Newspaper de Jour

[msfreeh]

#IStandWithAhmed: Musicians show solidarity with boy arrested for making a clock
Pharrell Williams, Janelle Monáe and Questlove among those who shared online support for 14-year-old schoolboy Ahmed Mohad_
Thursday 17 September 2015 04.41 EDT

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/s ... ed-mohamed" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/l ... ain-part-1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

With Little Fanfare, FBI Ramps Up Biometrics Programs (Yet Again ...
EFF-September 18 2015
In the last few years, FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next ...

[msfreeh]

Heidi Fleiss -- I Have Nothing To Do With My Black Book Auction
HEIDI FLEISS
I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MY BLACK BOOK AUCTION
9/20/2015 12:04 PM PDT BY

Heidi Fleiss claims she has nothing to do with the eBay sale of her notorious black book … in fact, she’s pointing the finger at an elusive thief she thinks could have stolen it from an FBI evidence room.
Fleiss was at the Moonlite BunnyRanch Saturday night with owner Dennis Hof, and got in front of a camera to give her side of the story.
Here's what doesn't make sense ... 20 years ago Fleiss claimed someone had stolen her book, but now she's dragging the FBI into it?? Something doesn't add up.
In any event, Fleiss' pal Hof says he won't let it go public, and you won't believe how much he's willing to pay to do that.
Let's just say it's way more than Elvis' Rolls Royce


Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2015/09/20/heidi-fle ... z3mLImhtAP" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

FBI agent may have stolen murdered millionaire heiress' fortune ...
New York Daily News-
An FBI agent who investigated the 1977 murder of a millionaire heiress may have swiped part of her fortune and hidden it in a Swiss bank ...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2369835" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

https://wikileaks.org/Assange-statement-on-the.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Wilkileaks

[msfreeh]

Lobster
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue70.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

CALIFORNIA STORIES SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER
L.A. Now
Gun discounts for LAPD unit may have violated ethics rules
Kate Mather

Los Angeles police officers in a unit that evaluated Smith & Wesson handguns for a new department contract used their relationship with the gun company to privately purchase discounted pistols for members of the unit, a possible violation of city ethics rules, according to a report made public...

http://www.latimes.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

Monday, September 21, 2015

http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


China Probes Ex-Official Who Oversaw Clinical Trials for Bribery/ Bloomberg
Drugs and devices licensed in the US often rely on data generated overseas for FDA approval. It should come as no surprise that FDA oversight of foreign clinical trials may be weak or nonexistent, and that drug/device approvals today seem more and more likely to be based on data whose reliability is far from assured...especially when the stakes are so high. The cost of doing business for big pharma has included fines of billions of dollars, when they are occasionally found out.

From the point of view of a physician, prescribing newly licensed drugs to patients is a nerve-wracking activity, as I have no assurance they are as safe and effective as claimed. And they are assuredly more expensive than the old standards. From Bloomberg:


Chinese prosecutors announced a bribery investigation into a former national health official who for at least a decade oversaw clinical drug trials and implemented hospital policies. Wang Yu, the former director of the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s bureau of medical administration, has been arrested and is being investigated by prosecutors in the southwestern province of Sichuan, China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate said on its website Tuesday. Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Wang was suspected of violating Communist Party discipline, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named because the probe wasn’t public.

Before retiring last year, Wang was responsible for supervising trials of drugs and medical devices, as well as drafting policies for medical institutions. The prosecutor’s statement Tuesday provided no details about bribery allegations against him.

The health industry is facing greater scrutiny in China, with the government in September fining British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc 3 billion yuan ($484 million) for paying bribes to win customers in the world’s most populous country. Authorities also last year started a preliminary probe into the business practices of foreign medical-equipment makers, people familiar with the matter said earlier this month.

Posted by Meryl Nass, M.D.

[msfreeh]

http://www.mynews4.com/news/story/There ... 0AFZA.cspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

October 2, 2015
Jeremy Corbyn’s Heroic Refusal to be a Nuclear Mass Murderer

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/ ... -murderer/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Jeremy Corbyn’s first Labour Conference as party leader and Leader of the Opposition was looking like an overwhelming success – the best in many years.

[msfreeh]

http://plenglish.com/index.php?option=c ... 1&Itemid=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Betrayal Never an Option , Says Cuban Hero in Ecuador PDF Imprimir E-Mail


By Nestor Marin

Imagen activaQuito, Sep 4 (Prensa Latina) Gerardo Hernández, one of the five Cubans held in US prisons for fighting terrorism, said here today that betraying was never an option to them.
There was no other option than to follow the path we followed, we never thought of betraying our country, said Gerardo, who is visiting Ecuador accompanied by his comprades of struggle Ramon Labanino, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero and fernando Gonzalez, at an invitation from President Rafael Correa.

