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#confirmed the founding text of the United Nations

mediaheights · 6 months

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On October 24, which is United Nations Day, they celebrate the anniversary of the UN Charter's adoption in 1945. The majority of its signatories, including the five permanent members of the Security Council, confirmed the founding text of the United Nations, which led to the creation of the organization.

#uno #UnitedNations #MEDIAHEIGHTS #digitalmarketingcompany #searchengineoptimization #content #instagrammarketing #advertisingagency #web #MEDIAHEIGHTSPRCOM #best #public #relation #agency #in #chandigarh #mohali #punjab #north #india #buildingrelationships #globally #customer #internetbanding — at media heights #smo #branding #facebook #twitter #marketingonline #brand #searchengineoptimization #internetmarketing #follow #digitalagency #marketingagency #motivation #digitalmarketingtips #onlinebusiness #websitedesign #marketingonline #brand #searchengineoptimization #content #instagrammarketing #advertisingagency #web #technology #onlinebranding #branding360degree #SEO #SEObrandingagency #websiteranking #websitetrafic #Digitalmarketing #mediaheights #OnlineAdvertising #instagrammarketing #advertisingagency #web #marketingonline #brand

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beardedmrbean · 2 months

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A highly anticipated report from the United Nations’ top investigative agency is poised to shed new light on Israel’s allegations that U.N. workers participated in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks, with the fate of the U.N.’s aid agency for Palestinians hanging in the balance.

In the weeks since Israel issued the shocking allegations, key donor nations including the United States have suspended funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, whose role providing food, water, medicine and shelter in the Gaza Strip is a critical lifeline for civilians. Yet the allegations have fueled a raging debate about the limited evidence Israel has produced.

The allegations were conveyed in Israeli officials’ public statements as well as a diplomatic document known as the “UNRWA File,” which was not distributed widely but was given to NBC News.

They center on the claim that at least a dozen UNRWA staffers took part in the Oct 7. attacks and that 1,468 employees — or more than 11% — are “active members” of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second most prominent militant group in Gaza. NBC News can’t verify the identities of the staffers Israel says participated in the attacks, or the veracity of the claims about the evidence.

An initial report from the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services, which investigates wrongdoing by U.N. staff, is expected in the coming weeks. The U.N. secretary-general’s spokesperson said late last month that the office was still waiting for Israel to hand over evidence and expected to receive it “shortly.” No further updates have been released.

“The investigation remains ongoing,” said U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, adding that investigators planned to visit Israel “soon.” The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, says it’s waiting for that report before deciding whether to restore badly needed funding to UNRWA.

Yet some experts doubt the U.N. can competently investigate itself.

Peter Gallo, a former OIOS investigator, said that the agency’s authority is limited to investigating and punishing U.N. employees and has no mandate to force broader UNRWA reforms. In this case, UNRWA has already terminated the staffers initially accused by Israel.

“So they have no control over them,” Gallo told NBC News. “They can’t require them to turn up for an interview. They can’t threaten them with anything, because they’ve already been fired.”

The UNRWA allegations mark a new low in a fraught relationship between Israel and the U.N. that has further deteriorated since the start of the war.

Israeli officials have long campaigned for UNRWA to be disbanded. A recent UNRWA report also alleged Palestinian detainees were physically and sexually abused in Israeli custody, while a separate U.N. report found “convincing” evidence that Israeli hostages in Gaza have been raped.

NBC News takes a look at the UNRWA allegations:

Israel’s allegation: Staffers participated in Oct. 7 attacks

In late January, Israel accused 12 UNRWA staffers of involvement in the attacks, according to UNRWA and Israeli officials’ public statements. In the following days, UNRWA said two of those 12 were confirmed dead, although it’s not clear how they died., although it’s not clear how they died.

The number later grew to 13, according to a diplomatic memo known as the “UNRWA File,” first referenced by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz during the Munich Security Conference in February.

According to a copy of the 13-page document, Israel alleges that six staffers infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7, while another four are said to have helped kidnap Israelis. The memo alleges three employees were summoned by text message the day before the attacks to “arrive armed at the assembly point.”

In addition to those 13, the memo says that “at least one UNRWA employee supplied logistical support to the infiltration attack and an additional employee was directed to establish an OPS room on Oct. 8,” referring to an operations room.

Israel’s defense minister later raised the number of those allegedly involved further, saying more than 30 UNRWA employees either killed Israeli civilians, kidnapped soldiers or helped detain them.

What Israel says:

In mid-February, Israel’s military identified the 12 staffers initially accused of involvement, including their photos, dates of birth and job titles. Israel named two that it said were found or arrested inside Israel.

The disclosure included a photo and CCTV footage Israel said showed one of the staffers, an UNRWA social worker, inside Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7 helping move the limp body of an Israeli into a Jeep.

NBC News verified the location of the CCTV footage as Kibbutz Be’eri, but can’t independently confirm the identities of the staffers named by Israel.

An intelligence dossier containing what Israel says is additional evidence was also transmitted to the U.S. and other allies, but has not been made public.

Last week, Israel’s military also released two phone recordings it says further prove UNRWA staffers’ involvement.

In one, a man Israel says was an UNRWA teacher says in Arabic, “We have female captives” and “I captured one.” In the other recording, another man also identified by Israel as an UNRWA teacher says, “I’m inside with the Jews.”

NBC News can’t independently confirm who is speaking in the recordings, or whether these were edited.

What the U.N. says:

On Jan. 26, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “horrified” by the allegations and immediately launched an investigation.

UNRWA said it immediately fired 10 of the 12 staffers initially accused by Israel who were still alive. It has promised that anyone involved in terrorism “will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.”

UNRWA said Israel hadn’t presented it with any evidence substantiating that more than 30 staffers were involved. It noted that this number would be a tiny fraction of the agency’s roughly 13,000 staffers in Gaza.

Israel’s allegation: UNRWA’s staff is filled with Hamas operatives

In addition to having an armed wing, Hamas is a social movement and the governing authority in Gaza.

Last week, Israel said 450 UNRWA employees are military operatives enrolled in Gaza terror groups.

What Israel says:

Israel has not publicly provided evidence documenting large numbers of UNRWA employees being members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

What the U.N. says:

UNRWA says it first learned about this allegation in the media and has received no evidence from Israel or any other nation to support it. It says it has zero tolerance for terrorism and that the “overwhelming majority” of staff adhere to U.N. principles.

The agency says it conducts “detailed reference checks” on recruits and regularly provides lists to Israel of all its staffers, including their names, job titles and I.D. numbers. UNRWA says Israel has never previously voiced concern about anyone on the list — including the 12 originally accused of participating in Oct. 7.

Last week, UNRWA alleged in a report reviewed by Reuters that some UNRWA staffers, while in Israeli detention during the war, were coerced by Israel into falsely confessing ties between the agency and Hamas, and the involvement of UNRWA staffers in Oct. 7.

UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma confirmed to NBC News that UNRWA collected written testimonies from previously detained staffers released into Gaza that included those allegations, but said it was unclear whether those testimonies will be made public. Israel has not responded specifically to those allegations other than to say that its military follows international law regarding detainees.

Israel’s allegation: Hamas uses UNRWA facilities for terrorism

Israel says that UNRWA schools, aid depots and headquarters throughout the Gaza Strip have been used by Hamas to launch rockets, store weapons and plan operations.

What Israel says:

Last month, Israel said its forces found a tunnel underneath UNRWA’s main Gaza headquarters containing large quantities of weapons and explosives. Israel said electrical lines directly connected to UNRWA’s headquarters above provided the underground Hamas facility with power.

The Israel Defense Forces released drone footage, video of the weapons it says it found, and video of its troops conducting the operation. NBC News can’t independently verify what the IDF presented.

Israel has also released videos it says show rocket launches from inside an UNRWA school in Beit Hanoun.

NBC News geolocated the video to an UNRWA primary school in Beit Hanoun, but cannot confirm who launched projectiles seen in the video provided by Israeli officials or when it was filmed.

What the U.N. says:

UNRWA’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, did not dispute the Israeli allegations about the tunnel, but said UNRWA “did not know what is under its headquarters in Gaza.” He said that during peacetime UNRWA inspects its facilities quarterly, but has been unable to access the site since abandoning it on Oct. 12, when Israel ordered that the area be evacuated.

Lazzarini did not specifically address the allegations that the Hamas underground facility was receiving electricity from the UNRWA headquarters above.

UNRWA has said there have been instances since the mid-2000s, when “armed actors from both sides” have violated the agency’s neutrality, including rockets placed in its schools. The agency says it has “systematically condemned” those violations, protested to Gaza authorities and informed Israel when it occurred.

The agency also said that when it finds suspected tunnels, it seals them by injecting cement and discloses the discoveries publicly.

#nunyas news #tear it down #after how they handled the sex for food thing #they have even less credibility #when it comes to investigating itself

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whartonists · 4 months

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Sara Rivers Cofield was on her usual search for interesting period clothing about a decade ago when she noticed what appeared to be a “textbook” silk bustle dress from the 1800s at an antique mall in Maine. The bronze-colored dress was in good condition, with a draped skirt, puffy bustle, and metal buttons that appeared to depict a Shakespearean motif. Ms. Rivers Cofield, an archaeologist, bought it for $100. Little did she know that the garment also contained a mystery: A secret pocket with a cryptic note. Part of the message, written on two, scrunched-up translucent sheets of paper, read: “Bismark Omit leafage buck bank / Paul Ramify loamy event false new event.”

Full text under the cut.

The bronze-colored dress was in good condition, with a draped skirt, puffy bustle, and metal buttons that appeared to depict a Shakespearean motif. Ms. Rivers Cofield, an archaeologist, bought it for $100. Little did she know that the garment also contained a mystery: A secret pocket with a cryptic note.

Part of the message, written on two, scrunched-up translucent sheets of paper, read: “Bismark Omit leafage buck bank / Paul Ramify loamy event false new event.”

Ms. Rivers Cofield was baffled. Was it a writing exercise? A list? A code? “What the…?,” she wrote on her blog in 2014. “I’m putting it up here in case there’s some decoding prodigy out there looking for a project.”

Wayne Chan, a data analyst at the University of Manitoba, finally cracked the case. The note, he wrote in a recent study, contained codes used to telegraph condensed weather observations for stations in the United States and Canada in 1888. Each message started with a station location, followed by code words for temperature and pressure, dew point, precipitation and wind direction, cloud observations, wind velocity and sunset observations, Mr. Chan wrote.

“For the first time in history, observations from distant locations could be rapidly disseminated, collated, and analyzed to provide a synopsis of the state of weather across an entire nation,” he added. Those observations, however, needed to be condensed — just like other telegrams — into codes.

Mr. Chan’s findings brought resolve to a community of online sleuths who for years had speculated whether the owner of the dress was a spy, a romantic sending coded love notes, or a risk-taker engaged in illegal gambling. One cryptologist declared it among the “top 50 unsolved encrypted messages”; another wrote that even the most “voracious code-breaking teeth” had been unable to decipher the messages, which came to be known as the “Silk Dress cryptogram.”

Mr. Chan, the analyst, said in an interview that he first worked on the code in the summer of 2018, but gave up after a few months without getting anywhere. At the end of 2022, he revisited it, poring over some 170 telegraphic code books in an attempt to find the answer, to no avail. Another book, with a section detailing signals used by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, seemed to contain examples similar to the note found in the dress. After further research, he was finally able to decode it.

And, lo and behold, it was a weather report.

“When I first thought I cracked it, I did feel really excited,” Mr. Chan said, noting that it took a while to build enough evidence to confirm his theory was correct. “It is probably one of the most complex telegraphic codes that I’ve ever seen,” he said.

For example, “Bismark Omit leafage buck bank,” indicated the reading was taken at Bismarck station, in the Dakota Territory. “Omit” was for an air temperature of 56 degrees and pressure of 0.08 inches of mercury, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the true reading could have been higher. “Leafage” for a dew point of 32 degrees, observed at 10 p.m. “Buck,” clear weather, with no precipitation and a northerly wind. “Bank,” a wind velocity of 12 miles per hour, and a clear sunset.

