https://www.c-span.org/video/?511689-1/john-kerry-testifies-house-global-response-climate-change
John Kerry Testifies Before the House on Global Response to Climate Change
Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry appears before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to testify on the global response to climate change.
What's going on with Trudeau?
>Merriam-Webster dictionary has changed their definition of “anti-vaxxer” to include “people who oppose laws that mandate vaccination”
source
https://www.c-span.org/video/?511689-1/john-kerry-testifies-house-global-response-climate-change
John Kerry Testifies Before the House on Global Response to Climate Change
Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry appears before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to testify on the global response to climate change.
Judge undercuts ex-D.A. Jackie Lacey's initial decision not to charge Ed Buck in fatal overdose
A federal judge has ruled that Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies acted properly when they seized drugs and other evidence from the West Hollywood home of Democratic donor Ed Buck after a man was found dead there in 2017.
The ruling raises new questions about why L.A. County prosecutors initially declined to charge Buck with a crime and then belatedly did so two years later after federal prosecutors built a case against him.
Buck, who is awaiting trial on federal drug charges stemming in part from the man's drug overdose, asked U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder to bar prosecutors from using as evidence syringes, drug paraphernalia and nearly two grams of methamphetamine deputies discovered in what Buck called an illegal search of his apartment.
Snyder denied the request. In a ruling Wednesday, she wrote that Buck effectively invited law enforcement into his home when he called 911 to report the overdose of 26-year-old Gemmel Moore during a "party and play" sexual encounter. The deputies' presence was lawful and the drug evidence was "in plain view," she found, so prosecutors are free to use it in their case against Buck.
"The evidence they ultimately saw and seized was mere feet from Moore’s body," Snyder wrote.
The judge's decision was a victory for federal prosecutors, who allege that Buck, 66, provided the meth that resulted in Moore's death. They say Buck systematically targeted often destitute Black men, luring them to his home for sex and drugs, in some cases injecting them with meth when they were unconscious. Seventeen months after Moore's death, another man died of a meth overdose in Buck's apartment.
Snyder's ruling undercut the finding of Jackie Lacey, when she was L.A. County district attorney, that the drug evidence could not be used to file charges against Buck in Moore's death. Lacey argued that sheriff's deputies had no legal right to pick up the meth and paraphernalia that they saw in Buck's apartment as emergency workers were trying to resuscitate Moore.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-26/ed-buck-court-evidence-drugs-district-attorney
Judge undercuts ex-D.A. Jackie Lacey’s initial decision not to charge Ed Buck in fatal overdose
In a brief 2018 memo declining to prosecute Buck for Moore’s overdose, county prosecutors noted an “inadmissible search and seizure” had taken place but did not elaborate.
In 2019, Lacey told Spectrum News that sheriff’s deputies in Buck’s apartment “saw that Mr. Moore was dead, but they investigated it sort of like an overdose.”
“They found some things, but we contend that it’s illegal how they searched for it,” she said. “They needed a warrant in order to get that stuff.”
Lacey also defended her rationale at a gathering of the Stonewall Democratic Club, telling the LGBTQ group that deputies and a coroner’s office investigator improperly searched a red tool chest containing drugs inside Buck’s home.
By then, federal prosecutors had filed drug charges against Buck. He faces a nine-count indictment that includes charges of distributing drugs leading to death and enticement to travel across state lines to engage in prostitution.
In a March 2 hearing held over Zoom, Snyder heard testimony on the tool chest from Buck, who was in jail, and Sheriff’s Deputy Grehtel Barraza.
Barraza said she noticed a bulbous pipe and a plastic bag with white crystalline residue in drawers of the tool chest that were open, along with drugs on the kitchen table. Buck testified that he was “ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths” percent sure the drawers were closed, because the tool chest could tip over if they were left open.
But prosecutors showed the judge a video from Buck’s computer that appeared to show Moore smoking something with the tool chest just behind him and its drawers open. Snyder said she found the deputy’s testimony more credible than Buck’s.
>https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-26/ed-buck-court-evidence-drugs-district-attorney
Legal experts said there should be no difference in how state or federal prosecutors evaluate whether police have violated the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
“The 4th Amendment standard is the same whether it is in federal court or state court,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school.
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, said it was “not a good reflection on the D.A.’s office that Judge Snyder pretty quickly found evidence admissible that the D.A. didn’t see as admissible for prosecution.”
“The horrifying thing is that, in being so cautious, the downside is great,” she said. “What’s of grave concern here is that I think there were just a lot of signals that this was a really serious event that was putting people in danger, so you might want to move as aggressively as the law would permit.”
Levenson said Buck could have at least been charged with drug offenses. It’s a concern, she added, that Buck was allegedly able to keep engaging in behavior that led to another man’s death months after Lacey declined to prosecute him for Moore’s overdose.