Regarded as heroes in their country, The Cuban Five, as they are known internationally, were arrested by the FBI on Sep, 1998, in Miami, while monitoring Florida-based terrorist groups operating against Cuba.

"We were accomplishing a misison, and we were aware of the risks we were facing, but above all, we knew why we were facing them," said Gerardo in remarks to Prensa Latina.

He recalled that at the time of the arrest, the group included ten people, but five of them yielded to pressure exerted by their captors and decided to collaborate with the FBI, but the rest remain firm and were sent to jail in isolation for 17 months.

During that period, the Cuban Five decided, along with their lawyers appointed by the US government, to turn the trial into a denunciation of the terrorist plans forged against Cuba from US territory and establish the urgence of their presence there.

Sometimes this is talked about in general terms, but the missions have a full name and specific essence because the explosives were there, the plans to plant bombs and down planes were there, and anyone consulting the original papers of the trial can verify this, he said.

Gerardo was given a doub le life prison sentence plus 15 years, while Ramon and Antonio were sentenced for life, and Rene and Fernando were given 15 and 19 year sentences, respectively.

Not even today after having served 16 years in prison we would regret having given a step like thism said Gerardo, who, along with his comrades, was awarded recognition as Hero of the Republic of Cuba by President Raul Castro.

But neither would The Cuban Five ever forget the people who for years mobilized aroudn the world to demand their release, and that's why they are

[msfreeh]

George and Candy Gonzales moved to Belize from Maine.
She is a lawyer. He is a activist in Social Justice issues.


http://belizeanminds.blogspot.com/2015_ ... chive.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

http://www.climatecentral.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

http://m.bangkokpost.com/news/725692?re ... 20%2Cd.cWw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
News

Child sex case dropped, but a life still left in ruins

On June 8 last year, the life that American engineer Christopher Lee Hobbs had been building for himself and his family came tumbling down. The 56-year-old was arrested in Pattaya on six counts of molesting two underage boys — a Thai and a Cambodian — and faced the prospect of 42 years in prison.

Published: 11/10/2015 at 01:16 AM


He was paraded before local and national media and police and his NGO accusers were lauded for catching a child abuser.

But more than one year later police and the Pattaya Prosecutor’s Office determined the case was a wrongful arrest. It was found that convicted American paedophile Steven Strike, wanted on sex offences in Hawaii, had been living in the Pattaya townhouse where the boys alleged they were abused on one occasion.

Mr Hobbs believes that the case against him was not only one of mistaken identity, but also a “sting” operation involving US FBI agents, local police and a Pattaya-based NGO specialising in child protection, to boost their standing. He is now trying to launch multiple lawsuits seeking hundreds of millions of baht in compensation for damage to his reputation.

Mr Hobbs had spent four years in Thailand prior to his arrest, working for a Japanese multinational which did sub-contracting work for major companies and agencies such as the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand. He earned an annual salary of seven million baht and married a Thai woman, Somporn, 36, who he has a son with.

“All I really want is a simple apology after what they have put me through,” Mr Hobbs told Spectrum. “When the police held the press conference and spread the false information, it seemed so easy to do.

“But now that I have won that case and proved that I am not guilty, no one cares about helping me gain my reputation back.”

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

During the working week, Mr Hobbs’ main residence was a condo on Sukhumvit Soi 11 in Bangkok. After the birth of his son in 2011, he decided he didn’t want his child to grow up in a big city. He bought a home in South Pattaya, which was run as a guesthouse, earning income for the family on top of the restaurant they already owned in his wife’s name.

Mr Hobbs, who also holds Canadian citizenship, was busy at his job in Bangkok and says he only visited his family, who had relocated to Pattaya, every other weekend. In a police interview, a close Bangkok friend of Mr Hobbs, identified only as Stefan, said the engineer was working 12-hour days and had little time for socialising apart from “one to two beers” after work. He said Mr Hobbs was a married man who only seemed attracted to women.

Three years ago, Mr Hobbs met another friend in Pattaya, UK national Dan Clark, who he entered into a business partnership with. That friendship would lead to the predicament he is in today. Mr Hobbs agreed to set up a fruit juice business with Mr Clark, lending him the money to import juicing machines from China and a second-hand van for deliveries. To protect his investment, Mr Hobbs said the van was purchased and registered under his name.

Mr Clark had also made a new acquaintance: a tall, bearded, middle-aged American called “Steve”, who rented a room above the three-storey townhouse from which he operated the juice business, in the gated Pattaya community of Midtown Villa.