Old maps helped Mr. Chan figure out the exact date of the observations: May 27, 1888.

Some mysteries surrounding the dress, however, remain — including who owned it, and why she would have had weather codes stuffed in a secret pocket.

“It’s tantalizing,” said Ms. Rivers Cofield, who found the dress, noting that a name, “Bennet,” was written on a paper tag stitched into the garment.

“Presumably, whoever did that is the last person who owned the dress, and presumably, the last person who owned the dress,” she added, “put the code in the pocket.”

#this is deeply cool #fashion #history

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taizi · 2 years

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For the dialogue prompts to break a reader's heart, might I request 6,7, and 8 (either combined or not- with your writing, it'll be good no matter what) for Natsuyuu (bonus points for NishiNatsu and/or Natori being best bro)?

If you're up for it, of course- if not, that's cool too.👌

HEARTBREAKING PROMPTS

6. "Am I going to die?"

ao3 // ko-fi

Shuuichi is on set when the news breaks.

A panicked college-aged intern is turning the volume up on the TV in the lounge, and Shuuichi looks up from his lines in time to watch a local station air some amateur drone footage of what looks like the apocalypse.

It’s a busy intersection downtown, which at this time of morning should be in full swing as people commute to work or classes. Instead, traffic has ground to a standstill, vehicles left abandoned as hundreds of people run from a frenzied mob.

The room is quiet, everyone slow to react to what they’re seeing. It’s like something from a horror film—found-footage is trendy, when it’s produced well, so for a moment Shuuichi thinks he’s looking at an upcoming Netflix original. He finds himself thinking the Foley effects could use some work.

Then it cuts back to two pale, shaken newscasters sitting stiffly behind their desk. The anchorwoman is turned in her chair, a hand covering the mic clipped to her shirt as she speaks rapidly to someone off-screen. The anchorman’s eyes dart as he reads silently from the teleprompter, and then he clears his throat.

“We’ve received word from our correspondents in Tokyo that the recent widespread reports of violent and erratic behavior are not a local event. The National Institute of Infectious Diseases has not yet confirmed if this is the work of a virus, but eye-witnesses on social media have made the comparison to—to rabies. Again, there is no official statement yet, but it is strongly recommended that you stay in your homes, and avoid all contact with individuals showing any of the following symptoms—”

“What the fuck,” Hana blurts. She’s still sitting at the table across from Shuuichi, where she’d been running lines with him, but her script lay abandoned now. “Is this a joke?”

“I’m checking Yahoo,” the intern says. Her nose is already buried in her phone. “I don’t understand, the streets were clear when we got here.”

“The streets were empty when we got here, because it was like three o’clock in the morning,” someone from the AD department retorts. “What I want to know is how something like this could have happened in a matter of hours.”

There’s a bit of a flurry then, of people checking their phones and computers, or getting up to stand closer to the television. Two men leave the room at a brisk clip to collect the cast and crew still milling about the set, and a woman Shuuichi vaguely recognizes as Hana’s agent uses the landline to call the security office in the front of the building.

Shuuichi’s heart is racing. He’s staring at the news broadcast, at the worried reporter standing outside a hospital, where flashing ambulances are lined up and paramedics are rushing up to the building pushing gurneys.

A digital banner stretches across the bottom of the screen, the scrolling text reading China has declared a state of emergency. All inbound flights have been diverted. The United States has declared a state of emergency. All inbound flights have been diverted. Great Britain has declared a state of emergency. All inbound flights have been…

“Urihime,” he says under his breath, “check in with Hiiragi now.”

Hana gives him an odd look but Urihime nods and disappears without a word. Sasago, hovering faithfully at his opposite shoulder, drifts closer to make up for her absence. Shuuichi forces his eyes away from the TV and digs his phone from his pocket.

There are thirty-some email notifications, a handful of texts—but most concerningly, a missed call.

Shoving away from the table, Shuuichi taps to redial, and holds the phone to his ear. He paces to the far side of the room, and can’t force himself to breathe until the moment the line finally connects and Natsume’s quiet voice says, “Natori-san?”

Oh my god, Shuuichi thinks, pressing his forehead against the wall, oh, thank god.

“Are you alright?” he demands. “Is everyone there alright?”

“We’re fine,” Natsume says quickly. “Um, everyone’s still asleep but me and Kitamoto. There’s been a lot of noises in the hallway, but Hii—I mean. I figured I shouldn’t open the door.” Shuuichi makes a mental note to kiss Hiiragi right on the face for strong-arming the most stubborn teenager alive into staying in the relative safety of the hotel room. “I, um, I tried to call you—”

“I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t see it,” Shuuichi says. He rubs a hand over his face, struggling between the crippling relief that the kids are safe, and the visceral, terrifying reality that something could potentially still happen to them. “I’m on my way back now, okay? Stay put. Listen to Hiiragi. Don’t let the chaos twins do anything stupid.”

He means Taki and Nishimura, and he knows Natsume knows exactly who he means. He hears the kid murmur something, ostensibly to Kitamoto, and then the sound of movement, and then a door closing softly.

“I’m in the bathroom now. Natori-san, are you sure?” He sounds frightened. His voice is still quiet, but his words are coming faster now, all but running together as his anxiety rears its head. “I mean—we looked out the window a few minutes ago, and it’s—”

“Hey,” Shuuichi says firmly. “I know what it looks like outside. I don’t care. Keep away from the windows, and keep quiet, and wait for me. Tell your monster he has my full permission to sit on you if that’s what it takes.”

Natsume laughs a little. “He’s listening. He says he doesn’t need your permission.”

“For once, cat, I almost respect you,” Natori says with a light-heartedness he doesn’t feel. “Alright, Natsume. Wake your friends up, eat something. I’ll see you soon.”

He hangs up, digs the heel of his hand into his eyes, and allows himself five seconds of silent panic. Then he turns around and strides for the door.

“Um, Natori-san, I don’t think you should leave,” Hana says, alarmed, as he grabs his coat from the hook and pats the pockets to find his keys. “The governor said—and the police—Natori-san, we’re supposed to stay inside!”

That gets some attention. There’s a sudden swell of well-meaning colleagues rounding on him, urging him to stay calm, sit back down, let Ha-ri make you some tea. Ordinarily, Shuuichi might have been touched by their concern, but now he just doesn’t have time for it. He glances at Sasago and then looks pointedly at the door. She inclines her head and sweeps out in front of him, causing the people in his way to stumble aside and neatly clearing his path.

Everyone is staring at him, staggered. Even the ones who weren’t pushed by an invisible force seem staggered. Natori spares a moment to bow his head and says, “Thank you for taking care of me. Good luck.”

He pushes out the door into the empty hallway. His steps on the polished tile floor echo, and another pair of footsteps follows him out.

It’s the intern, Ha-ri. She lifts her chin and says, “My little brother’s cat-sitting at my apartment. He’s only in Osaka in the first place because of me.”

“I’m headed for Tennoji ward. If you’re going in the same direction, you’re welcome to tag along,” Shuuichi replies, and holds the door to the parking garage open for her.

As soon as they’re outside, it’s clear they’ve left safety behind. There’s an overturned car on the street, burning steadily, and another parked on the sidewalk with a shattered windshield. It’s ominously still—the busy morning foot-traffic is conspicuously absent.

Sasago leaps to the roof of the garage and casts her blindfolded eyes up and down the street. Urihime joins her there, glancing down at Shuuichi.

“The kids are safe,” she says shortly. “Let me guide you, Natori-dono. The streets are a mess, but I remember which ones are mostly deserted. Sasago and I will clear the way. Count on us.”

They move quickly. Ha-ri keeps close and says nothing, hands white-knuckled on the strap of her crossbody bag, canvas sneakers treading silently on the asphalt. If she thinks it odd that Shuuichi turns down streets and alleyways seemingly at random with total confidence, she keeps it to herself.

The set in Chuo is only a few miles away from the hotel the kids picked in Tennoji. They were so looking forward to this trip, a whole week in the city with a movie-star chauffeur at their beck and call. Shuuichi left them to sleep in this morning, with plans to get some work done at the studio and be back in time to bring them lunch, but he wishes he hadn’t. He shouldn’t have left.

Sasago throws herself bodily in front of him before he can round the next corner, and Ha-ri stumbles into his back at his sudden stop. Urihime hisses through her teeth for them to get down! Shuuichi grabs Ha-ri by the strap of her bag and drags her down with him, their backs pressed against the side of a large vending machine.

Something shambles by.

Ha-ri gasps, and then muffles herself with both hands before she can give them away, her knees tucked in tight against her chest. Urihime and Sasago are crouched warily in front of them, a guard that only Shuuichi is aware of. And on the street, moving in odd, awkward clusters, there are…

People.

People with torn clothes and tossed hair, looking as though they just tumbled out of a car accident. A lot of them have blood on their necks, or their hands, or their mouths. All of them have milky-white eyes and a vacant expression, as though they’re sleepwalking through this nightmare.

The last thing Shuuichi expects is for the nearest one to turn its face toward the shiki. Shuuichi’s heart shoots up into his throat as the—the sleepwalker teeters drunkenly, staring straight at Urihime, who is visibly bracing herself for a fight. Thankfully, though, it seems like the sleepwalker is aware of yokai in the same way that animals are—a passing interest only, the spheres of their existence just overlapping in the fringes.

Shuuichi and Ha-ri stay absolutely still until the street has emptied. Even when Sasago quietly gives the all-clear. They just sit there, not speaking, breathing like they’ve run a marathon.

Then Ha-ri says, “Rabies.”

“What?” Shuuichi asks stupidly.

“The man on the news said it,” the girl replies. Her voice is wooden and grim. “He said that it was like rabies. And they—some of them looked like they’d been—”

She doesn’t say it. She doesn’t have to. Shuuichi closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the machine behind him. Acclimating to this brand new genre of shit-show he has no choice but to deal with.

“Natori-dono,” Sasago says with some urgency.

“Right,” he mutters, and pushes himself to his feet. He stretches a hand down to Ha-ri, pulls her up beside him, and they go.

They bump into a few other people, panic-stricken and running for whatever safe place is waiting for them. None of them linger long enough to exchange words. Most stores and kiosks they pass are closed and locked tight, security shutters lowered. Outside a little fast food restaurant is a row of delivery scooters parked on a rack; one of the scooters is missing, and there’s a broken lock lying on the ground next to an abandoned sledgehammer. Without pause, Ha-ri stoops and picks up the hammer.

The shiki save them two more times within fifteen minutes; the third time, Shuuichi doesn’t need the warning, and neither does his young companion. They fling themselves silently into a sidestreet, and Shuuichi shoves Ha-ri back even farther, into the shadow of a stoop, just in time to miss a handful of the sleepwalkers who seem to be chasing the taillights of a passing car.

“I think it’s safe now,” Shuuichi says, and starts to step back onto the sidewalk, but Ha-ri grips his sleeve.

“I have to go the other way,” she tells him, barely more than a whisper. Her eyes are wide, and with the huge glasses and full bangs she looks absurdly young. She’s only a few years older than the kids Shuuichi is responsible for. But there’s iron in her spine, and she lifts her chin the way she did back at the studio when she refused to stay behind. She ducks forward in a bow, and says, “Thank you for taking care of me until now.”

Fuck, Shuuichi thinks. Out loud he says, “Give me your phone.”

Bewildered, Ha-ri tucks the hammer under her arm to slide her iPhone out of her back pocket.

Shuuichi opens the messages app and texts himself. Handing the phone back, he grits out, “I know that kids seem to have a medical condition that makes them choose to be stupidly self-reliant at the absolute worst of times, but you have my number. Contact me if you need help. For your brother and your cat, if not for yourself.”

Ha-ri blinks rapidly a few times, taken-aback. Then she smiles for the first time all morning. She slips her phone back into her pocket, bows again, and says, “Be careful, Natori-senpai. Don’t let them bite you.”

Then she spins around and runs the opposite way down the winding alley toward the chained fence blocking the next street. She tosses her bag and the hammer over first, then plants one sneaker on the fence, heaves herself to the top, and disappears on the other side without a sound.

