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My autistic brother created a new family Christmas tradition

Okay, so last year, my mom bought this Christmas moose that she lovingly named Barry

This is him

Cute, right?

Well, for whatever reason only known to my brother, he decided that he wanted to put Barry in different rooms of our house and it usually scares the shit out of whomever happens upon Barry; usually the person who finds him is the person that my brother wanted to scare.

So far, Barry has been found

On our dining room table

On my dad's side of my parents' bed

In my parents' closet

Outside their bedroom door (at 5 in the morning and scared my mother shitless)

Near the kitchen door

Near my fucking bed

At the bottom of my sister's stairwell

In our bathroom

And down the hallway

This has gone on for 9 days and it doesn't seem to show signs of stopping. Most of the time we know who gets Barry because it's always followed with a very loud "FUCKING BARRY!!!!!"

My brother is the funniest fucking person I know.

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On the day before police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her apartment in Louisville, Ky., a detective tried to persuade a judge that a former boyfriend of Ms. Taylor’s could be using her home to stash money and drugs.

The detective, Joshua Jaynes, said the former boyfriend had been having packages sent to Ms. Taylor’s apartment, and he even claimed to have proof: a postal inspector who had confirmed the shipments. Mr. Jaynes outlined all this in an affidavit and asked a judge for a no-knock warrant so that officers could barge into Ms. Taylor’s home late at night before drug dealers had a chance to flush evidence or flee. The judge signed off on the warrant.

But this week, federal prosecutors said Detective Jaynes had lied. It was never clear whether the former boyfriend was receiving packages at Ms. Taylor’s home. And Mr. Jaynes, the prosecutors said, had never confirmed as much with any postal inspector. As outrage over Ms. Taylor’s death grew, prosecutors said in new criminal charges filed in federal court, Mr. Jaynes met with another detective in his garage and agreed on a story to tell the F.B.I. and their own colleagues to cover up the false and misleading statements the police had made to justify the raid.

Amid protests over Ms. Taylor’s killing, much of the attention has focused on whether the two officers who shot her would be charged. But the Justice Department turned most of its attention on the officers who obtained the search warrant, highlighting the problems that can occur when searches are authorized by judges based on facts the police may have exaggerated or even concocted.

“It happens far more often than people think,” said Joseph C. Patituce, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor in Ohio. “We are talking about a document that allows police to come into the homes of people, oftentimes minorities, at all times of night and day.”

Ms. Taylor is far from the first person to die in a law enforcement operation authorized on what prosecutors said were police misstatements.

In Houston, prosecutors accused a police officer of falsely claiming that an informant had purchased heroin from a home in order to obtain a search warrant in 2019; officers killed two people who lived there during a shootout when they tried to execute the warrant, and only after that did the police chief at the time, Art Acevedo, say there were “material untruths or lies” in an affidavit for the warrant that led to the raid. The officer pleaded not guilty and the case is still pending.

In Atlanta, police officers barged into a home and fatally shot a 92-year-old woman, Kathryn Johnston, in 2006 after an officer lied in a search warrant affidavit about an informant buying drugs from her home.

And in Baltimore, a federal judge sentenced a detective to two and a half years in prison last month after prosecutors said he had lied in a search warrant affidavit about finding drugs in a man’s truck in order to justify a search of the man’s motel room.

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Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams officially handed over the looted antiquities to Cambodia’s ambassador to the United States, Keo Chhea, in front of press.

“We celebrate the return of Cambodia’s cultural heritage to the Cambodian people, and reaffirm our commitment to reducing the illicit trafficking of art and antiquities,” Williams said.

Among the 30 works was a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu deity Skanda, seated on a peacock, as well as a 10th-century sculpture of the Hindu god Ganesha. Both were stolen from Koh Ker, the ancient Khmer capital located 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the renowned temples of Angkor, Williams’s office said in a statement.

The antiquities, which range from the Bronze Age to the 12th century, had been stolen along with thousands of others during the wars in Cambodia in the 1970s and when the country reopened in the 1990s.

The federal prosecutor’s office said that thousands of Khmer statues and sculptures that were trafficked out of Cambodia over the course of decades to antique dealers in Bangkok, before being illegally exported to collectors, businessmen and even museums in Asia, Europe and the United States.

One of the dealers, American Douglas Latchford, was charged in 2019 with art trafficking, but the case was tabled after his death.

