News You Can Use

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Stairway to bureaucracy: Toronto to tear down park stairs after man steps up to build them himself | CTV News

A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards.

Retired mechanic Adi Astl says he took it upon himself to build the stairs after several neighbours fell down the steep path to a community garden in Tom Riley Park, in Etobicoke, Ont. Astl says his neighbours chipped in on the project, which only ended up costing $550 – a far cry from the $65,000-$150,000 price tag the city had estimated for the job.

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The Feds Just Expanded Civil Asset Forfeiture 'Laws' Nationwide | Zero Hedge

When you're a government agency, asking for a tax increase is always a hassle. As Ryan McMaken notes, for the most part, taxpayers don't like taxes, and if asked if they want to pay more, they're likely to often say "no." Moreover, when public officials pass tax increases, they may face the wrath of taxpayers at the ballot box. For this reason, governments are always looking for ways to get revenue without having to use tax revenue.

One such 'hidden' method of seizing wealth from the taxpayers is through what is now called "civil asset forfeiture."

This occurs when a law enforcement agency seizes the assets - including real estate, cars, cash, and other valuables - from private citizens based merely on the suspicion that the person has committed a crime with the assets in question. No due process is necessary. No conviction in a court of law need occur. While it is technically possible to sue a government agency to reclaim one's possessions, this requires immense amounts of time and legal fees to pursue. Needless to say, civil asset forfeiture has become a lucrative source of income for law enforcement agencies. And, over the past 30 years, the practice has become widespread.

As Martin Armstrong detailed, between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. Now, according to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses.

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Should America’s Tech Giants Be Broken Up? - Bloomberg

Crazy? Maybe not. Taplin, 70, author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, knows digital media, having run the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Ten years before YouTube, he founded one of the first video-on-demand streaming services. He also knows media M&A as a former Merrill Lynch investment banker in the 1980s. He says Google is as close to a monopoly as the Bell telephone system was in 1956.

He has a point, judging by market-research figures. Alphabet Inc.’s Google gets about 77 percent of U.S. search advertising revenue. Google and Facebook Inc. together control about 56 percent of the mobile ad market. Amazon takes about 70 percent of all e-book sales and 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce. Taplin pegs Facebook’s share of mobile social media traffic, including the company’s WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram units, at 75 percent.

Amazon isn’t technically dominant, but it pervades our lives | The Seattle Times

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is already a huge part of many people’s lives. And its $13.7 billion deal for the organic grocer Whole Foods will likely bind its customers even more tightly.

“It kind of feels like they’re taking over so much commerce in our life,” said Erica McGivern, a Whole Foods and Amazon customer who lives in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered. “It’s intimidating.”

The acquisition could easily hurt both Amazon’s existing rivals and future startups that might one day challenge it. Yet experts don’t believe U.S. antitrust regulators will oppose the deal. That’s largely because it doesn’t create anything resembling a traditional monopoly.

Instead, it merely extends Amazon’s long quest to make shopping so convenient that consumers won’t even think about stepping away from its embrace. The more successful that strategy, the more Amazon can monopolize the attention and shopping dollars of its customers — which, of course, is perfectly legal.

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos unveils £75bn macho makeover | Daily Mail Online

He looks set to overtake Bill Gates as the world's richest man - but Amazon chief Jeff Bezos looks like he's also had an image overhaul.

As the online giant unveiled its new app service, Bezos, 53, caused a stir with his macho new look - particularly as it is in such contrast to his previous nerdy appearance when Amazon started out in the mid-90s. 

Back then Bezos ran the business from a garage at a house he had rented in Seattle, USA.

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Queens Couple Pleads Guilty to Enslaving Brother and Sister | NBC New York

A husband and wife from Queens have pleaded guilty to enslaving two children from Korea, forcing them to do housework, provide massages, and turn over pay from outside jobs, prosecutors in New York said Wednesday.

The Flushing couple — 54-year-old Jeong Taek Lee and his wife, 50-year-old Sook Yeon Park — were charged on two counts of labor trafficking. Lee was sentenced to five months’ probation, while his wife faces six months in prison followed by five years’ probation.

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Pet lovers rage over law that bans dog-sitting without license - NY Daily News

Pet lovers are barking mad over a little-known city rule that makes dog-sitting illegal in New York.

Health Department rules ban anyone from taking money to care for an animal outside a licensed kennel — and the department has warned a popular pet-sitting app that its users are breaking the law.