She’ll probably be fine.

“Urihime,” Shuuichi orders quietly.

With a displeased sigh, the shiki takes off after her. Sasago tilts her head toward the street, and Shuuichi follows.

He’s running on nothing but anxiety and adrenaline by the time he reaches the hotel. It’s tucked away at the end of a busy street, near a huge train station, because of course it is. There are dozens of sleepwalkers in the way, and Shuuichi’s stomach sinks like a stone.

But Hiiragi appears in front of the building, and points with her sword toward the small service road that leads around to the back, presumably for the unloading of delivery trucks. Then she disappears again, and Shuuichi realizes why a moment later. The window of a restaurant a few blocks away explodes into a loud shower of glass, and all the shambling bodies on the street react like wild animals, clawing over one another to rush toward the sound.

It’s potentially the most horrifying thing Shuuichi has ever seen. He very carefully compartmentalizes his reaction, because frankly there’s no time for it right now.

Once they’re in the building, weaving through eerie stockrooms and a gleaming, completely abandoned commercial kitchen, Sasago leads him past the elevator to the stairwell, and then herds him up four flights of stairs, glaring coldly when he dares gasp for air too loudly.

“Well, excuse me,” Shuuichi wheezes. “Not all of us can float.”

There are some alarming sounds on the second floor, and absolute silence on the third and fourth. Shuuichi doesn’t trust it for a second, but he shoves open the stairwell door when Sasago gives him the go-ahead, and beelines straight for his suite.

Ridiculously, he starts searching his pockets for his keycard. The door is ripped open a second later, and Hiiragi says, with just barely passable deference, “Natori-dono. Get inside now.”

The moment he does, he feels himself cross a barrier. It’s like stepping into a physical net of safety. It feels as though whatever is happening outside can’t reach him here, even though he knows that can’t really be true. He can hear quiet chatter from the next room, all those dear voices present and correct and secure.

He leans against the wall and closes his eyes. He just needs a minute.

When he opens them, he has company. On the step above the neat row of shoes lined up in the entryway, Madara is tucked into a fat little loaf, unnatural green eyes glinting. The symbol on his forehead is glowing faintly. Shuuichi doesn’t think he’s ever seen it sustained for longer than a few seconds at a time.

“Is this your work, cat?” Shuuichi asks, waving a hand to indicate that barrier he’s only peripherally aware of. His voice is hoarse and exhausted. The cat deigns not to comment on the state of him, which is a kindness he didn’t expect.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” Madara says plainly.

“I paid for this room, freeloader,” Shuuichi mutters, and braces a hand against the wall as he follows the quiet sound of conversation into the sitting room of the extravagant suite. It’s dimly lit even at half past ten in the morning, with the heavy curtains pulled across the windows, and the TV is on so low he can barely hear it over the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears.

He barely catches a glimpse of Natsume’s wide-eyed expression before the boy is crossing the room at a run and colliding with him hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs.

It’s the absolute last thing on the list of things Shuuichi has to complain about. It doesn’t even make the list. He plants his chin on the top of Natsume’s head, wraps an arm around his shoulders, and takes a full breath for the first time since he saw that news broadcast.

Natsume is joined in short order by a tearful Taki, then Nishimura, then Ogata. Kitamoto slumps where he’s sitting, like whatever has been propping him up this whole time just collapsed underneath him. Shibata glares at Shuuichi with vitriol, because he tends to get his feelings mixed up when he’s thrown into high-pressure situations, but he buries his face in Tanuma’s shoulder before his mouth can run away from him. Tanuma, for his part, looks like he’s just barely keeping a panic attack at bay by nothing but sheer willpower and the need to be present for his friends. He pats Shibata on the back gently.

They’re all ruffled and pale, still in their pajamas, wrapped in the extra throw blankets from the closet and the duvets from the beds. It’s like a slumber party gone catastrophically wrong.

“It’s okay,” Shuuichi tells the room at large. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“What’s happening outside?” Ogata asks, voice warbling. “I called my friend Junko, but she lost signal. She told me that a bunch of people broke into her dad’s store. She said they were acting really strange.”

“We found a bunch of different news stations on TV,” Tanuma whispers. “It’s happening all over the country.”

“I can’t get ahold of my parents,” Kitamoto blurts. “Or my sister. Or Tsuji or Sasada. Or anyone from Hitoyoshi.”

“Are you okay?” Natsume says, pulling out of Shuuichi’s arms just enough to look up at him with stricken brown eyes. His voice cuts through the room easily, because no one is willing to talk over him. “Did you run the whole way here? Come sit down. Shibata, move. Satchan, can you get him something to drink?”

Shuuichi smiles as they scurry like little worker ants, and gratefully accepts the expensive bottled water from the minibar that Nishimura presses into his hands. He can see the kids visibly sitting on their questions, trying to be respectful, and he thinks they’re so good. They’re much better than he was when he was their age.

They don’t deserve whatever fresh hell is happening outside.

“Here’s what I know,” Shuuichi says, and lays everything out.

“You don’t know much,” Shibata says judgmentally. Nishimura digs an elbow into his stomach.

“What are we going to do?” Taki asks. "Are we going to die?"

"No, Tooru," Shuuichi says sternly, shutting that down as fast as he can. "None of you are going to die."

She’s frightened and clearly trying to be brave. She has a marker clenched in her fist, and it reminds Shuuichi of the way Ha-ri had hefted that sledgehammer.

All of their worried faces are turned up toward his. He’s the oldest person in the room, ancient at almost twenty-four years old. He’s responsible for them, agreed to be when their parents gave permission for this big trip to the city. It’s his job to make things right. Somehow, he has to make this right.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out and opens the new texts, with an audience of at least four teenagers peering over his shoulders.

They’re both from Ha-ri. The first one is a selfie. She’s sitting on the carpeted floor of what looks like a bedroom, with her arm around the shoulders of a boy who looks exactly like her. There’s a huge orange cat draped across their laps and the twins are grinning wearily at the camera.

Made it, the text beneath it reads. And you?

Shuuichi finds himself smiling. He glances around the room and says, “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”

The kids seem thrown off by the question, but only for a moment. They trade glances, communicating in that silent language that people only develop after spending way too much time together, and then Shibata speaks up.

“My parents are overseas.”

“So are mine,” Taki says.

“My mom is a doctor,” Kitamoto pipes up. He’s near tears, frightened that he hasn’t heard from his family yet. “She’ll be able to help.”

Nishimura slips away to shove himself into the armchair with Kitamoto, which is probably equal parts annoying and comforting. He takes Kitamoto’s hand and squeezes hard, and that tips the scales in favor of comfort, after all. Kitamoto leans against him and looks a little less frantic.

“My brother’s pre-med,” Nishimura adds. “And supposedly he’s back from university for the weekend. He wouldn’t be completely useless to have around, I guess.”

“Junko’s on our way,” Ogata says quickly. “She could meet us and come along.”

“There’s room at the temple for everyone,” Tanuma offers in his careful, thoughtful way. He sounds like he's half-afraid his friends might shoot him down, even now, in this worst-case scenario. He's ridiculous and Shuuichi would do anything to protect him.

Natsume lifts his ugly cat into his arms and hugs it tightly. His eyes are moonlike, round and hopeful. It’s obvious who he’s thinking of—Touko and Shigeru and their big, welcoming smiles, and their big, welcoming house, and how they always leave a light on for him.

No one has outright said it yet; none of them are eager to sound childish in the face of what is shaping up to be a global disaster. They’re trying to be very grown-up about it.

But the wanting is plain on their faces. It’s clear where they would all feel safest.

Shuuichi is thinking about Madara’s barrier, and the deft way the shiki handled the sleepwalkers every step of the way between Chuo ward and Tennoji. He’s thinking about all of Natsume’s questionable friends among the ghosts of Yatsuhara, and their unwavering loyalty to him, and how eager they are to prove their worth. He thinks that Hitoyoshi might just be the best place to go, if only they can make it there.

“Okay,” Shuuichi says. “Let’s go home.”

#📢ZOMBIE AU📢#im so predictable. its fine #natsume yuujinchou #natsuyuu #natori shuuichi #natsume takashi #my writing #prompt #natsumiyasblog #natsume zombie au #will i add more to this ?? potentially #ive been watching z movies all weekend ok let me live #thinking of dawn of the dead (2004) and how the nurse got home from a normal shift and woke up the next morning to a total shit show #those vibes #i didnt edit this at all pls forgive me

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is-the-primate-vid-cute · 2 years

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Chimpanzee language article! (Haven’t actually read it yet, just immediately thought of this blog)

https://mindblowingscience.tumblr.com/post/685100814728085504/thousands-of-chimp-vocal-recordings-reveal-a

Here's the original study that article references! Text from the source:

They conducted the study within the Taï Chimpanzee Project97 on wild western chimpanzees at the Taï National Park, Cȏte d’Ivoire. Using recordings of the chimp vocalizations, they found about 12 different sounds and those sounds arranged into aprox 300 different, but similar, structures. The chimpanzee vocal repertoire consists of several call types. Most of these call types are emitted either singly or in a “panted” form whereby a voiced inhalation is inserted between each call. Thus hoos can be emitted as single hoos, as repetitions of single hoos with 100–500 ms between each hoo.

The barplot on the left indicates the maximum length of sequences reported in each species (i.e., the number of unique single units emitted in a single sequence) (a). The barplot on the right indicates the number of different sequences reported to comprise at least two different single units (b).

The number of single units in the utterance is indicated on the x axis. The y axis depicts the number of recordings (log-transformed for ease of visualization). All utterances with one to seven single units (in dark blue) are produced by both sexes while utterances with eight or more single units (in light blue) are only produced by females. The number on top of each bar in blue indicates the number of individuals producing utterances of this particular length.

More than one-third of their vocal output includes at least two units, with 15% of vocal sequences containing three to ten units. Chimpanzees show a high degree of flexibility in vocal sequence output. 11 of the 12 vocalizations in the vocal repertoire were produced as single units and emitted in numerous different sequences with 4–9 other single units. found 58 bigrams, 40 of which were 20 different pairs of single units produced with every single unit either as the first or second element in the bigrams (e.g., a combination of A and B either as AB or BA) and 18 were bigrams which appeared only in a certain order (e.g., EF was produced but FE was never recorded).

"Our findings highlight a vocal communication system in chimpanzees that is much more complex and structured than previously thought," says animal researcher Tatiana Bortolato

If these single units carry meaning, it may be that chimpanzees form combined meanings from two single units, which can, in turn, be recombined with a third unit to eventually output a third combined meaning. Overall, the data suggest that chimpanzees might possess some fundamental combinatorial principles which can be used to establish sequential relationships across multiple sound units.

More research is needed to confirm, but it seems like chimpanzees have a phenetic communication style in which the order of the sounds can convey different meanings. Very neat!

#mod E #chimpanzee #inquiring minds want to know #images not described

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truecrimepromiseversion2 · 1 year

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Disappearance of Beverly Sharpman

Beverley Sharpman circa 1947 (The Doe Network)

Beverly Sharpman

Physical Description

Full Name: Beverly Sharpman

Date of Birth: December 10, 1930

Race/Ethnicity: White/Caucasian

Sex: Female

Height: 5′0″ - 5′6″ (60 inches - 66 inches) (152.4 cm - 167.64 cm)

Weight: 100 - 180 lbs (45.35 kg - 81.65 kg)

Hair Color: Brown

Eye Color: Brown

Nicknames/Aliases: Babe

Distinguishing Characteristics

Hair was long and wavy

Family

Mother

Father

Brother

Misc. Info

Worked at a clerk job in downtown though she resigned from it the day before she disappeared

Was going to be a senior at Overbrook High School before she disappeared

Case Information

Age at Disappearance: 17 (92 if still alive as of April 23, 2023)

Missing Since: September 11, 1947 (Missing for 75 years as of April 23, 2023)

Location Last Seen: Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, USA

Location Last Seen on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B057'09.3%22N+75%C2%B009'54.8%22W/@39.9525839,-75.1652215,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d39.9525839!4d-75.1652215

Case Classification: Endangered Missing

Dentals: Not Available

Fingerprints: Not Available

DNA: Available

Clothing & Personal Effects

Gray or Brown suit or dress

Brown in Black shoes

Flush Colored stockings

Earirngs

Suitcase

Circumstances of Disappearance

Beverly was reportedly last seen at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Station at 24th and Chestnut Streets carrying a suitcase and sent her parents a telegram telling them she was leaving home to marry and not to worry. She was never heard again. The day before her disappearance she appeared to be troubled and wanted to tell her mother something but later changed her mind and her mother decided to not press her about it.