The New York prosecutor’s office is involved in the restitution of a vast array of works. From the summer of 2020 to the end of 2021, at least 700 pieces have been returned to 14 different countries, including Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Greece and Italy.

In 2021, American collector Michael Steinhardt returned about 180 antiquities stolen from around the world in recent decades as part of a deal with the government.

The pieces had a total value of $70 million.

The agreement between the US judicial system and Steinhardt, 80, allowed him to escape an indictment but prohibits him from acquiring works on the legal art market for the rest of his life.

Angkor, which at 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) is the largest archaeological site in the world, was the capital of the Khmer empire, which lasted from the ninth to 14th centuries.

The site, which recently reopened to tourists after a two-year pandemic-induced closure, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.

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A 17-year-old girl and her mother have been charged with a series of felonies and misdemeanors after an apparent medication abortion at home in Nebraska. The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication to induce abortion online, and then disposed of the body of the fetus. While the court documents, obtained by Motherboard, allege that the abortion took place before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June, they show in shocking detail how abortion could and will be prosecuted in the United States, and how tech companies will be enlisted by law enforcement to help prosecute their cases.

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For months now, the governors of Texas and Arizona have been sending charter buses full of migrants and refugees to Washington, D.C.'s Union Station, just a few blocks from the Capitol building.

When they disembark, they find neither the local nor federal government there to meet them.

[...]

So far, only local volunteers and nonprofit staff have greeted these buses at Union Station. Abel Nuñez is head of CARECEN, the Central American Resource Center, which stepped in to help people being bussed to D.C. when this all started.

"It was really crazy because they were just leaving them on the street," said Nuñez, who first showed up at the station on April 16 after getting a tip from the D.C. Mayor's Office on Latino Affairs that a bus was on its way.

"We knew it was on its way so we were there since 5 a.m. just waiting for them along with mutual aid organizations," he said, adding that the first bus didn't arrive till 8 a.m. "And it was incredible how shell-shocked these people were coming out of the buses."

The organization soon learned that the migrants had been let out of immigration detention centers at the border and spent very little time — sometimes less than a day — at a shelter or nonprofit at the border before being put on the bus for a 36-hour journey.

[...]

"Over there in Texas, when we were in the refugee camp, it was tougher because on the border there are military, so they treat the people like militants," said Ronald, the husband. "I felt that we were in a better place. If we didn't have her family I told her that we would stay here. We would stay in Washington."

Critics — including some Republican state and local officials — have called Abbott's plan to bus migrants to D.C. "political theater". Still, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey joined Texas and started busing migrants to the nation's capital in May.

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😀😀😀😀😀😀

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Clarissa-Jan Lim at BuzzFeed News:

Four current and former Louisville police officers have been charged with federal crimes in Breonna Taylor’s killing, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday.

Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany, Kelly Goodlett, and Brett Hankison have been charged with civil rights and obstruction offenses, unlawful conspiracies, and unconstitutional use of force.

The Department of Justice alleges that Jaynes and Meany, and Goodlett knowingly falsified the affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for Taylor’s home. They also covered up their unlawful conduct after Taylor was killed and lied to authorities, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also allege that former Louisville police detective Brett Hankison used excessive force during the raid on Taylor’s home, violating her rights and that of her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, as well as her neighbors.

“We share, but we cannot fully imagine, the grief felt by Breonna Taylor’s loved ones and all of those affected by the events of March 13, 2020,” Garland said at a news conference. “Breonna Taylor should be alive today.”

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was killed on March 13, 2020, by Louisville police executing a “no-knock” warrant in a narcotics raid. She and Walker were awoken by the pounding on the door, and Walker said that he thought it was an attempted break-in. He shot once into the darkness when police broke down the door, before officers opened fire, shooting Taylor at least eight times.

The warrant was related to Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, and her family has maintained that she had no involvement in the alleged drug dealing. No drugs were found in her apartment.

In the first indictment announced Thursday, federal prosecutors accused Jaynes and Meany of drafting and approving a false affidavit to obtain a search warrant for Taylor’s home, knowing that they lacked probable cause. They allegedly knew the affidavit falsely claimed that a drug trafficking operation received packages at Taylor’s address when that was not true.

The DOJ files federal charges on the four Louisville PD officers who killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020  that happened right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany, Kelly Goodlett, and Brett Hankison were the four current and former Louisville PD officers to face charges from the DOJ. 

