Tag: hit&run

In California, Lincoln High
School cheerleaders had planned to hold a car
wash fundraiser until the San Jose Environmental Services
Department stepped in. City officials say all such car washes
violate water discharge laws, which bar anything other than
rainwater from flowing into storm drains.

Newsday’s Lane Filler and Ross Clark of The
Times and The Spectator are the co-winners of Reason
Foundation’s 2013 Bastiat Prize, which honors the writing that best
demonstrates the importance of individual liberty and free markets
with originality, wit, and eloquence.

“Lane Filler and Ross Clark, each in their own way, channel the
spirit of Bastiat to communicate the importance of freedom to the
pursuit of happiness,” said Julian Morris, vice president of Reason
Foundation and founder of the Bastiat Prize.

Filler and Clark split $15,000 in prize money and received
engraved crystal candlesticks at the Reason Media Awards tonight in
New York City.

Dhiraj Nayyar of India Today was awarded
third-place and $1,000. Honorable mentions went to The
Economist’s Tamzin Booth, Stephanie Slade of
U.S. News and World Report, and The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution’s Kyle Wingfield.

Previous Bastiat Prize winners include Virginia Postrel, Anne
Jolis, Tom Easton, Bret Stephens, John Hasnas, A. Barton Hinkle,
Amit Varma, Jamie Whyte, Tim Harford, Mary O’Grady, Robert Guest,
Brian Carney, Sauvik Chakraverti and Amity Shlaes.

In celebration of Reason magazine founder
Lanny Friedlander, who passed away in 2011, the first-ever Lanny
Friedlander Prize was awarded
to Wired co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane
Metcalfe for their impact helping people understand the power of
free minds and free markets
through Wired’s analysis of technology,
business, and culture. 

Newsday’s Lane Filler and Ross Clark of The
Times and The Spectator are the co-winners of Reason
Foundation’s 2013 Bastiat Prize, which honors the writing that best
demonstrates the importance of individual liberty and free markets
with originality, wit, and eloquence.

“Lane Filler and Ross Clark, each in their own way, channel the
spirit of Bastiat to communicate the importance of freedom to the
pursuit of happiness,” said Julian Morris, vice president of Reason
Foundation and founder of the Bastiat Prize.

Filler and Clark split $15,000 in prize money and received
engraved crystal candlesticks at the Reason Media Awards tonight in
New York City.

Dhiraj Nayyar of India Today was awarded
third-place and $1,000. Honorable mentions went to The
Economist’s Tamzin Booth, Stephanie Slade of
U.S. News and World Report, and The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution’s Kyle Wingfield.

Previous Bastiat Prize winners include Virginia Postrel, Anne
Jolis, Tom Easton, Bret Stephens, John Hasnas, A. Barton Hinkle,
Amit Varma, Jamie Whyte, Tim Harford, Mary O’Grady, Robert Guest,
Brian Carney, Sauvik Chakraverti and Amity Shlaes.

In celebration of Reason magazine founder
Lanny Friedlander, who passed away in 2011, the first-ever Lanny
Friedlander Prize was awarded
to Wired co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane
Metcalfe for their impact helping people understand the power of
free minds and free markets
through Wired’s analysis of technology,
business, and culture. 

Domestic drone surveillance is an
inevitability, and while certain uses of the machines are unlikely
to cause any significant issues, there’s still the matter of what
law enforcement will (and does) do with them. One senator wants to

establish some rules. Courtesy of the National
Journal:

As the Federal Aviation Administration assesses whether
commercial skies are ready for commercial, nonmilitary drones in
the near future, some lawmakers are attempting to capitalize on the
data-surveillance debate by pushing for preemptive privacy
regulations on the still-grounded industry.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced a bill this week that
would require law-enforcement agencies to earn a warrant before
conducting any surveillance via any unmanned aircraft. The bill
would also make drone applications include statements detailing the
purpose and location of any drone and how any data collected is
intended to be used; it would also require the FAA to maintain a
website listing licenses issued and other information about
approved drones.

“Before countless commercial drones begin to fly overhead, we
must ground their operation in strong rules to protect privacy and
promote transparency,” Markey said in a statement. “This
legislation requires transparency on the domestic use of drones and
adds privacy protections that ensure this technology cannot and
will not be used to spy on Americans.”