“The laws are antiquated,” said Chad Bacon, 29, a dog sitter in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with the app Rover. “If you’re qualified and able to provide a service, I don’t think you should be penalized.”

Bacon, a former zookeeper and wildlife researcher, signed up for the app to help make ends meet while he was between jobs, but did enough business that he now makes his living from it full-time.

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Can you say eugenics?

White County Inmates Given Reduced Jail Time If They Get A Vasectomy - NewsChannel 5 Nashville

Inmates in White County, Tennessee have been given credit for their jail time if they voluntarily agree to have a vasectomy or birth control implant, a popular new program that is being called “unconstitutional” by the ACLU.
 
On May 15, 2017 General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield signed a standing order that allows inmates to receive 30 days credit toward jail time if they undergo a birth control procedure.
 
Women who volunteer to participate in the program are given a free Nexplanon implant in their arm, the implant helps prevent pregnancies for up to four years. Men who volunteer to participate are given a vasectomy, free of charge, by the Tennessee Department of Health. 

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White County Inmates Given Reduced Jail Time If They Get A Vasectomy - NewsChannel 5 Nashville

Inmates in White County, Tennessee have been given credit for their jail time if they voluntarily agree to have a vasectomy or birth control implant, a popular new program that is being called “unconstitutional” by the ACLU.
 
On May 15, 2017 General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield signed a standing order that allows inmates to receive 30 days credit toward jail time if they undergo a birth control procedure.
 
Women who volunteer to participate in the program are given a free Nexplanon implant in their arm, the implant helps prevent pregnancies for up to four years. Men who volunteer to participate are given a vasectomy, free of charge, by the Tennessee Department of Health. 

[Joel]

Belle Plaine Allows Satanic Monument In City Park « WCCO | CBS Minnesota

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — A small Minnesota town is getting a lot of attention for a Satanic monument coming to their veterans park.

The monument going up for The Satanic Temple — which features an upturned helmet atop a black cube — will soon be at the site of the Veterans Memorial Park in Belle Plaine.

It is being built by a group of Satanists out of Massachusetts, and it will be the first Satanic monument on public property in United States history.

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IQ costs Oregon parents their kids, but is that fair? (Column) | OregonLive.com

For nearly four years, the Redmond couple has been fighting to prove to the state of Oregon that they are intellectually capable of raising their children. The Department of Human Services has removed both of their boys, saying the parents are too mentally limited to be good parents.

Fabbrini, 31, and Ziegler, 38, lost custody of their older son, Christopher, shortly after he was born. Five months ago, the state took their second child, newborn Hunter, directly from the hospital. Both are now in foster care. 

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This is happening in my neighborhood. Most people rent because corporations own the homes and they aren't interested in selling them, just renting them.

Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street - WSJ

SPRING HILL, Tenn.—When real-estate agent Don Nugent listed a three-bedroom, two-bath house here on Jo Ann Drive, offers came immediately, including a $208,000 one from a couple with a young child looking for their first home.

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UK girl fined for lemonade sale

LONDON — It's a time-honored tradition that's as American as apple pie, baseball and, well, selling homemade lemonade. In Britain, it led to a $200 fine. 

Andre Spicer's daughter was selling cups of lemonade near her home in east London when local government workers accused her of not having a commercial license. 

The girl is five. She made the lemonade herself. She wanted 65 cents a cup. (Yes, 65 cents is a lot. But this is London, one of the most expensive cities in the world.)

Spicer, a professor at the University of London, told British media that when confronted by the accusation his daughter burst into tears and said: "I've done a bad thing."

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News from The Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexico's spiraling violence reached new heights with 2,234 murders in June, the country's deadliest month in at least 20 years, according to government data.

Killings rose in states ranging from the tourist haven of Baja California Sur to the Gulf coast state of Veracruz and even in Mexico City, long considered a relative oasis from drug gang violence. For the first six months of 2017, authorities nationwide recorded 12,155 homicide investigations, or 31 percent more than the 9,300 during the same period last year.

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Toronto tears down elderly man’s $550 staircase, promises to build new one for $10K | National Post

A 73-year-old retired mechanic built the wooden staircase that led from a public parking lot on Bloor Street into Tom Riley Park in Toronto’s west end after the city estimated that the project would cost between $65,000 and $150,000.