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Outbreaks of the viral disease have been reported from 78 countries, mostly in Europe, and 98% of cases outside the countries in Africa where it is endemic have been reported in men who have sex with men, the WHO says. read more

But in Africa, where repeated outbreaks have been documented since the 1970s, the pattern of transmission is different, the experts said.

“Currently 60% of the cases that we have - the 350 - 60% are men, 40% are women,” said epidemiologist Dr Otim Patrick Ramadan, who was answering questions on monkeypox at a media briefing organised by the WHO’s regional office in Africa, and who was referring to the continent’s number of current cases.

He said that more than 80% of cases in Africa were in countries where transmission had happened before, and that typically people were initially exposed to the virus through contact with animals carrying it, before passing it to household members.

He added that women typically took care of sick people at home, which was one of the factors in the spread among women.

Dr Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, acting director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told a separate media briefing there was no evidence that transmission among gay men was a specific factor in African outbreaks.

“We’ve been collecting data on monkeypox since 1970 and that particular indicator, men having sex with men, has never come up as a significant issue here in Africa,” he said.

More than 18,000 cases of monkeypox have been reported worldwide in what the WHO has declared to be a global health emergency. read more

Monkeypox spreads via close contact and tends to cause flu-like symptoms and pus-filled skin lesions.

Public health agencies have stressed that although in many countries the outbreaks are concentrated among men who have sex with men, anyone can contract the virus through prolonged close contact or from particles on items such as bedding or towels.

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Alex Jones explained for non USAmericans:

Alex Jones is an infamous radio conspiracy theorist who has been a persistent element of American politics for the last 30 years. His radio show, Infowars, uses the tagline "tomorrow's news today" as Alex claims his information comes from a pantheon of secret sources within the nonexistent shadow government.

Infowars got it's big break in the early 2000s with 9/11. Alex claims to have predicted the attack beforehand, even though Osama Bin Laden had been all but outright stating his desire to commit a terrorist attack for months if not years beforehand. Alex also claimed that the UN was behind 9/11, claiming that it was done to destabilize the dollar. The Infowars guest on the day of 9/11 was actually Joe Rogan. That's not actually relevant, it's just a fun fact.

Throughout the years, Alex has been a dangerous radicalizing voice in America. He has claimed that every mass tragedy like a terrorist attack or school shooting has been a false flag, generally stating that the tragedy was engineered by the government to strip Americans of their gun rights. Recent court documents reveal that at its peak, Infowars was making 800,000$ profits a day.

He has been sued before, but has generally managed to skirt by on settlements and technicalities.

In 2012, a 20 year old named Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people in the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Alex claimed that no children died, and that the grieving parents and community members were actually paid actors. He has said equally reprehensible shit in the past, and nothing has come of it. But this time, Alex didn't stop there. He has been harassing the victims for nearly eight years now, claiming that the parents were agents of the deep state, even going so far as to dox the public addresses of the parents of the victims, and even send "reporters" (read, dangerous armed white supremacists) to their houses. The entire time he was doing this, he was running commercials for his brand of vitamin supplements.

The victims of his harassment are currently suing Alex for defamation. The trial is not going well for Alex. Alex is currently on lawyer 12. Alex's lawyers have proved themselves to be so incompetent, so unprepared, so blatantly disrespectful to the American legal system, that the judge has handed down what's called a "default judgement". Which essentially means "the court has decided that even if you are actually innocent, the court will legally be considering you guilty because of your rampant disrespect for the legal process." A default judgement was described by one of the lawyers as "approximately as rare as a football game being called on account of unicorns."

The firm that took the case for the victims side is doing so for free. They have extensively studied Alex and his history, and are currently in the middle of what could be described as a surgical disassembly.

On August 3rd, Alex's lawyer turned over nearly 2 years of Alex's phone records. These texts contain DEEPLY incriminating evidence. The victims lawyers asked Alex's lawyer "hey, we can use these right? Like these are admissible?" And either out of ignorance, incompetence, or potentially even intentionally, Alex's lawyer said yes.

It doesn't stop there.

Alex was instrumental to the January 6th coup attempt that happened here recently. One of the victims lawyers was heard on a hot mic saying that they intended to turn the evidence over to law enforcement, heavily implying that Alex may have implicated himself in some nigh-treasonous crime.