Unidentified Person Exclusions (NamUs)

https://www.namus.gov/MissingPersons/Case#/7034/investigations (30)

Misc. Info

The Text of the Telagram: "Got married. Leaving town. Will not be back. Don't worry. Babe."

Police labeled her a runaway but they still searched for her

Beverly had taken $175 dollars from her savings account

She had told coworkers that she was going to Chicago and while she has relatives in Chicago, those relatives reported that they never seen or heard from Beverly

Beverly had no boyfriends and none of her friends know of any men in her life nor of anyone she would eloped with

Authorities had checked marriage-license bureaus in all 50 states but didn’t found any evidence that Beverly had married

There were many reported sightings of Beverly in cities all over the United States after her disappearance but none of them were confirmed

Her parents published advertisements in newspapers in attempt to appeal for to contact them but she never reached out.

A theory is that she ran away because of an illegitimate pregnancy as it was a heavy stigma in the 1940s though nothing found support that theory

Contact Information/Investigating Agencies/Contact Agencies

Philadelphia Police Department

Agency Case Number: 2010-16-028710

Agency Contact Personals

Detective Viviana Reyes

Detective Valarie Miller-Robinson

Agency Phone Number

215-686-3093

215-685-3252

209-937-8377

NamUs

Agency Case Number: #MP7034

Agency Contact Personal: Regional Program Specialist Katherine Pope

Agency Phone Number: 817-879-9357

Agency Email Address: [email protected]

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)

Agency Case Number: 1148707

Agency Phone Number: 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-The-Lost)

Sources/Further Information/Places of Interest

https://charleyproject.org/case/beverly-e-sharpman

https://www.namus.gov/MissingPersons/Case#/7034/details

https://www.doenetwork.org/cases/2220dfpa.html

https://www.missingkids.org/poster/NCMC/1148707/1/screen

https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/pa-beverly-sharpman-17-philadelphia-11-sept-1947.61173/

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virginiaprelawland · 23 days

Text

The Petito-Laundrie Civil Suit

By Elizabeth Wolnik, George Mason University Class of 2024

April 5, 2024

The infamous case of Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie has evolved to include their parents. Gabby was a 22-year-old travel blogger who was killed by Brian while they were on a cross-country road trip [1]. In March 2022, Gabby’s parents Nichole Schmidt and Joseph Petito, filed a lawsuit against Brian’s parents, Christopher and Roberta Laundrie as well as their lawyer Steven Bertolino, for intentional infliction of emotional distress. The Laundries were alleged to have refused to return calls and texts to Gabby’s family during the investigation, which led to the Petitos releasing a public statement begging them to cooperate with the investigation [6]. The Petito family claimed that the Laundries were aware of Gabby’s murder soon after her death in August 2021, and willfully chose to do nothing to help the investigation other than issue a statement through Bertolino saying, “It is our hope that the search for Miss Petito is successful, and that Miss Petito is reunited with her family” [1]. The Laundries have argued in court filings that they had no duty to respond to the Petito family [7].

In July 2021, Gabby and Brian left for what was intended to be a four-month cross-country trip where they would visit national parks. They planned to sleep in their van and document their travels to post online [2]. In early August 2021, a 911 call was placed by someone who was reported to have seen a confrontation between Gabby and Brian. Police in Moab, Utah pulled the couple’s van over and police bodycam shows Gabby upset and crying. Police reports indicate that Gabby hit Brian, but no arrests were made. However, this contradicted what the 911 caller saw. They state that they saw Brian hit Gabby while they were driving. The couple was separated for the night with Brian checking into a hotel and Gabby staying in the van [2].

In late August 2021, the couple’s van was spotted at Grand Teton National Park and Gabby posted her last picture to Instagram [2]. According to a search warrant, on August 27 Nichole Schmidt said that she received a strange text from Gabby. It read: “Can you help Stan, I just keep getting his voicemails and missed calls.” Stan is Gabby’s grandfather, but she never referred to him by his first name. Nichole said this was out of character for Gabby and confusing [2].

On September 1, 2021, Brian returned home to Florida alone and by September 11, Gabby was reported missing by her family [2]. On September 13, Brian’s parents reported that he left the family home for a hike in the Carlton Reserve in Sarasota County, Florida, but that he hadn’t returned. They also released a statement through their lawyer saying that they intend to remain in the background while the search for Gabby continues. The Petito family also released a statement accusing Brian of refusing to tell them when he last saw Gabby. By mid-September, Brian was named a person of interest for failing to cooperate with the investigation [2].

On September 19, 2021, remains were found near Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming that were later identified to be Gabby Petito’s remains [2]. Soon after this discovery, the FBI raided Brian’s home. They seized his car and a hard drive that they say, “may contain evidence that a felony has been committed.” An arrest warrant was then issued for Brian, who was charged with unauthorized use of a debit card to make unauthorized withdrawals worth more than $1,000 during the time Gabby was missing [2].

On October 6, 2021, it was confirmed that Brian flew home to Florida on August 17 and returned to Utah on August 23, four days before Gabby was last seen [2]. Brian reportedly flew home to get some supplies and to close a storage unit. On October 20, human remains were found at the site where authorities were searching for Brian. Later identified as Brian, authorities announced that he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In the FBI’s final report on the investigation into Gabby’s death, they reported that Brian claimed responsibility for Gabby’s death in a notebook that was found near his remains. The notebook was found alongside a backpack and a revolver. FBI confirmed that Brian had been “attempting to deceive law enforcement by giving the impression that Ms. Petito was still alive by continuing a text chain between their two phones after she is believed to have died.” [2].

At this point, lawsuits are in full swing. In March 2022, the Petito family sued the Laundrie family claiming that Brian told his parents that he killed Gabby and that they concealed Brian’s confession to committing the murder [2]. The Laundries filed to dismiss the lawsuit, calling it “baseless and frivolous”, but the lawsuit moved forward. In August 2022, the Petito family also filed a $50 million wrongful death suit against Utah police. The lawsuit named the Moab Police Department, three of its officers, and 10 other unnamed defendants and accused them of “negligent failure” in their investigation into the alleged assault between Gabby and Brian, weeks before Gabby’s murder. In a report, the Moab police officers indicate that they made “unintentional mistakes” on the day of the incident, and in November 2022, the Petito family was awarded $3 million dollars in the wrongful death suit. The Petito’s lawyer announced that whatever money was received will go to the Gabby Petito Foundation, which is dedicated to locating missing people and curbing domestic violence [2].

Depositions in the civil suit filed by the Petitos against the Laundries have recently been released, which shows a more complete timeline in the aftermath of Gabby’s disappearance [4]. On August 29, 2021, Brian told his parents that Gabby was “gone” and to “call a lawyer” in what is described as a frantic phone call that took place three weeks before Gabby’s remains were found. On September 2, 2021, Brian’s parents sent Stephen Bertolino a retainer and Bertolino entered into a fee agreement with a criminal defense firm in Wyoming [3]. The same day Brian “frantically” called his parents, documents also allege that Brian was using Gabby’s phone pretending to be her in text messages to her family [4]. When asked what Roberta Laundrie understood what Gabby being “gone” meant in her deposition, she stated, “I wasn’t sure. I don’t even remember what I thought. (Brian) was very upset. He didn’t sound like himself. I knew something was wrong.” The attorney for the Petito family then asked Roberta on why Brian saying “(Gabby’s) gone. Call a lawyer.” didn’t raise any alarm bells. Roberta responded with, “A lot of things ran through my head. Possibly they got into a fight, and you know, maybe she’s going to press charges against him or something? I don’t know.” In her deposition Roberta Laundrie also denied blocking Nichole Schmidt on social media but admitted to ignoring her texts at the advice of Bertolino [4].

After going back and forth on whether to include an incriminating letter from Roberta Laundrie to Brian in the civil suit, a judge in the 12th Judicial Circuit Court determined that it could be relevant to the case and that the plaintiff’s lawyers should at least get a copy [7]. The letter was found near Brian’s remains and said “burn after reading” on the envelope. It contained “references to bringing a shovel to help bury a body, and baking a cake with a shiv in it should Brian Laundrie go to prison” [6]. Roberta Laundrie has continued to state that she wrote the letter before Brian left for his trip with Gabby. She said, “It was a poor choice of words. When I read this later, I was like ‘This sounds awful’. It was a jokey, stupid letter that I dashed off before he left with lots of bad jokes and poor humor…I never imagined any of this.” Roberta also states that her and Brian’s relationship was strained before he left on the trip, so she wrote the letter to remind her son that she would always love him [6].

The Petito and Laundrie family have decided to settle the civil suit between them to avoid going to trial [1]. The details of the settlement were not disclosed, but it reportedly came “after a long day of mediation.” The Petito family said that “All parties reluctantly agreed in order to avoid further legal expenses and prolonged personal conflict” [5].

______________________________________________________________

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/parents-gabby-petito-brian-laundrie-reach-settlement-emotional/story?id=107434194

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gabby-petito-brian-laundrie-case-story-deaths/

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/04/us/gabby-petito-gone-brian-laundrie-parents-lawsuit/index.html

[4] https://www.mysuncoast.com/2024/02/13/court-documents-roberta-laundrie-insists-she-didnt-know-gabby-petito-was-dead/

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/settlement-reached-gabby-petito-laundrie-families-rcna139905#:~:text=The%20parents%20of%20slain%20New,distress%20case%20were%20not%20disclosed.

[6] https://abc7chicago.com/what-happened-to-gabby-petito-brian-laundrie-parents-phone-calls/14452286/#:~:text=But%20Laundrie%20returned%20to%20his,claimed%20responsibility%20for%20Petito's%20death.

[7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/24/us/gabby-petito-parents-lawsuit-letter-brian-laundrie

0 notes

bambithevideogame · 3 months

Text

Correlation -Relation relativity-conjunction confirmations in the *narrative contextually *philosophy from the meaning for the object of immortality in a unified theory.

