abortion laws end up serving the interests of men and coercing the so-called ‘choice’ of women.”
But here’s what neither Camosy, Hemingway, Scheidler, or any of the major pro-life voices have addressed: What happens when there is no abortion doctor? No sketchy clinic. No nagging or coercive partner. What happens when a woman decides to terminate her pregnancy and takes matters into her own hands?
Women have been self-inducing abortions for time immemorial. Herbs. Coat hangers. Mifepristone. It’s that last one, used in conjunction with another drug (misoprostol), that’s likely to be most common for illegal 21st Century abortions. This two-pill regimen, referred to as “medical abortion” (as opposed to surgical abortion), is currently the most common method for legal first-trimester abortions in America.
But that doesn’t mean it’s an easily accessible option for all women seeking abortions. Many states have set up a labyrinth of laws designed to make the process of prescribing or obtaining abortion drugs more difficult and time-consuming than necessary for women’s health or safety. As a result, we already see American women illegally obtaining the drugs to self-induce abortion. And what happens now, when these cases are found out? The women arecriminally prosecuted, under a range of state charges, such as fetal homicide or “unlawful abortion.”
“Despite claims from antiabortion advocates and lawmakers that abortion restrictions are intended to only criminalize providers of abortion care, some prosecutors have exercised their discretion under current state laws to penalize women who end their pregnancies on their own,” notes the Guttmacher Institute. If this is what happens when abortion is legal, why should we expect differently under an abortion ban?
What’s more, prosecutors have not limited these charges to women who admit to self-induced abortion, or to cases where the evidence clearly suggests it, but in some instances gone after women who say they have suffered miscarriages. Whatever the truth in these individual cases, this points to another issue with criminalizing abortion: suddenly, many women who spontaneously miscarry will become suspect.
It is theoretically possible that if abortion were illegal, pro-lifers would advocate new laws protecting pregnant women from punishment even in cases where they act 100 percent independently. Then again, that seems like a rather toothless and ineffectual sort of abortion ban. And also a strange compromise, from a moral standpoint: if abortion is murder—and punishable accordingly when someone is an accomplice to it—how can it be that the killer is subject to absolutely no consequences? These are questions prominent pro-lifers do not answer, or even bring up.
If pressed, I’m sure some would suggest there is always someone to hold responsible (other than the woman): an overseas pharmacy that sold her the abortion drugs, a boyfriend who doesn’t want kids, a friend who kept the woman company while taking the abortion pills. There are all sorts of creative avenues for criminalization, sure. In other areas where women are deemed incapable of moral reasoning or agency, such as prostitution, we already see this sort of work in action, with police going after anyone tangentially related to the commercial sexual activity.
It’s understandable, from a political standpoint, that abortion opponents don’t want to talk about these things—especially when they’re running for office. But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have to reckon with them if abortion were once again illegal in this country.
Note that no one on the pro-life side has argued that Trump doesn’t actually believe in punishing women if abortion were illegal. When people suggest that Trump just “doesn’t get” the pro-life position, what they’re really saying is that he doesn’t get how pro-life Republicans are supposed to talk about their positions. That it’s politically incorrect to talk about punishing women, regardless of what you actually believe.
Yet, as The New Republic’s Jeet Heer tweeted, Donald Trump “has a habit of turning sub-text into text. He doesn’t know how to talk in dog whistle or code & spells out bluntly implications of policy. Bush talked about WMDs & spreading democracy. Trump says USA should kills enemies & ‘take the oil.’ Bush’s subtext is Trump’s text. … In the case of abortion, Trump isn’t native to anti-abortion right & doesn’t know lingo devised to hide horrifying implications of policy.”
Trump’s original statements on abortion might not have been politically correct from a conventional conservative perspective, but they were the closest to honesty or authenticity we’ve gotten from a pro-life politician in a long time.
By at least one measure, inequality among working men has grown for decades. But, in 2015, it accelerated: The wage gap among men saw its largest single-year increase on record.
Top earners — men who made more than 95 percent of their peers — saw wages last year rise by 9.9 percent, according to an analysis of federal data. Men in the middle — with earnings higher than half their peers — saw a much-smaller 2.6 percent increase.
Now here’s a graphic of the trend:
Meanwhile…
Since 1973, wages among men in the 50th percentile have fallen a total 4.6 percent. Wages for men in the 95th percentile, meanwhile, are up 51.4 percent.
Here’s what that looks like:
This isn’t the outcome of a fairly regulated free market economy. It’s what you get in a rigged economy.
The American public is being used like a cheap suit by the status quo. When will enough be enough?
The Fed failed to hike interest rates in March despite the “data” hitting levels at which the Fed said it would hike. Indeed, the Fed even lowered its expected number of rate hikes for this year from four to two!
This confirms for us that the Fed does indeed want inflation.
In the last few weeks, several Fed officials, most notably Fed Vice-Chair Stanley Fischer stated not only that inflation was appearing in the US but that this is something the Fed “would like to happen.”
In separate prepared remarks in Washington, neither Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer nor Gov. Lael Brainard made direct reference to next week’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. But Brainard argued for patience in rate increases amid possible risks that inflation and U.S. economic activity will fall.
“Tighter financial conditions and softer inflation expectations may pose risks to the downside for inflation and domestic activity. From a risk management perspective, this argues for patience as the outlook becomes clearer,” Brainard said.
Source: CNBC
AND…
Inflation is showing signs it could accelerate in the United States, a top Federal Reserve policymaker said in comments that back the view that the central bank will hike interest rates again this year.
“We may well at present be seeing the first stirrings of an increase in the inflation rate,” Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said on Monday in prepared remarks, adding that faster inflation was “something that we would like to happen.”
Source: Reuters
With that in mind, take note that the Fed is finally achieving this, with US Core inflation well above the Fed desired rate of 2%:
Moreover, “sticky inflation” (considered by some to be the purest “official” measure of inflation) has hit 3%.
And finally, the Cleveland Fed’s Median CPI is growing at an annualized rate of 2.8%.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the median Consumer Price Index rose 0.2% (2.8% annualized rate) in February…
Earlier today, the BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted CPI for all urban consumers fell 0.2% (-2.0% annualized rate) in February. The CPI less food and energy rose 0.3% (3.4% annualized rate) on a seasonally adjusted basis.
Over the last 12 months, the median CPI rose 2.4%, the trimmed-mean CPI rose 2.0%, the CPI rose 1.0%, and the CPI less food and energy rose 2.3%.
Source: Cleveland Fed
Put simply, the inflation genie is out of the bottle. Core inflation is already moving higher at a time when prices of most basic goods are at 19-year lows. Any move higher in Oil and other commodities will only PUSH core inflation higher.
The Fed is cornered. Inflation is back. And Gold and Gold-related investments will be exploding higher in the coming weeks.
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