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https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/04/politics/desantis-suspends-prosecutor/index.html

(CNN)Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday suspended Tampa's elected prosecutor, Andrew Warren, for pledging not to use his office to go after people who seek and provide abortions or on doctors that provide gender affirming care to transgender people.

DeSantis also accused Warren of not pursuing criminals to the fullest extent of his powers as the state attorney of Hillsborough County.

"To take a position that you have veto powers over the laws of the state is untenable," DeSantis said at a press conference in Tampa surrounded by law enforcement.

The move by DeSantis, a Republican, to remove a Democrat twice elected by Hillsborough voters drew an immediate and sharp rebuke from Democratic state lawmakers and officials. Minority Leader Sen. Lauren Book said DeSantis was "behaving more like a dictator than 'America's governor.'" And Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democratic candidate for governor, called Warren's suspension "a politically motivated attack on a universally respected state attorney democratically elected to exercise prosecutorial discretion."

Republicans: I believe in small government, but only when it benefits me.

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When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work.

They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.

"It was beyond promise," said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. "We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected."

But that's not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.

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Excerpt from this story from National Geographic:

The sun rises over the salt marshes on James Island, turning the low-hanging clouds a rich orange and deepening the green hue of the grass blades. Bill “Cubby” Wilder, the unofficial mayor of Mosquito Beach, has already arrived. He stands by his pickup on the rocky shoulder of the asphalt road, chatting with several workers tasked with restoring buildings that have clearly seen better days. “I like to get up and get going early,” he says with an easy chuckle.

Less than 10 minutes from downtown Charleston, Mosquito Beach juts into the marsh on Sol Legare, the tiny barrier island wedged between James and Folly islands. As he strolls along the marsh’s edge, the 82-year-old retired schoolteacher’s love for the place is evident.

He swells with pride as he recounts his family’s role in turning this strip of undeveloped land and dirt paths into one of the most prominent Black beaches of the Jim Crow era. Then, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, buses brought hundreds of people from around the Low Country to dance, eat, drink, and see and be seen, Wilder says.

“We would dive off the pier and go swimming and have boat races when the tide was high,” he says. ”We could count on the tides being higher in September and October, but in the last 20 years it’s nothing to see flooding and the tide high every other month.”

Latitude, topography, and proximity to the Atlantic Ocean make the stretch of coastline from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida—called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor— particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise, storm frequency and intensity, higher temperatures, and a warmer, more acidic ocean.

The area was dubbed the Low Country because much of it sits at or below sea level, which has risen 10 inches since 1950 and is currently increasing about one inch every two years. According to a 2019 state report on sea level rise, Charleston floods during high tide at least once a week, compared to once a month in the 1990s. Exacerbating the difficulties are the speed and placement of new homes and businesses. Those data points make the Gullah Geechee people who live here among the most climate-threatened in the world.

“In the course of a single generation we’ve seen unprecedented disruption and unimaginable change,” says Kevin Mills, president and chief executive officer of the South Carolina Aquarium, a coastal research, education, and conservation museum. “What we used to politely call nuisance flooding is now a recurrent threat to commerce, transportation, and public health, and storm surge threatens historic neighborhoods.”

That realization has sparked collaboration among scientists, environmental groups, government agencies, NGOs, and community members like Wilder to look for ways to shore up and protect the coastline. Efforts are underway to repopulate oyster reefs, which dissipate wave strength and prevent erosion, and to preserve the salt marsh for its ability to help mitigate climate change by storing carbon, absorbing tremendous amounts of rainwater, and maintaining the coastline through soil storage.

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since polygraphs aren’t admissible in court because they’re nonsense junk science, a primary purpose they serve in interrogations is essentially using them as a prop to ramp up the pressure on a suspect. it’s all a big performance and no one should ever submit to one if they have the option not to

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I’m going to scream. Pushback on the narrative that climate breakdown can be averted by individual decisions centres around the fact that NORMAL PEOPLE do not contribute to a significant amount of carbon emissions cos the average NORMAL PERSON emits 7 tons of CO2 a year. Not Taylor fucking Swift who has emitted over 8000 tons of emissions this year SO FAR. Her CO2 emissions from private jet use alone are equivalent to that of TWO THOUSAND normal people. We absolutely should be blaming individuals if those particular individuals are emitting two thousand people’s worth of emissions.