[Introduction to thesis part B-2]

[ tangent B-2]

[#TheeMapToHeaven A #Thesis by #BambiTheLivingSimulation]

[#BambiPrescott #ClaireJV #PunkBoyCupid #HanielJorif #AndyDandy #Better #Ezekiel #V #BlackMatter #GodAspects #TheRatio #Nostrodamus #TheTrees #AngelicPhysiology #StudyOfAngels #SpiritualGifts #Discernment #LynxSight #DoeEye #TrueSight #Blessed

=======

From here I’m studying Isaac newton’s texts, what he was learning from alchemist and the philosopher stone what he learned from the emerald tablets, it’s revealing that he might have been inside of a ufo and his text arnt about alchemy or the philosopher stone at all. He believes god was thing to unite the different peoples into one nation… after this he lost his faith …

All these things are relative, and your motorcycle chick is in here too

Here these images compare disneys early rough animations for the classic film Bambi with other pieces of Walt Disneys earlier works with Isaac Newton’s basic laws of alchemy with other earlier alchemist philosophy

and the medals correlate to what an AI produced for what it believed the akashic records would look like if there were a codex or hardcover book

Lastly

My research is based on Isaac Newtons notes for their studies in alchemy and laws in motion and dynamics. But I believe what Isaac newton found had nothing to do with alchemy even if they did figure out the key to creating the philosophers stone, what granted immortality, what Isaac newton may have discovered was what they witnessed on board a UFO and being among other life forms, became why they believed god was trying to unite the Israelites and others grating them all to one tree making a unified people

0 notes

masterofd1saster · 3 months

Text

CJ current events 8feb24

Gun control advocate pleads not guilty after pointing loaded gun at woman, pulling trigger, and killing her

Alec Baldwin has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of "Rust." The actor entered the plea in a court document filed Wednesday, waiving his arraignment, which had been scheduled to occur virtually on Thursday. Under the terms of his release, the actor is ordered to not possess firearms, among other conditions, court filings show. A grand jury indicted the 65-year-old actor on involuntary manslaughter in January, a fourth-degree felony that carries a sentence of up to 18 months in prison if convicted.*** https://abcnews.go.com/US/alec-baldwin-pleads-not-guilty-involuntary-manslaughter-rust-shooting/story?id=106797584

***

Hope they used protection, don't want cloven-hoofed children; clean Costco w/ bleach

Brian Meloche, a longtime friend of Jennifer Crumbley and with whom she was having an affair with at the time of the 2021 Oxford School shooting, took the stand to testify in her manslaughter trial on Wednesday. In texts sent after the shooting, Jennifer Crumbley told Meloche that the shooting "could have been prevented," according to evidence. In other texts, she told him the school was "nonchalant" about concerns surrounding Ethan Crumbley and said that the school should have taken the concerns seriously and not allowed him to return to class. Jennifer Crumbley and James Crumbley are each facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the school shooting, which was carried out by their then-15-year-old son Ethan Crumbley. James Crumbley is being tried in a separate trial in March.*** Meloche testified Wednesday that Jennifer Crumbley had told him she was able to leave work to meet up with him even though she allegedly told school officials on the day of the shooting that she could not take her son home or for mental health care that day because she needed to return to work. Jennifer and James Crumbley decided to send their son back to class despite a meeting the morning of the shooting in which school officials expressed concerns about him. Andrew Smith, the CEO of the real estate company where Jennifer Crumbley worked at the time of the shooting, testified on Tuesday that she would have been allowed to leave for the day if she needed to take care of her son and could have brought him to work if she needed.*** Meloche testified that the two normally met in the parking lot of a Costco across the street from her job during the morning hours of work days, when Ethan Crumbley was at school. He testified that he never felt that Jennifer Crumbley did not care about her son.***

***

In all fairness, St Augustine did get around as a young man.....

A 22-year-old San Francisco man was arrested in connection with a shooting incident at a Catholic church after a standoff at a Hunters Point home Tuesday. South San Francisco police said officers responded to St. Augustine Catholic Church on Callan Boulevard for a report of a shooting at around 1:25 p.m. When they arrived, they found broken glass from the church's entryway but no injuries. Witnesses soon told police a suspect was seen fleeing the area afterward. Detectives soon identified the suspect as Debari Charvel Augustine and worked with the San Francisco Police Department SWAT Team and San Mateo law enforcement to apprehend the suspect.*** https://sfstandard.com/2024/01/31/san-francisco-man-shot-up-catholic-church/

+++

*** On January 26, a person with the same name as Debari Augustine created a petition on Change.org titled “Urge Israel and the United Nations to Sign the Golden Compact for World Peace.”

At the time of publication, CatholicVote was not able to confirm if the person who created the petition is also the same Augustine whom the police arrested in San Francisco on January 30.

In the petition, Augustine claims to be “a descendant of St. Augustine and my father is the Biblical Melchezedek.”

An excerpt from the petition reads,

On behalf of the Divine Order of Saint Augustine, under Jewish law, for the United States of America. I, King James Julius Caesar Augustine of Europe, charge the United States of Africa with the attempted assassination of King Debari Charvel Augustine and the genocide of the Augustine family for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Therefore, I reject your declaration of independence and hereby declare war on the United States of Africa.

The petition has acquired 31 signatures. https://catholicvote.org/police-arrest-22-year-old-suspect-san-francisco-catholic-church-shooting

***

Maybe try a legit, non-criminal, socially useful job?

Opinion: Weed-bros still cling to a “booth babes” and “no girls in the grow” sexist mentality

How misogyny permeates the marijuana industry

Cannabis revels in the beauty and destruction of the female form: the flowering bud of the unfertilized female plant is the coveted product. And yet, on the altar of weed-bro culture, women like me have found themselves devoured and sacrificed by a marijuana industry that is steeped in sexism. I spark a joint and inhale it slowly to kill the pain. Back in 2014, when I began my career as a writer, I sold weed at a medical shop. A fifty-something-year-old man who owned the dispensary told me, “No women in the grow.” I cried. He then handed me a hundred dollars as an apology, the bill itself a visual reminder of all the structures that have excluded women. I am not proud of it, but I took the cash. I thought it was a kindness. What a gentleman. Ten years later, I’ve learned that women are the true outliers in weed.***

***

BB-

***

Rethinking that DNA is always right thing

DENVER (KDVR) — A forensic scientist previously employed by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is costing the state millions to review her work after “anomalies” were found in her DNA testing analyses. According to a state funding request obtained by FOX31, the Colorado Department of Public Safety is asking for nearly $7.5 million to spend on reviewing and retesting DNA samples processed by a longtime state forensic scientist, Yvonne “Missy” Woods. The request includes funding for an accountant to manage the payments required for impacted district attorneys’ offices. The offices will be responsible for reviewing the legal ramifications of impacted cases — which could total nearly 2,300 — and possibly presenting the cases for retrial. Woods worked in CBI’s Forensic Services division for 29 years, according to CBI, and left the position in November. She is now subject to an internal affairs investigation in addition to a criminal investigation for the anomalies in her work.*** She also was recognized by the Polis administration in March 2022, receiving the Tom Clements Award for “Outstanding Service in Government.”*** https://kdvr.com/news/local/dna-retesting-colorado-criminal-cases-state-forensic-scientist/

***

You killed a man over a bus ride?

A 13-year-old boy allegedly shot and killed a 60-year-old man on a bus because the man’s leg was blocking the aisle, Denver police said. The boy was arrested Thursday afternoon on suspicion of first-degree murder, the Denver Police Department said in a news release Friday. Officers responded to a shooting on a Transdev bus near the intersection of South Federal Boulevard and West Mississippi Avenue at 6:41 p.m. Saturday and found a man, later identified as Richard Sanchez, with a gunshot wound.*** The Denver Office of the Medical Examiner determined Sanchez’s death was a homicide as a result of multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators believe the boy had a “verbal exchange” with Sanchez about Sanchez’s leg blocking the aisle of the bus, after which the boy shot him, according to Denver police. A second man injured in the shooting was treated at the scene and did not need to be taken to a hospital, the department said in a news release. https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/02/boy-13-arrested-fatal-bus-shooting-denver-richard-sanchez/

***

Rehabilitation works when the person sees a reason to rehab

Jelly Roll For Jelly Roll (born Jason DeFord), a 39-year-old former drug dealer from Antioch, Tennessee (just outside of Nashville), who was in and out of detention centers for ten years and did his first stint at 14, music is primarily an emotional exercise: he channels a life of pain, drugs, and crime into his work. Hip-hop was the obvious way for Jelly Roll to tell his story. And that’s the kind of music he made until 2020, when he released “Save Me,” a stripped-down demo where he sings rather than raps. More recently, he tells his story with a different sound: country music. Jelly Roll isn’t just making money off his past; he’s trying to make change happen, too. Earlier this month, he testified before Congress about the fentanyl crisis, saying “I brought my community down. I hurt people. . . . I am here now standing as a man that wants to be a part of the solution.” Tomorrow he’ll complete his journey from prison cell to red carpet with his first-ever nomination—for a sound that is all his own. *** https://www.thefp.com/p/grammys-joni-mitchell-lana-del-rey-jelly-roll

***

You whiny little snot,

Joshua Adam Schulte, 35, of New York, New York, was sentenced [1feb24] to 480 months in prison for crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography. Schulte’s theft is the largest data breach in the history of the CIA, and his transmission of that stolen information to WikiLeaks is one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States. Today’s sentencing followed Schulte’s convictions at trials that concluded on March 9, 2020, July 13, 2022, and Sept. 13, 2023.*** from 2012 to 2016, Schulte was employed as a software developer in the Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), which conducts offensive cyber operations: cyber espionage relating to terrorist organizations and foreign governments. *** In March 2016, Schulte was moved within branches of CCI as a result of personnel disputes between Schulte and another developer. Following that transfer, in April 2016, Schulte abused his administrator powers to grant himself administrator privileges over a development project from which he had been removed as a result of the branch change.*** Schulte had, however, secretly opened an administrator session on one of the servers before his privileges were removed. On April 20, 2016, after other developers had left the CCI office, Schulte used his secret server administrator session to execute a series of cyber-maneuvers on the CIA network to restore his revoked privileges, break in to the backups, steal copies of the entire CCI tool development archives (the Stolen CIA Files), revert the network back to its prior state, and delete hundreds of log files in an attempt to cover his tracks. Schulte’s theft of the Stolen CIA Files is the largest data breach in CIA history. From his home computer, Schulte then transmitted the Stolen CIA Files to WikiLeaks, using anonymizing tools recommended by WikiLeaks to potential leakers, such as the Tails operating system and the Tor browser. On May 5, 2016, having transmitted the Stolen CIA Files to WikiLeaks, Schulte wiped and reformatted his home computer’s internal hard drives. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began publishing classified data from the Stolen CIA Files. Between March and November 2017, there were a total of 26 disclosures of classified data from the Stolen CIA Files that WikiLeaks denominated as Vault 7 and Vault 8 (the WikiLeaks Disclosures). The WikiLeaks Disclosures were one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States, and Schulte’s theft and disclosure immediately and profoundly damaged the CIA’s ability to collect foreign intelligence against America’s adversaries; placed CIA personnel, programs, and assets directly at risk; and cost the CIA hundreds of millions of dollars. *** In March 2017, the FBI searched Schulte’s apartment in New York pursuant to a search warrant and recovered, among other things, multiple computers, servers, and other electronic storage devices, including Schulte’s personal desktop computer (the Desktop Computer), which Schulte built while living in Virginia and then transported to New York in November 2016. On the Desktop Computer, FBI agents found layers of encryption hiding tens of thousands of videos and images of child sexual abuse materials, including approximately 3,400 images and videos of disturbing and horrific child pornography and the rape and sexual abuse of children as young as two years old, as well as images of bestiality and sadomasochism. Schulte collected some of these files during his employment with the CIA and continued to stockpile child pornography from the dark web and Russian websites after moving to New York.*** https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-joshua-adam-shulte-sentenced-40-years-prison-espionage-and-child

***

Social and physical pathologies are close friends

***Since July 1, the Pueblo County jail screened 182 women for syphilis under the pilot program, according to the state health department. It found 37 who were infected, including two who were pregnant at the time. About 70% of those who tested positive, including both of the pregnant prisoners, had completed treatment as of December. El Paso and Jefferson counties also started screening female prisoners in December, but haven’t yet released data.*** https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/03/colorado-syphilis-rates-state-funding/

***

Death in DC

[Mike Gill] who was shot during a Washington, D.C., carjacking spree on Monday died Saturday, his wife said in a statement. [He] was shot Monday in violence that also claimed the life of another man. Gill, a father of three, was picking his wife up Monday from work at her law office near Mount Vernon Square, when 28-year-old Artell Cunningham got inside his parked car outside of an office building on K street and shot him in the head around 5:45 p.m., according to police. His wife found him on the sidewalk. He was taken to a hospital in critical condition.*** The violence began Monday afternoon when the assailant got into a car and shot a male driver before running away, Washington's Metropolitan Police Department reported. Police said the ordeal, which involved a Jeep Grand Cherokee, occurred in about three minutes. The attacker later tried and failed to steal a Mercedes-Benz, according to police. The attacker approached a man and a woman, demanding their car keys, police said. The attacker then fatally shot Alberto Vasquez Jr., 35, and fled in a stolen Chrysler 200, according to an incident report. The next morning, the man fired once at a cruiser on Interstate 295, police said, causing the vehicle to sustain a gunshot to the driver's side door and shattering the driver's side window. The attacker was fatally shot by police Tuesday in New Carrollton, Maryland, Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown said in a statement. The Washington Post reported that he may have been undergoing a psychiatric crisis at the time of the events. https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mike-gill-dies/2024/02/04/id/1152187/

***

Might actually have Pres Biden join Trump in the whole immunity argument

President Biden's team is concerned that special counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents will hurt his re-election campaign.