Adi Astl visits the park every day with his partner, Gail Rutherford. He said he was tired of seeing his neighbours injure themselves going down a steep hill into the park that hosts a community garden.

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Houston man must pay child support for kid that's not his - Houston Chronicle

A Houston man is on the hook for $65,000 in child support for a child that's not his.
Gabriel Cornejo, 45, took a DNA test proving a child his ex-girlfriend had 16 years ago was not his.
The test was too late. In 2003, a child support court in Houston ruled that Cornejo owed his ex-girlfriend child support because, she claims, there was no way he wasn't the father. 

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Meet Tim Gill, Megadonor Behind LGBTQ Rights Movement Wins - Rolling Stone

More broadly, for Gill and his allies, nondiscrimination is the new front of the movement: a campaign that pits LGBTQ advocates against a religious right that responded to marriage equality by redoubling its efforts. The election of Donald Trump, who claims to support gay rights but stocked his administration with anti-LGBTQ extremists, has only emboldened those looking to erase the gains of the past decade. Gill refuses to go on the defense. "We're going into the hardest states in the country," he says. "We're going to punish the wicked."

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Teenagers Recorded a Drowning Man and Laughed

The video was shocking in Florida, where shocking videos seem like a genre. A group of teenagers laughed and watched as a man struggled in the water of a pond. The man drowned, and his body was not found for days.

The five teenagers did nothing to help him, not even call 911, but after examining the video, the authorities said this week that they did not break the law.

“In the state of Florida, there is no law in place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in distress,” Yvonne Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, said on Friday.

But the local police were not giving up. Later in the day, they said that they believed a different Florida law requires any person who is aware of a death to report it. Ms. Martinez said the authorities would recommend charges under that law.

The man, Jamel Dunn, 31, drowned July 9, and his body was found five days later when the police received a report that it was floating near the edge of the pond in a park in Cocoa, a town with 18,000 people near Orlando.
Continue reading the main story

As detectives investigated the death over the weekend, a family member of Mr. Dunn’s alerted them to the video, which the teenagers had begun sharing with friends.

The police asked the office of Phil Archer, the state attorney for Brevard and Seminole Counties, to review the footage. But the prosecutor’s office said it did not contain the evidence needed for a criminal prosecution.

In the statement, the prosecutor’s office said it was nonetheless “deeply saddened and shocked” by how Mr. Dunn died and the failure of the teenagers to help him in any way.

The low-quality, 2.5-minute cellphone video was provided to The New York Times by Mr. Archer’s office and earlier obtained by Florida Today. It shows a man flailing in the middle of a body of water as the teenagers describe his struggle and laugh at him from the shore. The teenagers are not visible.

One of the them, using an expletive, calls Mr. Dunn a junkie. Someone tells him not to expect any assistance: “Ain’t nobody going to help you, you dumb &!@$#. You shouldn’t have got in there,” he says.

About a minute into the video, the man appears to let out a whimper before submerging, fully, underwater. “He just died!” a voice can be heard saying, as the others begin to laugh.

Later, one of the teenagers appears to suggest that they call the police, only to be rejected by another.

The police identified and met with all five, who ranged in age from 14 to 18, Ms. Martinez said. None appeared to show much emotion. “What I saw was not remorseful,” she said.

“If they can sit there and watch somebody die in front of their eyes, imagine what they’re going to do when they get older?” she said about the teenagers.

It's unfortunate there isn't a law that requires them to assist, but that being said, we have free agency. I don't even know what a suitable punishment should be for these teens. This generation of kids is really disturbing.

We do know Jesus addressed issues like this during His mortal ministry. I'm guessing these kids don't know the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
https://www.lds.org/bible-videos/videos ... n?lang=eng

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Lana Del Rey confirms attempt to use witchcraft against Donald Trump

Lana Del Rey has confirmed that she attempted to place a hex on US President Donald Trump.

The singer sparked speculation that she was attempting to use witchcraft to get rid of Trump earlier this year, when she asked her Twitter followers to gather mysterious ‘ingredients’.

Now, she has confirmed it in a new interview with NME when quizzed about her love of the occult.

“Yeah, I did it. Why not? Look, I do a lot of s**t”, she replied.

“I’m in line with Yoko [Ono]and John [Lennon] and the belief that there’s a power to the vibration of a thought. Your thoughts are very powerful things and they become words, and words become actions, and actions lead to physical charges.”