The American was Steven Strike, 46, who had fled from Maui, Hawaii, after being indicted there for the sexual abuse of a boy aged under 14. Eight days after his arrest, Strike obtained a new passport and fled to Thailand

[msfreeh]

Great Read A lawyer, a 7-foot tall Chinese boxer and the fight no one expected


http://www.latimes.com/local/great-read ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

http://www.occurrencesforeigndomestic.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Daniel_Hopsicker" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... iak-alaska" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


'It's a whole other world': religious pilgrims venture deep into Alaska forest

Pilgrims from as far as Russia descend up the small town of Kodiak to honor a Russian Orthodox saint who lived and died in the archipelago centuries ago

[msfreeh]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/p ... -1.2409531" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

South Carolina
South Carolina sheriff's deputy on leave after dragging student from her desk


http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... oom-arrest" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Video shows officer making forceful arrest in case that stokes tensions among black and white parents in Richland County School District Two
Sheriff’s deputy manhandles high school student in classroom arrest.


Tuesday 27 October 2015 10.51 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 27 October 2015 11.16 EDT


Video of a South Carolina sheriff’s deputy manhandling a black student in a high school classroom has prompted an investigation by local authorities after the footage was widely circulated on Monday.

The video shows a school monitor reported to be Ben Fields – who is also a Richland county sheriff’s deputy – confronting the female student.

When she refuses to leave her seat in a classroom at Spring Valley high school in Columbia, he tells her: “I’ll make you.” He then wraps his arm around her neck, flips her desk backward, then drags her across the floor. He arrested both the girl, and a male student.

According to a classmate, the student in question had peeked at her cellphone during class. When the teacher tried to take the phone away, the student refused to hand it over, and when a school administrator told her to leave the class, she stayed at her desk, which is when Fields was summoned.


The sheriff’s department has placed Fields on administrative leave while it investigates the case.

A spokeswoman for the school district, Libby Roof, said on Monday night that the administration was “deeply concerned”. “We are investigating it, along with the sheriff’s office,” she said.

A spokesman for the Richland county sheriff did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Steve Benjamin, the mayor of Col

[msfreeh]

blog by retired DA in Mass

viscerating the FBI

http://thetrialofwhiteybulger.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.2415881" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Lesbian couple says Hawaii cop attacked, arrested them for kissing in grocery store: 'You girls can't do that in here!'






Updated: Thursday, October 29, 2015, 8:46 AM



Courtney Wilson (l.) and Taylor Guerrero filed a lawsuit against the Honolulu cop who allegedly beat and arrested them for kissing in a grocery store. Jennifer Sinco Kelleher/AP
Courtney Wilson (l.) and Taylor Guerrero filed a lawsuit against the Honolulu cop who allegedly beat and arrested them for kissing in a grocery store.

A vacationing lesbian couple said a Hawaii cop harassed, beat and arrested them for kissing in a grocery store — and then their tropical getaway turned into a five-month detainment when they were forced to stay on the island as a condition of their release from jail.

The Honolulu Police Department opened an internal investigation Wednesday, a day after Courtney Wilson and Taylor Guerrero filed a lawsuit against Officer Bobby Harrison and the city.

The Los Angeles couple said they stopped into a Foodland to pick up some snacks in March, the second day of their first-ever trip to Hawaii. The happy couple held hands as they shopped and exchanged cheek kisses in the aisle.

“We were just dancing, being goofy, you know. Gave her a hug. We were just like, ‘hey, we’re happy to be here,'” Wilson told Hawaii News Now.

Harrison, who was off-duty but shopping in his police uniform, witnessed the grocery store romance and started yelling at the women, they said.

“He was like, ‘You girls! You girls can't do that in here!'” Guerrero said.

The couple said they walked away and kept shopping, but when they were affectionate again, Harrison threated to have them thrown out of the shop and followed them to the checkout line.

Wilson, confused about what they had done that might get them booted from the store, called police. As she was on the phone with dispatch, Harrison allegedly grabbed Wilson by the waist.

“He was bumping his belly against Courtney,” Guerrero said. “He said, ‘You girls don't know how to act. You don't know the difference between a motel and a grocery store.’”
The L.A. couple said they were picking up snacks at a Foodland on the second day of their March vacation. Hawaii News Now
The L.A. couple said they were picking up snacks at a Foodland on the second day of their March vacation.

When Guerrero tried to get in between her girlfriend and the officer, the situation turned violent, the women said in their lawsuit. Harrison shoved Guerrero to the ground and punched Wilson in the face.

The off-duty cop didn’t have his handcuffs, so

[msfreeh]

couple of stories



1.


http://lovefm.com/2015/10/30/local-cops ... -analysis/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Home / Belize Police Department / Local Cops Get Training From FBI on Intelligence Analysis
Local Cops Get Training From FBI on Intelligence Analysis
By Renee Trujillo
FBI Training 1

There was a closing ceremony for Basic Intelligence Analysis Training at the Biltmore Plaza for a group of policemen and women of the Belize Police Department. The week long training was provided by the United States Embassy, with training from the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Derrick Stivers, an Intelligence Analysis of the FBI spoke on the types of training that the police officers were engaged in.