Why it matters: Biden aides don't expect criminal charges in the case, but they believe Hur's report will include embarrassing details — possibly with photos — on how Biden stored documents.

In late 2022, Obama-era classified documents were discovered in Biden's garage at his home in Delaware and in a private office he used.

Biden aides believe that Donald Trump, Biden's likely foe in November, will try to use Hur's report to create equivalency with the felony charges Trump faces related to his keeping classified documents after his presidency.

Biden aides believe Hur's probe is done and that his final report could come any time — even as soon as this week — but the final timing is unclear.***

Even if there are no criminal charges, Biden aides expect the report's details to be politically damaging.

Biden has defended storing documents from his vice presidency in his garage, saying: "By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage, so it's not like they're sitting out on the street."

Any photos of those storage practices could cause a political storm similar to what happened after the release of photos of Trump storing documents at Mar-a-Lago, including in a bathroom.*** https://www.axios.com/2024/02/04/biden-special-counsel-classified-docs-trump

***

Swat him

A 17-year-old “serial swatter” from California is believed to be responsible for hundreds of swatting incidents and bomb threats throughout the United States and is now facing charges in Florida, according to a pretrial detention motion. Alan Filion was extradited to Florida on January 30 to face charges for a swatting incident at a mosque, according to the Seminole County State Attorney’s Office.*** The sheriff’s office said the teen created several accounts on websites offering swatting services and “various IP addresses connected to these accounts” led to his home address. In July 2023, officials said they executed a search warrant at Filion’s home address. He was arrested on January 18. Filion was charged as an adult and faces three felony charges of false reporting and a felony charge of unlawful use of a two-way communication device.*** https://www.yahoo.com/news/17-old-alleged-serial-swatter-030252992.html

***

You conceal evidence like that, see what happens

VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION The Honorable Christopher A. Wray Director Federal Bureau of Investigation Dear Director Wray: We are writing about the FBI’s failure to provide information requested by members relating to the now infamous Richmond memo while misleading this body with what little information it did provide. We recently also learned that the FBI permanently deleted critical records related to the memo, and one of the authors of the Richmond memo prepared a second, external report in coordination with headquarters that was intended to be circulated outside the Richmond office to the full FBI.1 This information further calls into question your sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on July 12, 2023, and the integrity of the FBI’s internal review.2 The FBI must immediately provide a coherent and complete response to the Senate.*** https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-senators-demand-the-fbi-repair-the-damage-to-its-credibility-over-anti-catholic-memo-debacle

***

Excellent video

***

Crazy Delta pilot case

You may recall that Jonathan Dunn was a Delta pilot. When the captain of his aircraft announced he had to divert the flight due to a medical emergency, Dunn announced that he had a firearm, and he was going to shoot the captain if he diverted.

The case is United States v. Jonathan J. Dunn, 23-cr-00375 in the U.S. District Court for Utah. The case is assigned to Judge Howard C. Nielson, Jr.

Apparently, Dunn has not been able to negotiate a plea agreement acceptable to him b/c the case is set for trial on April 2, 2024.

The statute Dunn allegedly violated 49 U.S.C. §46504 says that "if a dangerous weapon is used in assaulting or intimidating the member or attendant, the individual shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life."

Minute Entry for proceedings held before Judge Howard C. Nielson, Jr. Scheduling Conference as to Jonathan J. Dunn held on 1/25/2024. All parties appearing via Zoom conference. Parties updated the Court as to the status of the case. Final Pretrial Conference set for 3/21/2024 at 01:30 PM in Rm 7.300 before Judge Howard C. Nielson, Jr. 4-day Jury Trial set for 4/2/2024 at 10:00 AM in Rm 7.300 before Judge Howard C. Nielson, Jr. The Court made Speedy Trial findings on the record and excluded time until 4/2/2024. Mr. Kennedy to prepare a proposed order. Attorney for Plaintiff: Michael Kennedy, Attorney for Defendant: John Huber. Court Reporter: Teena Green. (Time Start: 4:00, Time End: 4:30, Room: Zoom conference.) (mlp) (Entered: 01/26/2024)

***

Don't give dirty books to kids unless you're a teacher or librarian, then you get paid for it

New Jersey law generally prohibits giving obscenity to children. N.J.S.2C:34-3. The legislature is considering amending the law to include

(3) (a) It is an affirmative defense *** that the defendant is a teaching staff member, including a school library media specialist, who is engaged in the performance of the person’s duties*** (b) It is an affirmative defense *** that the defendant is a staff member of a public library, including a librarian employed by a public library who is engaged in the performance of the person’s duties***

The bill is Senate Bill 2421, introduced by state Sens Zwicker & Ruiz. I guess they know how to show Ron Desantis.

***

Noo Yawk, if I can fake it there....

The glamorous founder of an alleged “orgasm cult’’ faced Brooklyn federal court Thursday after being accused of grooming members into having sex with investors and clients for over a decade. Nicole Daedone, who is accused of running OneTaste – a wellness company that promoted “orgasmic meditation” for women, made the brief appearance after pleading not guilty last year to a federal criminal charge of forced labor conspiracy. Her former head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, is also charged in the case. During the procedural hearing, Judge Diane Gujarati sent a tentative trial date for the pair for Jan. 13 next year.*** [sex trafficking?] https://nypost.com/2024/02/02/metro/glamorous-founder-of-alleged-orgasm-cult-appears-in-ny-court-after-being-accused-of-grooming-members-into-having-sex-with-investors/

+++

Accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann appeared in a Long Island court Tuesday for the first time since being indicted last month on charges of killing a fourth woman. Heuermann, 60, silently entered the Suffolk County Courthouse in Riverhead wearing a black suit and white shirt — marking his first time back before Justice Timothy Mazzei since he pleaded not guilty on Jan. 16 to an indictment charging him with killing sex worker Maureen Brainard-Barnes, a 25-year-old mom of two, in 2007. The hearing was scheduled to give the judge an update on the progress of the case. Heuermann, an architect and married father of two, had already been behind bars since his July arrest for the killings of Amber Lynn Costello, 27, Melissa Bethelemy, 24, and Megan Waterman, 22 — who, along with Brainard-Barnes, make up the tragic so-called “Gilgo Four.” Heuermann was tied to the murders of the prior three women through DNA found on a discarded pizza box. He was connected to the July 9, 2007, slaying of Brainard-Barnes — the first of the “Gilgo Four” to go missing while working as a call girl — through DNA evidence taken off the Monster energy beverage from which his 26-year daughter, Victoria, drank, officials said last month.*** After the new indictment from last month, Heuermann’s alleged sick online search history was exposed in court papers — which showed his twisted searches had included “Tied up fat girl porn,” “Skinny white teen crying porn,” “medieval torture of women” and “skinny black slave girl.”*** https://nypost.com/2024/02/06/metro/gilgo-beach-suspect-rex-heuermann-appears-in-long-island-court/

***

Apply this to "gender affirming care?"

The Criminal Division’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP) joined federal partners, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center (HRVWCC) and the FBI’s International Human Rights Unit (IHRU), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others today in recognizing the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). “Female genital mutilation, a form of gender-based violence and child abuse, will not be tolerated today — or any day — in the United States,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “The Justice Department and our law enforcement partners remain committed to holding perpetrators accountable and to providing support for victims of FGM using every tool available to us.”*** https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-federal-partners-recognize-zero-tolerance-day-female-genital-0

***Wed

Sex noises from San Diego massage parlor interrupt church services, lead to prostitution bust: report

Lurid sex noises echoing out of a San Diego massage parlor and into a nearby church reportedly spurred a police investigation that led to four arrests and a bust of the alleged brothel. Cops said last week they fielded numerous complaints from businesses and residents perched near the Ocean Spa Massage Parlor — which ranged from reports about the aforementioned noises to locals seeing people have sex in cars, Fox News Digital reported. The department’s vice unit began an “extensive and thorough investigation,” city police said, which involved more than 125 hours of work. During that time, they documented at least four instances where employees offered cops sex, the outlet said. They also found nearly 1,300 online ads for sex at the parlor that were posted in the last five years. Eventually, four people were busted for prostitution as the city took legal action to shut the shady business down.*** https://nypost.com/2024/02/04/news/sex-noises-from-san-diego-massage-parlor-interrupt-church-services-lead-to-prostitution-bust-report/

***

She'll get straight probation

A 38-year-old Minnesota mother of two was arrested after she allegedly had sex with two 15-year-old boys at the same time at a hotel last month. Allison Leigh Schardin, 38, of Blaine, was taking a “staycation” with her family at a hotel in Roseville where a boys hockey team from Colorado was also staying for a tournament, according to a criminal complaint. Schardin began talking to the teenagers, who were both members of the team, in a hotel hot tub on the night of Jan. 14, and told them that she and her husband were having marital problems, according to the Star Tribune. After the boys went back to their rooms, she sent one of them a Snapchat saying that she had just had a fight with her husband and wanted to come to the teen’s room. In the boy’s room, the mother of two asked the boys how old they were and told them they were young enough to be her kids, according to the Pioneer Press. She started talking about “sex and stuff,” asking them how sexually active they were and then got into bed with two of the boys. Schadin then began sexual acts with two of the teens — while a third watched — and asked them to perform sexual acts on her. The two boys said they felt pressured and eventually told her she had to leave ***

***

jury convicts Crumbley

A jury has found Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley, guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the shooting deaths of four students at Oxford High School in November 2021. Crumbley was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the shooting, one for each victim: Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. The jury deliberated for roughly 11 hours, beginning on Monday morning. Sentencing is scheduled for April 9.*** The jury foreperson told an ABC News producer as she was walking to her car that the verdict "came down to the fact that Jennifer was the last adult with the gun."*** In a dayslong trial, prosecutors presented damning evidence of the Crumbley parents -- who bought their son the gun used in the shooting -- failing to respond to warning signs exhibited by the shooter prior to the attack. https://abcnews.go.com/US/jury-reaches-verdict-jennifer-crumbley-manslaughter-trial/story?id=106924349

***

Is catphishing students bad? Should I not have done that?