Both Lacey and a spokesman for current Dist. Atty. George Gascón declined requests for comment on the ruling or how it might affect any future state prosecution of Buck. He faces a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole if convicted at his federal trial, which is set to start July 21.
Two days before Buck was charged with federal drug crimes in September 2019, L.A. County prosecutors charged him with operating a drug den and battery after a third man overdosed on meth in his apartment but survived. That case is on hold as the federal prosecution proceeds. It could be moot if Buck is convicted.
Buck’s lawyer, Ludlow B. Creary II, said he was disappointed in Snyder’s ruling. “We’ll see what the jury thinks of the deputy’s assertion that she could easily see these things in plain view,” he said.
Until Moore’s overdose, Buck was a fixture of Democratic politics in West Hollywood. A former member of the Stonewall Democratic Club’s steering committee, he made frequent donations to Democratic candidates for local, state and federal office.
Jasmyne Cannick, a political consultant who has advocated for Moore’s family and organized protests demanding Buck’s prosecution, said Snyder’s ruling was a sign of Lacey’s mishandling of the case. “I don’t think she took it as seriously as she should have,” Cannick said.
Lacey, who was ousted by Gascón in the November election, raised other concerns about hurdles to prosecuting Buck. The statements of other men who made claims of misconduct by Buck in their own “party and play” encounters could not be corroborated, she argued.
Nonetheless, federal prosecutors plan to rely on the men’s testimony to establish a pattern of behavior similar to what they say led to the fatal overdoses of Moore and, 17 months later, 55-year-old Timothy Dean of West Hollywood.
In another ruling Wednesday, Snyder rejected Buck’s request to bar prosecutors from having the men testify about what they say was Buck’s habit of using racial slurs. At the same time, she barred “the use of the ‘N’ word,” saying language “in police reports and otherwise should be sanitized.”
>https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place
A century ago, one section of Vienna played host to Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Tito, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Stalin.
In January 1913, a man whose passport bore the name Stavros Papadopoulos disembarked from the Krakow train at Vienna's North Terminal station.
Of dark complexion, he sported a large peasant's moustache and carried a very basic wooden suitcase.
"I was sitting at the table," wrote the man he had come to meet, years later, "when the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered.
"He was short… thin… his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks… I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness."
The writer of these lines was a dissident Russian intellectual, the editor of a radical newspaper called Pravda (Truth). His name was Leon Trotsky.
The man he described was not, in fact, Papadopoulos.
He had been born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was known to his friends as Koba and is now remembered as Joseph Stalin.
Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century.
It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established.
The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practised on the city's Berggasse.
The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia's leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times.
Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler.
>https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
In his majestic evocation of the city at the time, Thunder at Twilight, Frederic Morton imagines Hitler haranguing his fellow lodgers "on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons".
"His forelock would toss, his [paint]-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, [and] stalk off to his cubicle."
Presiding over all, in the city's rambling Hofburg Palace was the aged Emperor Franz Joseph, who had reigned since the great year of revolutions, 1848.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his designated successor, resided at the nearby Belvedere Palace, eagerly awaiting the throne. His assassination the following year would spark World War I.
Vienna in 1913 was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which consisted of 15 nations and well over 50 million inhabitants.
"While not exactly a melting pot, Vienna was its own kind of cultural soup, attracting the ambitious from across the empire," says Dardis McNamee, editor-in-chief of the Vienna Review, Austria's only English-language monthly, who has lived in the city for 17 years.
"Less than half of the city's two million residents were native born and about a quarter came from Bohemia (now the western Czech Republic) and Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), so that Czech was spoken alongside German in many settings."
The empire's subjects spoke a dozen languages, she explains.
"Officers in the Austro-Hungarian Army had to be able to give commands in 11 languages besides German, each of which had an official translation of the National Hymn."
And this unique melange created its own cultural phenomenon, the Viennese coffee-house. Legend has its genesis in sacks of coffee left by the Ottoman army following the failed Turkish siege of 1683.
>https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
"Cafe culture and the notion of debate and discussion in cafes is very much part of Viennese life now and was then," explains Charles Emmerson, author of 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War and a senior research fellow at the foreign policy think-tank Chatham House.
"The Viennese intellectual community was actually quite small and everyone knew each other and… that provided for exchanges across cultural frontiers."
This, he adds, would favour political dissidents and those on the run.
"You didn't have a tremendously powerful central state. It was perhaps a little bit sloppy. If you wanted to find a place to hide out in Europe where you could meet lots of other interesting people then Vienna would be a good place to do it."
Freud's favourite haunt, the Cafe Landtmann, still stands on the Ring, the renowned boulevard which surrounds the city's historic Innere Stadt.
Trotsky and Hitler frequented Cafe Central, just a few minutes' stroll away, where cakes, newspapers, chess and, above all, talk, were the patrons' passions.