Drone lobbyists worry that they’re going to be singled out and
want the rules to be “technology-neutral,” which, you know, might
not be a bad idea.

Read the full story
here.

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Two LAPD officers, Luis Valenzuela and James Nichols, are under
investigation for reportedly
using the threat of arrest to rape at least four women over the
course of several years. Two of the women reported working for the
officers as confidential informants, while one says she was
detained for prostitution and another was allegedly stopped while
she was simply out walking.

In a
search warrant affidavit released yesterday, an LAPD Internal
Affairs officer outlined the allegations against the officers.

According to the affidavit, the department was first made aware
of the officers’ alleged behavior in January 2010 when a woman who

worked as an informant for Valenzuela and Nichols reported
being detained by the plain clothes officers while she was out
walking; she was then forced to perform sex acts on one of the men.
The investigation was eventually dropped. 

A year later, another woman filed a complaint with LAPD
supervisors, alleging that Valenzuela raped her under almost
identical circumstances. While she was walking down the street in
Hollywood, Valenzuela ordered her into his undercover police
vehicle or be arrested. Once inside, Valenzuela allegedly told her,
“If you don’t suck my dick, you’re going to jail.” He then “grabbed
her by the back of her head and forced her to perform oral
copulation on him,” while Nichols sat in the front seat.

A sex worker also came forward, following an anonymous complaint
filed with the department that “unknown LAPD officers were
exchanging sexual favors from prostitutes in lieu of arrest.” The
woman claimed that Nichols raped her twice. Both times he detained
and handcuffed her, drove to a secluded area, and pulled out his
erect penis. At one point, Nichols allegedly asked the woman, “You
don’t want to go to jail today, do you?”

Additionally, a second confidential informant who worked with
Valenzuela and Nichols for over a year claimed that the men
insisted on using sex as a bargaining tool as she worked off her
arrest.

According to the
LA Times:

Sources familiar with the case…said police officials determined
from the investigation that there was enough evidence of misconduct
to have Nichols and Valenzuela fired.

Under city rules, the chief of police does not have the
authority to fire an officer outright. Instead, Chief Charlie Beck
ordered discipline hearing panels that will decide if the officers
are guilty of the allegations and, if so, whether they should be
fired or given a lesser punishment.

Valenzuela, a 16-year department veteran, and Nichols, who has
been an officer for nearly 13 years, were suspended with pay during
the investigation. They are no longer being paid as they await the
disciplinary hearing.

As the officers prepare for the hearing, Nichols’ attorney

claimed the women “have no credibility.”

The Lyndhurst school district in New
Jersey voted in a special meeting 7 to 2 in favor of a policy
banning students in Kindergarten through 8^th grade from
bringing any peanuts or peanut-containing foods onto school
grounds. High school students are now allowed to eat peanuts only
in the cafeteria. The district already had a restrictive peanut
policy, allowing the consumption of food containing peanut only in
designated classrooms by students in 4^th through
8^th grade, which came about  The anti-peanut policy
was first implemented after one child had an “apparent reaction.”
The parent of that child is a member of the school board. The local
Observer reports:

BOE member Jim Hooper told The Observer last week that
it was one of his sons who was stricken at the time. He elaborated:
“I have two sons who have peanut allergies. We don’t have
cafeterias in our elementary schools and sometime during the
2004-2005 school year, one of them who was attending Roosevelt
School where, at the time, the kids ate lunch in the gym, had a
reaction to something while he was in his gym class.”

The boy was taken to an area hospital and recovered, Hooper
said.

“If we had a new middle school and new cafeteria – which we’ve
tried to get [through a public referendum that failed] – where we
could come up with something that would allow non-allergic kids to
eat peanuts, then maybe we could control things better,” Hooper
said. “But we don’t. Some kids can go into anaphylactic shock from
being exposed to peanuts. So, it’s a safety issue. “I’m not
normally a guy who restricts things,” Hooper said, “but we’re
trying to protect the kids.”

The policy change came about after a “concerned parent” thought
the peanut policy wasn’t strict enough, says the school
superintendent. In a letter to parents she warned:

“Nut allergies can be life threatening. It takes only
the slightest smell, touch, or ingestion of peanuts, peanut butter,
peanut oil, a product that may contain trace amounts of peanuts or
a product that has been processed in a plant that also manufactures
peanut products, to cause a potential anaphylactic
reaction.