DERRICK STIVERS

“We’ve covered a wide range of topics this week. Intelligence analysis is all about trying to predict what threat might be coming next so we try to take a look at historical data and what is currently going on and try to predict the next threat so that we can prevent it from happening in the first place. One of the key parts of being an intelligence analyst is to think critically. Like you said, thinking like a criminal would to try to anticipate what they do is key but as people we tend to rely a lot on our assumptions and so we want to make sure that we are sup


2.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/k ... dence.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Tainting Evidence
Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab
By JOHN F. KELLY and PHILLIP K. WEARNE
The Free Press

Read the Review

Prologue: Examining the Examiners

The tall, graying legislator strode past the American flag onto the platform of Committee Room 226. With a quick adjustment of his black-and-white spotted tie, he seated himself at the center of a semicircular dais under the carved eagle on the hardwood-paneled wall. As the lights of six television cameras were switched on and photographers and cameramen began to jostle for position, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa began to read slowly from three sheets of paper. It was his opening statement as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight into the Courts at hearings entitled, "A Review of the FBI Laboratory: Beyond the Inspector General's Report."

His purpose, he explained, was to help restore public confidence in federal law enforcement in general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular. But the facts the senator went on to outline hardly seemed likely to do that. The hearings had had to be postponed twice, he stated, because of the FBI's refusal to cooperate by supplying requested documentation and by making FBI employees available to testify without the bureau's lawyers present. This, Senator Grassley said, was despite FBI director Louis Freeh's appeal for more oversight to another congressional subcommittee just four months earlier, when he had stated that the FBI could be the most dangerous agency in the country if "not scrutinized carefully."

Senator Grassley said the FBI was being hypocritical. "It is not the message that rings true. It's the actions. The Bureau's actions contradict the director's assertion that it is inviting oversight. And until the actions match the words, the ghosts of FBI past are still very much in the present." He went on to say that he expected the requested documentation to arrive the moment the hearings finished. In fact, within an hour, Senator Grassley had to apologize to the packed committee room for being "so cynical." The documents had arrived but were so heavily redacted as to be virtually useless, he said, holding up page after page of blacked-out FBI memos.

Senator Grassley's hearings took place in the wake of the release five months earlier of a damning 517-page report by the Inspector General's Office of the Department of Justice, the result of an eighteen-month investigation into the FBI laboratory. The investigators had included a panel of five internationally renowned forensic scientists, the first time in its sixty-five-year history that the FBI lab, considered by many -- not least, by itself -- the best in the world, had been subject to any form of external scientific scrutiny. The findings were alarming. FBI examiners had given scientifically flawed, inaccurate, and overstated testimony under oath in court; had altered the lab reports of examiners to give them a pro-prosecutorial slant, and had failed to document tests and examinations from which they drew incriminating conclusions, thus ensuring that their work could never be properly checked.

FBI lab management, meanwhile, had failed to check examinations and lab reports; had overseen a woefully inadequate record retention system; and had not only failed to investigate serious and credible allegations of incompetence but had covered them up. Management had also resisted any form of external scrutiny of the lab and had failed to establish and enforce its own validated scientific procedures and protocols -- the same ones that had been issued by managers themselves in an effort to combat the lab's known shortcomings in the first place.

But the IG's report, shocking as its conclusions were, was severely limited. It had looked at just three of seven units in the FBI lab's Scientific Analysis Section, a fraction of the lab's total of twenty-seven units.* The IG had been mandated to look into the specific allegations of just one man, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, a Ph.D. chemist and FBI supervisory special agent who for eight years, until 1994, had worked solely on explosives-residue analysis -- trace detection, and identification of the residue left behind by explosions in the lab's Materials Analysis Unit.

For nearly ten years, until he was suspended and put on "administrative leave" just weeks before the IG's report was published in April 1997, Whitehurst had reported his own observations and what others had told him. Underpinning his complaints and their persistence were three things: the unscientific nature of so much of what was being passed off as science in the FBI lab; the culture of pro-prosecution bias rather than scientific truth that pervaded the lab, including the possibly illegal withholding of exculpatory information; and the complete inability of the FBI lab or its management to investigate itself and correct these problems.

Not only had the IG report confined itself to Whitehurst's admittedly limited sphere of knowledge within the FBI lab, it had no mandate to look into the evidentiary matters raised, to ask how pa

[msfreeh]

Shrimp Boy Chow and FBI to clash in classic San Francisco trial



Posted: 11/01/2015 04:59:48 PM PST


http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts ... lassic-san" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... um.php?f=8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;