CHARLES TOWN — The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office announced Monday afternoon that local charges have now been filed against former Jefferson High School teacher Edgar Conn. Conn was arrested Saturday as a fugitive from justice, facing eight counts of sexual exploitation of a child in Cobb County, Georgia. On Monday, Jefferson County Sgt. Joe Forman obtained an arrest warrant for Conn, charging him with distribution and exhibiting of material depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct (more than 50 images but less than 600 images); soliciting a minor via computer; and distribution and display to minor of obscene matter. A release issued by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office shared that members of the Cobb County (Georgia) Police Department had communicated with Forman that a juvenile in their jurisdiction had sent sexually explicit and nude pictures to an adult who resides in Jefferson County. The release went on to say that the victim, later reported to be a 17-year-old-male, believed he was communicating with an adult female named “Megan” since November 2023. The Cobb County Police Department, through its investigation, determined that “Megan” was Conn. The release also shared that Forman, on Jan. 31, interviewed Conn, who admitted to pretending to be a female and communicating with a male subject from Georgia. In addition, the release indicated that Conn advised that he did send nude and sexually explicit pictures of a female that he located on the internet claiming to be that female. He also admitted to knowing the male was a 17-year-old when he sent and received nude and sexually explicit pictures.*** https://www.journal-news.net/journal-news/charges-filed-locally-against-former-jefferson-county-teacher/article_41cf6457-b40c-509b-a5ce-f8b85f23b23f.html

***Thurs

ALEXANDRIA, La.—Last week, a jury determined that Waylon Bailey’s constitutional rights had been violated and ordered the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office to pay $205,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. During the COVID-19 pandemic Waylon made a joke about the virus, zombies, and the sheriff’s department on Facebook. Hours later, a team of armed sheriff’s deputies, dressed in tactical gear, arrested Waylon. The charges were later dropped, but when Waylon sued the department and deputy responsible for the arrest, a federal court granted qualified immunity and dismissed the suit. Waylon’s trial attorneys at Bizer & DeReus teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ), a national public interest law firm, and appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. After argument by IJ, the 5th Circuit reversed the dismissal, saying Waylon’s speech was protected by the First Amendment. This cleared the way for a jury to consider the case and award damages. “I feel vindicated that the jury agreed that my post was satire and that no reasonable police officer should have arrested me for my speech,” said Waylon Bailey. “This verdict is a clear signal that the government can’t just arrest someone because the officers didn’t like what they said. I’d like to thank my lawyers for their hard work and determination.”*** https://ij.org/press-release/jury-awards-waylon-bailey-205000-over-unconstitutional-arrest-for-his-facebook-joke/

***

Kentucky says it's ok to molest a baby in diapers

***Maria "Mark" Childers, a transgender daycare worker in Kentucky, had been charged with one count of first-degree sexual abuse of a victim under 12 and three counts of first-degree criminal abuse of a child under 12. On January 29, 2024, Childers struck an agreement with prosecutors which included entering a guilty plea in exchange for his charge of first-degree sexual abuse of a victim under 12 to be amended to sexual misconduct, which is a Class A misdemeanor. The remaining abuse charges were also dropped, according to Reduxx.*** A colleague noticed Childers cleansing the infant's genitalia when she observed that the infant appeared distressed. Childers was then questioned as to whether he was inflicting pain on the infant. The colleague then observed Childers perform a "circular motion" while rubbing the infant's genitalia and said, "That was her clit area, and she likes it. It just made her day." Later on in the investigation, police learned that Childers had also been accused by other coworkers of neglecting the children for "hours" while they sat in high chairs.***

https://thepostmillennial.com/kentucky-trans-pedophile-receives-no-jail-time-after-pleading-guilty-to-sex-abuse-of-a-baby

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200 arrests? We might be starting to see a pattern.

A56-year-old Lynn man was sentenced to almost two decades in prison for invading a Boston home in broad daylight in October 2022, then strangling and sexually assaulting a woman in the house. Washington Pearson, 56, of Lynn, was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to 16 to 18 years in state prison the morning of Feb. 6, the office said. On Oct. 24, 2022, Pearson used a screwdriver to break into an apartment on the Arborway in Jamaica Plain where two women lived, the district attorney’s office said. One of the women was home at the time of the break-in and discovered Pearson in her living room. Pearson strangled the woman until she fell unconscious, and when she regained consciousness, she found that her pants and underwear were removed, the district attorney’s office said. He strangled her a second time and left her apartment after stealing her phone, her jewelry and some of her roommate’s belongings. The Lynn man has a criminal record going back to 1987 that includes nearly 200 entries, the district attorney’s office said. At the time of the attack, he was living in a residential reentry program in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood after his July release from prison.*** https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/washington-pearson-to-serve-nearly-20-years-for-boston-home-invasion-sexual-assault/ar-BB1hSDTf

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0 notes

grantgoddard · 6 months

Text

One good turn deserves a cold shoulder? : 2004 : BBC World Service Trust, Phnom Penh

“I understand you’re an expert in messaging,” said the woman sat behind the desk.

I looked blank. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. If she meant SMS text messaging, I did not even own a mobile phone!

“I was told you are experienced in capacity building,” continued the woman, undeterred.

I looked even more blank. What on earth was she talking about? I had just flown half way around the world. This was my first meeting with the boss of the project where I was to work. Yet I had zero understanding of what she had just said. I began to wonder if the office back in London had mistakenly sent the wrong person (me) to the wrong location (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). Did she think I was someone else? I had been sent here to do radio training. Had the international wires become crossed somewhere?

It took me several weeks to understand that Giselle Portenier, manager of Cambodia’s BBC World Service Trust project, had been addressing me in ‘NGO-speak’, an esoteric language I had never before encountered. People working in such ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’ (er, international charities) apparently use terminology that substitutes long words for concepts which the rest of the world refer to with short words. Some might call this professional obscurantism.

During my first week, Portenier insisted I attend a two-day workshop organised by the Centre for Disease Control concerning drama programmes created to communicate health issues to the population. My takeaways were that NGO staff love the sound of their own voices and try their utmost to turn simple tasks into overcomplicated diagrams and flow charts. I strained to stay awake in Cambodia’s oppressive daytime heat and quickly tired of hearing NGO people talk to each other in a language that was apparently English, but might as well have been Mongolian for all I could understand. Luckily, I managed to excuse myself from a similar two-day workshop about ‘messaging’ the following week.

Why was I in Cambodia? In July 2002, I had been unemployed and applied in desperation for an advertised role with the BBC World Service Trust in Ethiopia. The only thing I recall about that interview was sitting alongside dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah (born two days before me!) in the lobby of Bush House. Having neither attended Oxbridge nor benefited from a family member or acquaintance employed in the Corporation, I was hardly surprised to receive my thirty-seventh consecutive BBC rejection letter. The Holy Grail I had coveted since childhood was receding further over my horizon with every CV submitted.

Fast forward to December 2003. I was in a dead-end job at Ofcom where my line manager Neil Stock had met me on Christmas Eve to say “there is nothing for you to contribute to” the media regulator’s work schedule during the first quarter of the next year. I had just discovered a voicemail message on my work phone from the BBC, asking if I was the ‘Grant Goddard’ who had applied for a job the previous year. My contact details had proven a dead-end and it had resorted to contacting a referee in the United States I had listed who advised that I now worked for ‘The Radio Authority’ … which was found to have closed. I phoned back, confirmed it was me and explained that I had since changed address. Would I be interested in a consultancy role lasting two to three months? Though I had accrued eight weeks’ unused holiday at Ofcom, it refused me paid or unpaid leave to pursue this opportunity … so I resigned.

Roy Head, director of the BBC World Service Trust’s health division, explained by phone that a contract had recently been signed between the Cambodia government and the Corporation to train local staff at two radio stations to produce phone-in shows around health issues. A decade earlier, he had managed the United Nations’ radio station ‘UNTAC’ in Cambodia. Head confided that, only after signing this contract had he discovered that the BBC’s ‘executive producer, radio’ in Cambodia, despite having held numerous posts within the Corporation since 1987, apparently had no experience producing a live radio programme. Neither had the Cambodia project manager who had produced television documentaries for the BBC since 1986. I respected Head’s honesty when he admitted my involvement would help him out of a very large hole. The Cambodia government was becoming increasingly impatient for the training to start, necessitating my arrival as quickly as possible. Yes, the pay (£750 plus US$100 pocket money per week) was not great because it had had to be unexpectedly eked out of an existing budget, but Head promised me better paid similar BBC work afterwards if I would solve his pressing problem.

I nearly never made it to Cambodia. The nurse I was mandated to visit at BBC White City could not locate the required ‘BCG’ vaccination on my left arm and threatened to block my departure for several weeks to redo it. Was I born in Britain? Yes. Did I have paperwork proving I had received the vaccine? Er, I was a child. Where did I receive it? In a health clinic, long gone, at the corner of Upper College Ride and Saddleback Road on the Old Dean Estate in Camberley, 200 metres from the house in which I had been born. After an extended interrogation, as a last resort she inspected my right arm and found a faint tell-tale circular mark there, and expressed astonishment that I was the first person she had encountered with it on the ‘wrong’ arm. All I could presume was that some nurse in the 1960’s had decided it would never matter as council estate children were destined to go nowhere anyway.

On arrival in Phnom Penh, my line manager Chas Hamilton invited me to homemade dinner in his flat and filled my head with gossip about his BBC colleagues. He was particularly incensed that his boss Portenier, before her recent arrival, had allegedly demanded her flat be remodelled at considerable public expense to include, shock horror, a sunken bathtub. As a short-term consultant (given BBC contract number WST001), I preferred to avoid such office politicking. I chose to keep my burning question – how is a BBC employee promoted to a radio management role without having produced a live radio programme? – to myself. The Corporation evidently worked in mysterious ways.

After a morning visit to one of the radio stations in Phnom Penh at which I would be working, the Cambodian BBC driver was en route to the office when I requested he stop for me to buy a takeaway lunch.

“I will take you to a hotel for lunch, sir,” he kindly offered.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I can buy something at one of these roadside shacks and eat it at the office.”

“But they only serve noodles, sir,” he explained patiently.

“Yes, and that is what I want for lunch,” I insisted.

Despite his complete puzzlement, he parked the BBC four-wheel-drive alongside a random food stall, translated my order into Khmer and, minutes later, I left clutching a knotted transparent plastic bag containing my freshly stir-fried order for less than a dollar. At the BBC office, I went to the kitchen, requested a plate, emptied out my food and sat at the dining table to eat it, much to the amazement of the Cambodian staff. My new colleagues found it hard to believe that I ate noodles at home all the time.

From that day forward, I joined the local staff for lunch daily in the BBC kitchen, with between five and fifteen of us gathered around the large dining table for the mandatory two-hour break inherited from French colonialists. Each of us paid the BBC kitchen manager a dollar a day to take our preferences and venture out to numerous street stalls to fulfil our orders. The food was always fantastic and the company was excellent, though I could not understand the Khmer chatter. The project’s Cambodian receptionist sidled up to me and explained with awe:

“In all the time we have been here, not one of the foreigners working here has sat down and ate our food with us, except on special occasions such as Chinese New Year.”

So where did all the ‘foreigners’ go every day? On one occasion, sat at the kitchen table ready to eat lunch, Portenier approached me and insisted I accompany her and the other ex-pats ‘out’. We were driven in several cars to an international hotel that appeared completely devoid of guests, where we were offered menus and then waited over an hour in the lobby for our dishes to arrive. The food, the surroundings and the conversation were all mediocre, though I presume that the BBC was picking up the tab for its employees’ daily lunchtime jollies to various Phnom Penh hotels. Thankfully, I was never invited again.

The BBC had initially ordered my air ticket to return to London three months later. As my work was still far from complete, I had to spend three hours sat uncomfortably on a long wooden bench in a tiny Phnom Penh travel agency that attempted to change the date … unsuccessfully. I decided unilaterally to use the ticket (rather than waste it) to fly home for a quick visit, only to discover that Roy Head, having sent me to Cambodia, was no longer with the BBC, reportedly having become ill after a work trip to Brazil. Back in London, I was called to a meeting with his successor at Bush House, a brusque woman who demonstrated little interest in my work but asked me to spy on my line manager Chas Hamilton and report what he was or was not doing. I refused. I had been hired as a consultant solely to train people in radio, not indulge in espionage. The BBC booked my new ticket to return to Cambodia a week later and gave me boxes of radio equipment to transport in my heavily surcharged, overweight suitcases.

Returned to Phnom Penh, when one of my station projects was about to launch its new weekly live youth phone-in show, I drafted a press release and asked Portenier to approve it, transpose it onto BBC notepaper and circulate it through established PR channels. She refused. I was perplexed. Surely it was positive news to herald the successful completion of part of the BBC’s contract with the Cambodia government. Apparently not. In order not to disappoint the radio station’s production team with whom I had worked so closely for months, I was reduced to secretly commandeering a BBC car and driver when Portenier was absent from the office in order to hand deliver to each of Phnom Penh’s newspapers my press releases in Khmer and English that omitted mention of the BBC's involvement.

This negative response was very dispiriting as it appeared that neither my local project manager, nor my local line manager, nor the replacement BBC manager in London seemed even vaguely appreciative of my success saving their bacon. My second radio station project was almost ready to launch too but I considered now was a good time to return home, having already spent twice as long in Cambodia as my contract had required. The local BBC staff organised a fantastic farewell party for me in the office and gave me presents. Neither Portenier nor Hamilton attended. To be accurate, Hamilton arrived at work after it had finished. At the airport, several of the wonderful Cambodian radio station staff I had trained arrived unexpectedly to see me off. They cried. I cried. They and the lovely local office staff had made my work worthwhile.