A few
years ago, a Harvard professor of medical sociology, Nicholas
Christakis, suggested that the increased worry over peanut
allergies resembled mass psychogenic illness, better known as
epidemic hysteria. Only about 150 people a year die from all food
allergies combined, he noted, similar to the number of people who
die from lightning strikes and earthquakes combined.

We’ll finally get a look at
some official enrollment numbers for Obamacare’s federal exchanges
next week. To the surprise of almost no one, Health and Human
Services Secretary said today that the actual enrollment totals
won’t be very high. Sebelius testified on the botched rollout of
Obamacare’s online insurance portals today. A few details,
via Politico:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today
acknowledged that long-awaited enrollment figures for the rocky
first month of Obamacare will be “very low.”

“We intend to give you as much information as we can validate,”
Sebelius told a Senate Finance Committee hearing where lawmakers
from both parties harshly criticized the rollout and her agency’s
lack of foresight about the massive problems. She said the initial
batch of enrollment figures being released next week cover “the
first month of enrollment” and will include both Medicaid and
health plan numbers in the new insurance exchanges.

So far, the administration, which is directly running
Obamacare’s insurance exchanges in 36 states, has released some web
traffic numbers, the number of applications submitted across all
federal and state exchanges, and the number of subsidy calculations
performed by the IRS. Federal officials have suggested that the
numbers they have released prove there’s strong interest in the
law. But the administration declined to given any official
enrollment totals. 

Both Sebelius and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney
previously refused to discuss enrollment figures on the grounds
that they didn’t have the numbers. Notes from daily meetings in the
administration’s daily Obamacare “war room” meetings
later revealed that senior administration officials had exact
numbers for the first few days—with just six individuals
successfully enrolling on day one, and a total of 248 enrollments
on day two. 

We’ll finally get a look at
some official enrollment numbers for Obamacare’s federal exchanges
next week. To the surprise of almost no one, Health and Human
Services Secretary said today that the actual enrollment totals
won’t be very high. Sebelius testified on the botched rollout of
Obamacare’s online insurance portals today. A few details,
via Politico:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today
acknowledged that long-awaited enrollment figures for the rocky
first month of Obamacare will be “very low.”

“We intend to give you as much information as we can validate,”
Sebelius told a Senate Finance Committee hearing where lawmakers
from both parties harshly criticized the rollout and her agency’s
lack of foresight about the massive problems. She said the initial
batch of enrollment figures being released next week cover “the
first month of enrollment” and will include both Medicaid and
health plan numbers in the new insurance exchanges.

So far, the administration, which is directly running
Obamacare’s insurance exchanges in 36 states, has released some web
traffic numbers, the number of applications submitted across all
federal and state exchanges, and the number of subsidy calculations
performed by the IRS. Federal officials have suggested that the
numbers they have released prove there’s strong interest in the
law. But the administration declined to given any official
enrollment totals. 

Both Sebelius and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney
previously refused to discuss enrollment figures on the grounds
that they didn’t have the numbers. Notes from daily meetings in the
administration’s daily Obamacare “war room” meetings
later revealed that senior administration officials had exact
numbers for the first few days—with just six individuals
successfully enrolling on day one, and a total of 248 enrollments
on day two. 

• It turns out unions might get
  Obamacare subsidies after all.
• Israeli President
  Shimon Peres has asked Secretary of State John Kerry not to
  screw-up Israel-Palestine peace negotiations.
• Two Los Angeles lawmakers want to ease
  restrictions on street vendors.
• 
  Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed
  responsibility for the killing of two French journalists in
  Mali.
• 
  Silk Road is reportedly back online.
• 
  Another man was anally
  probed by police after a traffic stop.

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Last week, European Commission President Jose
Manuel Barroso expressed concern over the rise of
nationalist, xenophobic, and protectionist rhetoric in Europe and
the possibility that populist parties could gain seats in next
year’s European Parliament elections.

Barroso’s concerns are well founded. Across
Europe, Eurosceptic and nationalist parties
have increased in popularity. Unfortunately for Barroso and
many of his fellow European lawmakers, the rise of ignorant,
populist, and sometimes violent xenophobic parties and movements in
Europe is to a large degree a consequence of government policies,
which, Matthew Feeney argues, do little to help promote social
cohesion and actually restrict the economic potential
offered by immigrants.  

View this article.