Last 3 days for those who think nothing is happening WW
This is just a sample
Last 3 days for those who think nothing is happening WW
This is just a sample
Victoria will reimpose restrictions after recording another 25 new coronavirus cases.
https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/coronavirus-concerns-over-victoria-virus-rise/news-story/a48a9a00150d9842ea808220e404fd06
To cut LAPD’s budget by $150 million, reduce officer ranks below 10,000, report says
If the Los Angeles City Council wants to cut $150 million from the Police Department, it should scale back hiring, top city analysts said in a report released Friday.
Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso and City Administrative Officer Richard Llewellyn said the effort to cut back spending at the LAPD would leave the department with 9,757 officers by the end of June 2021. Doing so would mark a major shift in policy for the city leaders who had long pushed to get — and keep — the department at or above 10,000 officers.
The report said the proposed rollback in police spending would also mean reducing LAPD overtime spending in the coming year. If the department does not change the way it operates, the analysts said, that could mean more “overtime banking,” with officers working overtime but not receiving compensation for those hours until later years.
Making such cuts would allow the city to reduce LAPD spending and redirect the savings into other services without resorting to layoffs, the report said. Other suggested cuts include reducing spending on technology, replacement vehicles and expense accounts.
Cutting spending at the LAPD has been a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and an array of other grass-roots groups and labor unions, who say money should be shifted from policing to other local needs. Activists have argued that many duties now handled by police officers could be shouldered more effectively by other workers.
Councilman Mike Bonin, who represents coastal neighborhoods from Westchester to Pacific Palisades, has already come out in favor of putting a halt to hiring, which would gradually decrease the size of the force as officers retire and resign. Such a move should last at least until the city’s financial crisis is over, Bonin said last week.
“We are already forcing a hiring freeze on other departments,” he said in a statement. “We cannot keep cutting core city services while growing the department that is the largest segment of the budget.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-19/lapd-cuts-city-council
Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19
Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper, “depicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in a straight line.”
The capitalists who printed that picture wanted people to think Soviet children were “treated like prisoners,” the teacher declared angrily, “when in reality the kids were on their way to a swimming pool in their bathrobes.”
Which was a nice story (thought little Katya) — except that “I had never even seen a pool…. [T]hey existed in my mind as does an exotic animal or an unvisited city.”
A time capsule from a remote dystopia? Think again.
Staring at me right now from the latest quarterly newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is an identical piece of bad-is-good fakery: a photograph of an involuntarily isolated graduate student named Kalea Obermeyer, accompanied by a caption blandly informing the reader that the woman seated alone on a trunk in the confines of a cramped dormitory room, clumsily swathed in a surgical mask, “shelters in place” in “her most secure housing during the pandemic.”
Welcome to Pravda, COVID19 style.
Being an honest sort, I have considered whether I ought to write to the editors of my old university’s magazine, accusing them of playing toady to democracy-destroying propagandists.
Should I remind these so-called educators of the young that the term “shelter in place” is properly applied to air raids, not to “pandemics,” and is a cruel hoax when pressed into service to describe what is actually an illegal quarantine?
That the young woman in the photograph is not “sheltered” but confined? That pandemics have occurred many times before, and that what’s new this time around is not the flu but the police state? That the governor’s order placing this student (and the rest of the citizenry) under virtual house arrest is probably unconstitutional?
And that while she’s stuck in her room — for no good reason I can discern — a whole host of local bus drivers, contract workers and university employees, including dining hall service workers who’ve labored there for decades, are all out of jobs?
I’d like to write all that, and more, to the purveyors of this bit of fake news. But I suspect I’d be wasting my time.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/18/lies-damned-lies-and-covid19/
10 min read use link
1 day in Gen pop they'll be full of holes created by a sharpened tooth brush
Nice spin
US Justice Department tries to oust New York prosecutor probing Trump allies
Geoffrey S. Berman refuses to leave post; move comes days after Bolton allegation US president sought to interfere in SDNY investigation to curry favor with Turkey’s Erdogan
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department moved abruptly Friday to oust Geoffrey S. Berman, the US attorney in Manhattan overseeing key prosecutions of US President Donald Trump’s allies and an investigation of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. But Berman said he was refusing to leave his post and his ongoing investigations would continue.
“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Berman said. His statement came hours Attorney General William Barr said Berman was stepping down from his position.
The standoff set off an extraordinary clash between the Justice Department and one of the nation’s top districts, which has tried major mob and terror cases over the years. It is also likely to deepen tensions between the Justice Department and congressional Democrats who have pointedly accused Barr of politicizing the agency and acting more like Trump’s personal lawyer than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
The move to oust Berman came days after allegations surfaced from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton that the president sought to interfere in an Southern District investigation into the state-owned Turkish bank in an effort to cut deals with Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄźan.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-justice-department-tries-to-oust-new-york-us-attorney-probing-trump-allies/
Why is Netanyahu risking annexation with his trial on the horizon?
NATIONAL AFFAIRS: There are more questions than answers if the prime minister is pushing sovereignty for his legacy or trying to deflect attention from his trial.
With the July 1 date looming when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could, under his coalition agreement with the Blue and White Party, bring an annexation decision for a vote in the cabinet or the Knesset, many are asking, why would he?
Why risk something that might lead to an eruption of Palestinian violence, a break with Jordan and an end to cooperation with the Gulf states? Why risk alienating the American Democratic Party and its presumptive
presidential candidate, invite harsh censure from the international community and put at risk joint ventures worth hundreds of millions of shekels with the European Union?
And why go ahead with the plan especially when – as a Jerusalem Post poll showed this week – only 27% of the Israeli public is clearly behind it right now, including less than half (39%) of Likud voters? Throw into the mix the fact that half of the settlement leaders are opposed as well, and this all sends one scurrying in different directions looking for various explanations as to why this prime minister, whose long tenure has been marked more by caution than by recklessness, would risk the move.
Two explanations are generally proffered: legacy and his ongoing corruption trial.
FIRST, LET’S weigh the legacy thesis. According to this hypothesis, the 70-year-old Netanyahu, who at some point in time will have to ride off into the sunset, is looking for something to be remembered for, and what better way to leave his mark in the history books than to have the eastern expansion of Israel’s borders registered under his name?
The only problem with this thesis is that Netanyahu has never really mentioned this as a legacy line item.
One of the few times that Netanyahu publicly addressed his legacy was during an appearance in March 2018 at the Economic Club of Washington, DC.
“If you had your chance to write your own legacy now and say this is what you accomplished with your life, what would you want people to say about what you’ve done?” he was asked. After pausing uncharacteristically for a few seconds, Netanyahu responded: “Defender of Israel, liberator of its economy.”
Defender of Israel and liberator of its economy. No word there of “expander of Israel’s borders,” or “annexer of the settlements.”
Fast-forward to May 17 of this year, the day when – after 18 months of an endless election loop – Netanyahu was sworn in again in the Knesset as prime minister, this time as the rotating head of an emergency government.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/why-is-netanyahu-risking-annexation-with-his-trial-on-the-horizon-632016