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The billion-dollar palaces of Apple, Facebook and Google | Art and design | The Guardian

We know by now that the internet is a giant playpen, a landscape of toys, distractions and instant gratification, of chirps and squeaks and bright, shiny things – plus, to be sure, ugly, horrid beasties lurking in all the softness – apparently without horizon. Graphics – rounded corners, lower case, Google’s primary colours, Twitter’s birdie, Facebook’s shades of blue – enhance the innocence and infantilism. It is a world, as Jonathan Franzen once said, “so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self”. Until we chance on the bars of the playpen and find that there are places we can’t go and that it is in the gift of the grown-ups on the other side to set or move the limits to our freedom.

We’re talking here of virtual space. But those grown-ups, the tech giants, Apple, Facebook, Google and the rest, are also in the business of building physical billion-dollar enclaves for their thousands of employees. Here too they create calibrated lands of fun, wherein staff offer their lives, body and soul, day and night, in return for gyms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, climbing walls, basketball courts, running tracks and hiking trails, indoor football pitches, massage rooms and hanging gardens, performance venues, amiable art and lovable graphics. They have been doing this for a while – what is changing is the sheer scale and extravagance of these places.

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This App Tells You — and Maybe Someone Else — When You’re Depressed - Bloomberg

Woebot seems to care about me. The app asks me for a list of my strengths, and remembers my response so it can encourage me later. It helps me set a goal for the week -- being more productive at work. It asks me about my moods and my energy levels and makes charts of them.

“I’ll help you recognize patterns because ... (no offense) humans aren’t great at that,” Woebot tells me with a smirking smile emoji.

So Woebot knows that I felt anxious on Wednesday and happy on Thursday. But who else might know? Unlike a pedometer, which tracks something as impersonal as footsteps, many mental-health apps in development rely on gathering and analyzing information about a user’s intimate feelings and social life.

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‘They All Deserve to Die’: Caracas Militants Vow to Take Up Arms - Bloomberg

It was quiet in the dank basement in northwest Caracas, where dozens of young men and women sat on the floor and assembled their weapons. They poured asphalt, gasoline and paint into beer and pop bottles, tying knots in strips of fabric to fashion wicks.

Molotov cocktails are cheap and easy to make. Whether they’re doing the job is at the core of a bitter debate in Venezuela. After months of relentless demonstrations against President Nicolas Maduro, many militants are frustrated. The crew in the basement talked about it in hushed voices -- they didn’t want anyone in the middle-class neighborhood to find them out. It was clear, though, that many had reached their limit.

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Wisconsin Company To Implant Microchips In Employees | KSTP.com

A Wisconsin company is about to become the first in the U.S. to offer microchip implants to its employees.

Yes, you read that right. Microchip implants.

"It's the next thing that's inevitably going to happen, and we want to be a part of it," Three Square Market Chief Executive Officer Todd Westby said. 

The company designs software for break room markets that are commonly found in office complexes.

Just as people are able to purchase items at the market using phones, Westby wants to do the sam thing using a microchip implanted inside a person's hand.

"We'll come up, scan the item," he explained, while showing how the process will work at an actual break room market kiosk. "We'll hit pay with a credit card, and it's asking to swipe my proximity payment now. I'll hold my hand up, just like my cell phone, and it'll pay for my product."

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Brazilians funneled as "slaves" by US church, ex-members say | Charlotte Observer

SPINDALE, N.C.
When Andre Oliveira answered the call to leave his Word of Faith Fellowship congregation in Brazil to move to the mother church in North Carolina at the age of 18, his passport and money were confiscated by church leaders — for safekeeping, he said he was told.

Trapped in a foreign land, he said he was forced to work 15 hours a day, usually for no pay, first cleaning warehouses for the evangelical church and later working at businesses owned by the sect's senior ministers. Any violation of the rules risked the wrath of church leaders, he said, ranging from beatings to shaming from the pulpit.

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AI POLICE STATE: China to use technology to predict crimes BEFORE they happen | Science | News | Express.co.uk

Much like in the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, authorities in the east Asian country want to catch criminals before they have done any wrongdoing.

The police in the surveillance state have enlisted the help of AI to determine who is going to commit a crime before its happened.

Li Meng, vice-minister of science, said: “If we use our smart systems and smart facilities well, we can know beforehand… who might be a terrorist, who might do something bad.”

One of the ways China is hoping to peek into the future is with facial recognition firm Cloud Walk which is trialling software that gathers data on where people are what they are doing.