"Part of what made the cafes so important was that 'everyone' went," says MacNamee. "So there was a cross-fertilisation across disciplines and interests, in fact boundaries that later became so rigid in western thought were very fluid."
>https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21859771
Beyond that, she adds, "was the surge of energy from the Jewish intelligentsia, and new industrialist class, made possible following their being granted full citizenship rights by Franz Joseph in 1867, and full access to schools and universities."
And, though this was still a largely male-dominated society, a number of women also made an impact.
Alma Mahler, whose composer husband had died in 1911, was also a composer and became the muse and lover of the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Walter Gropius.
Though the city was, and remains, synonymous with music, lavish balls and the waltz, its dark side was especially bleak. Vast numbers of its citizens lived in slums and 1913 saw nearly 1,500 Viennese take their own lives.
No-one knows if Hitler bumped into Trotsky, or Tito met Stalin. But works like Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mr Hitler - a 2007 radio play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran - are lively imaginings of such encounters.
The conflagration which erupted the following year destroyed much of Vienna's intellectual life.
The empire imploded in 1918, while propelling Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Tito into careers that would mark world history forever.
https://twitter.com/finneganLAT/status/1385985428264689671
California Guard members feared fighter jet would be ordered to frighten protesters
https://twitter.com/SavannahGuthrie/status/1392483606086443008
Just sat down with Rep. Liz Cheney @replizcheney for an exclusive interview on @NBCNews.
are those colours deliberate
>Grimes was hospitalized for panic attack
The musician briefly played Nintendo character Princess Peach in a sketch
https://www.instagram.com/p/COwKZwfMdBz/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CK93KueFg74/
Tell me of the waters of your homeworld 🪐
https://www.instagram.com/p/CNEFC0FJGxA/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CMprg85p2Nq/
thank you @lilnasx for our gentle honest conversations and for acknowledging the inspiration cellophane gave you and your creative team in creating your iconic video!
i think what you have done is amazing and i fully support your expression and bravery in pushing culture forward for the queer community. legend status.
i want to thank @andrewthomashuang and @kelyvon for helping me create cellophane but also and most importantly i would like to thank sex workers and strippers for providing the physical language to make both videos possible. i have been working with @swarmhive to help support this community and i know all donations to the swarm hardship fund will be welcome during this difficult time.
>cellophane
In June 1986, before construction was completed, developer Larry Silverstein signed Drexel Burnham Lambert as a tenant to lease the entire 7 World Trade Center building for $3 billion over a term of 30 years. In December 1986, after the Boesky insider-trading scandal, Drexel Burnham Lambert canceled the lease, leaving Silverstein to find other tenants. Spicer & Oppenheim agreed to lease 14 percent of the space, but for more than a year, as Black Monday and other factors adversely affected the Lower Manhattan real estate market, Silverstein was unable to find tenants for the remaining space. By April 1988, he had lowered the rent and made other concessions.
>Drexel Burnham Lambert
>Boesky insider-trading scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexel_Burnham_Lambert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Boesky
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Boesky
Although insider trading of this kind was illegal, laws prohibiting it were rarely enforced until Boesky was prosecuted. Boesky cooperated with the SEC and informed on others, including the case against financier Michael Milken. As a result of a plea bargain, Boesky received a prison sentence of 3+1⁄2 years and was fined US$100 million. Although he was released after two years, he was permanently prohibited from working with securities. He served his sentence at Lompoc Federal Prison Camp near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Boesky, unable to rehabilitate his reputation after being released from prison, paid hundreds of millions of dollars as fines and compensation for his Guinness share-trading fraud role and a number of separate insider-dealing scams. Later, Boesky began practicing Judaism and attended classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he had been a major donor; however, during 1987, after the fallout from his financial scandal, The New York Times reported that "after Ivan F. Boesky had been fined $100 million in the insider-trading scandal, the Jewish Theological Seminary, acting at his request, took his name off its $20 million library.
>Guinness share-trading fraud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_share-trading_fraud
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_von_Haselberg
Sophie Frederica Alohilani von Haselberg is an American actress, best known for co-starring in the Woody Allen film Irrational Man. By birth, she is a member of the Haselberg German noble family and, by marriage, a member of the aristocratic Guinness family.
>Is Cheney in the CIA?
https://www.downloadtwittervideo.com/
https://translate.google.com/
https://twitter.com/Khair_Aljabri/status/1392536645287747585
https://twitter.com/LocalFocus1/status/1392537132523212801
https://twitter.com/akkadowis/status/1392538950905049092
https://twitter.com/mayadaasmaa/status/1392540345607544833
https://twitter.com/Jtruzmah/status/1392541873508478976
https://israelpalestine.liveuamap.com/
>https://twitter.com/Khair_Aljabri/status/1392536645287747585
Armed settlers shoot at worshipers trapped in a mosque in Lod, and distress calls over loudspeakers
Smartmatic CEO Venezuela