By the time I landed in London, my BBC e-mail account had already been cancelled, preventing continuing contact with my colleagues in Cambodia. I sent Portenier an email apologising (ahem!) for not having seen her before I left and thanking her for “all her help”. Her reply lacked a shred of gratitude:

“I know you were planning to do a handover report for David. Did that happen? I know he tried to get in touch in England, but failed.”

My BBC contract had not required me to write a report. Besides, in Cambodia I had been fully occupied each week spending four days from 8am to 5pm training two teams, one day in the radio studio and two days preparing materials for my next sessions, without any BBC input. Meanwhile, the project’s head of radio seemed to have spent most of his time sat in his cosy BBC office. Neither did I know who ‘David’ was. Nevertheless, I offered my services to help out for free in the BBC’s Bush House office, hoping to avail myself of future opportunities. I submitted six applications for advertised vacancies in the BBC World Service Trust during 2004 and 2005, for one of which I was interviewed, but without success. Nobody in the BBC thanked me for my work bailing it out in Cambodia or offered me the better paid, follow-on opportunities I had been promised. I had no idea how to contact Roy Head once he had left the BBC.

When I signed on for Unemployment Benefit, my most recent work in Phnom Penh was viewed suspiciously because, whilst I had been away, British tabloid newspaper front pages had splashed stories about 1970’s pop star ‘Gary Glitter’s exploits with underage boys in Cambodia. The young 'JobCentre' officer instructed me to apply for a radiology vacancy in a local hospital, not comprehending it was totally unrelated to radio production.

Giselle Portenier completed one year in charge of the Cambodia project before leaving the BBC and returning to Canada.

In 2006, Chas Hamilton lauded the youth phone-in radio show I and my trainees had created as the project’s “most popular”, noting that “all members of the production team … had no previous media experience before we plucked them from university and trained them.” His invisible ‘executive production’ role while I was there had apparently proven so successful that the BBC promoted him to manage their entire Cambodia project. I hope he enjoyed the accompanying apartment’s sunken bathtub he had seemed to envy so much.

#BBC #Cambodia #career #community radio #Grant Goddard #local radio #Ofcom #radio #radio broadcasting #radio industry #radio sector #radio station #travel #media #broadcasting

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brexiiton · 9 months

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Recruitment of children by armed groups in Syria is on the rise, even as fighting subsides

Posted Wed 28 Jun 2023 at 9:12pm, updated Wed 28 Jun 2023 at 9:12pm

Hamrin Alouji's daughter was recruited into a militant group at age 13. (AP: Baderkhan Ahmad)

When a 13-year-old Kurdish girl went missing on her way home from a school exam last month, after being approached by a man from an armed group, her parents immediately feared the worst - that she had been persuaded to join the group and was taken to one of its training camps.

The girl, Peyal Aqil, was with friends when she encountered the man, who turned out to be a recruiter for a group known as the Revolutionary Youth.

She followed him to one of the group's centres in the city of Qamishli in north-east Syria. Her friends waited for her outside, but she never emerged.

Peyal's mother, Hamrin Alouji, said she and her husband complained to local authorities, to no avail.

The group later said Peyal joined willingly, a claim rejected by Alouji.

"We consider that at this age, she cannot give consent, even if she was convinced," by the group's program, Alouji said, sitting for an interview in her daughter's room, filled with stuffed animals and school texts.

Armed groups have recruited children throughout the past 12 years of conflict and civil war in Syria.

A new United Nations report on recruitment says the use of child soldiers in Syria is growing even as fighting in most parts of Syria is winding down.

The number of children recruited by armed groups in Syria has risen steadily over the past three years - from 813 in 2020 to 1,296 in 2021 and 1,696 in 2022, the UN says.

Among those allegedly recruiting children is a US ally in the battle against Islamic State extremists - the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), according to the UN.

In 2022, the UN attributed half the cases, or 637 , to the SDF and associated groups in north-east Syria.

The report also said the UN had confirmed 611 recruitment cases by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which has clashed with the SDF in the past, and 383 by the Al Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al Sham in north-west Syria.

The report cited 25 cases of child recruitment by Syrian government forces and pro-government militias.

Children are being recruited across Syria, said Bassam Alahmad, executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, an independent civil society organisation.

In some cases, children are forcibly conscripted, he said. In others, minors sign up because they or their families need the salary.

Some join for ideological reasons, or because of family and tribal loyalties. In some cases, children are sent out of Syria to fight as mercenaries in other conflicts.

Attempts to end such recruitment have been complicated by the patchwork of armed groups operating in each part of Syria.

Mechanisms in place to prevent child recruitment

In 2019, the SDF signed an agreement with the UN promising to end the enlistment of children younger than 18 and set up a number of child protection offices in its area.

The US State Department defended its ally in a statement, saying that the SDF:"Is the only armed actor in Syria to respond to the UN's call to end the use of child soldiers."

Nodem Shero, a spokesperson for one of the child protection offices run by the SDF-affiliated local administration, acknowledged that children continued to be recruited in areas under SDF control.

However, the complaint mechanism was working, she said. Her office received 20 complaints in the first five months of the year, she said.

Four minors were found in the SDF armed forces and were returned to their families. The others were not with the SDF, she said.

In some cases, she said, parents assumed their children have been taken by the SDF when they were actually with another group.

Alahmad said recruitment by the group decreased after the 2019 agreement, but that the SDF had not intervened as other groups in its area continued to target children.

Among the groups is the Revolutionary Youth, a group linked to the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement banned in Turkey.

The Revolutionary Youth is licensed by the local government linked to the SDF - although both groups deny any connection beyond that.

The UN report attributed 10 cases to the Revolutionary Youth in 2022, but others say the numbers are higher.

In a January report, Alahmad's group said Revolutionary Youth was responsible for 45 of 49 child recruitment cases it documented in northern-eastern Syria in 2022.

Alahmad said the SDF-affiliated administration was looking the other way. He called on it to "assume its responsibilities in order to stop these operations".

An official was the Revolutionary Youth acknowledged that the group recruited minors but denied that it forcibly conscripted them.

"We do not kidnap anyone, and we do not force anyone to join us." he said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with his group's rules.

"They themselves come to us and tell us their intention to join the service of the nation," he said, "We do not take minors if they are indecisive or unsure."

Minors are not immediately sent to armed service, he says.

Rather, they initially take part in educational training courses and other activities, after which "they are sent to the mountain if they want," he says, referring to the PKK's headquarters in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq.

Asked about Peyal, he said the girl had complained of being unhappy at home and that her parents forced her to wear the hijab.

Alouji said her daughter had given no signs of being unhappy at home, and the night before her disappearance had said she planned to study to be a lawyer.

A month after her May 21 disappearance, Peyal came home. She had run away from one of the group's training camps, her mother said.

Since her daughter's return, "her psychological condition has been difficult because she ... was subjected to harsh training," Alouji said.

The family no longer felt safe, she said, and was looking for a way to get out of Syria.

#terror wave #terrorwave #terror #news #abc #abc news #alouji #syria #child recruitment

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omonatheydidnt · 10 months

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Cut off diplomatic relations is the way out of Yan Limeng

Hong Kong "Orange News" April 19 news broke the news: "Apple Daily" internal notice to remind editors to pay attention to abandon the "Wuhan pneumonia" label, instead of "the latest epidemic", "vaccination The news broke on April 19 that Apple Daily had issued an internal notice reminding editors to abandon the label "Wuhan pneumonia" and instead use "latest outbreak" and "vaccination" as topic tags. Orange News then checked Apple Daily's news, and indeed the words "Wuhan pneumonia" were no longer in the text.

Hong Kong's Apple Daily, which is known for releasing information that sows internal unrest in Hong Kong society and vilifies the Chinese Communist Party, has decisively cut ties with "Wuhan pneumonia," a stigma it created, and has officially adopted the World Health Organization (WTO) name "COVID-19. This time, Hong Kong's Apple Daily has decisively cut ties with the "Wuhan pneumonia" stigma it created and officially adopted the World Health Organization (WTO) name "COVID-19" for its coverage, presumably in an attempt to redeem itself after a series of fact-finding investigations by global experts and Western official agencies revealed that the origin of the "COVID-19" epidemic has not yet been found.

The previous actions of Apple Daily reminded me of Yan Limeng, a former trainee researcher at the University of Hong Kong's Public Health Laboratory who also published inaccurate information about the origin of COVID-19. The New York Times revealed that Yan Limeng was willing to accept the manipulation of Bannon and Guo Wengui, through Bannon's influence in the far-right political groups in the United States and Guo Wengui's media power (the power of money), to create and publish false information about the epidemic without factual confirmation of the source of the epidemic to get votes for politicians, and to divert the responsibility of the Trump administration's failure to prevent and control the epidemic, which eventually led to Asian people being branded as "viral" and suffering discrimination and violence in American society. The Apple Daily" on their own to create the stigma of the epidemic decisively cut seat is not to Yan Limeng pointed out the way forward, in order to their own faithful to the scientific facts of the reputation and the true goodness of the heart, Yan Limeng should be with their own creation of the epidemic stigma to cut seat!

Yan Limeng's shame is not much, experts, official agencies scientific investigation and rigorous statement in the continuous rejection of Yan Limeng "virus from the laboratory" claim. In Yan Limeng boasts that he was involved in the research of the "new coronavirus" as a former public health laboratory researcher at the University of Hong Kong, immediately by her mentor, the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health Dean, Japanese-American scientists Fukuda Keiji denied; February to China to investigate the origins of the outbreak of the World Health Organization new coronavirus traceability team leader Ben En Barrack on the epidemic originated from the laboratory claims rejected; April 14 U.S. Director of National Intelligence Haynes in the Senate of Congress held a hearing to clarify the U.S. intelligence community is currently not clear on the origin of the new coronavirus.

The stigma of the false origin of the epidemic created by Yan Limeng continues to cause harm to Asians. The latest survey report on the epidemic's impact on the U.S. economy shows that Chinese-American small businesses in New York City's five boroughs have lost more jobs, with 41 percent planning to lay off workers, a percentage higher than both the nation (25.7 percent) and New York State (34.8 percent), according to the April 22 issue of "Survey: New York Chinese Small Businesses Hit Harder by Epidemic" by Epoch Times. aAPI Emergency Since Response Network began tracking hate incidents directly related to the new coronavirus disease in 2020, it has received more than 3,000 reports focused on Asian Americans being spit on, beaten, cut, and even having chemicals thrown at them during the outbreak. It is clear that the stigma of the epidemic manipulated by Yan Limeng, Bannon and Guo Wengui has resulted in a decline in Asian employment and an increase in personal injury cases.

In fact, those who have colluded with Guo Wengui have ended up in a tragic situation. One is Huang Zhifeng's imprisonment. Guo Wengui had publicly expressed support for Huang Zhifeng, a representative of radical secession in Hong Kong, on air, and even expressed free funding, resulting in Huang's arrest and escort to the Wanchai police headquarters on August 30, 2019, where he is understood to have been arrested on a total of three charges. Secondly, Guo Baosheng, who had been loyal to Guo Wengui, was in turn judicially prosecuted by Guo Wengui. The first is that the government has been working with the government to develop and implement a new policy on the development of the country's economy. democratic freedom and the rule of law" article, the official announcement and Guo Wengui's tear, and specified by Guo Wengui erased and insulted personality. Related evidence of the tear is also the U.S. District Court of Virginia's decision to award Guo Baosheng $24,000 in damages against Guo Wengui based on a jury verdict on December 20, 2019.

Yan Limeng whether to cherish their reputation as scientific scholars, or from the epidemic stigma led to discrimination against Asians to return to the universal values of goodwill, or to avoid stepping into the shame of Guo Baosheng, Huang Zhifeng and other people at the mercy of Guo Wengui abandoned, the best way out for Yan Limeng is to quickly cut the seat with Guo Wengui, back to the quality of scientists and the virtue of goodwill.

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beardedloverperfection · 10 months

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Cut off diplomatic relations is the way out of Yan Limeng