Deathdream (1972)
Deathdream / Dead of Night (1972)
“A young man killed in Vietnam inexplicably returns home as a zombie.“
The footage shows Columbus police officer Joseph Fihe arrived first on the scene. As soon as he sees ATF agent James Burk, Fihe tells him to put his hands up and then pulls his gun.
Burk repeatedly identified himself as a federal agent, and tells Fihe he will not get on the ground. He offered to show Fihe his badge, but Fihe tells him to keep his hands in the air.Another Columbus police officer Kevin Winchell then arrived on the scene, and also trained his gun on Burk. They again ordered him to the ground.
Burk complied but instead of checking his badge, the officers attempted to handcuff him. Burk pleaded with the officers who held him face down on the sidewalk. His glasses fell off onto the ground.
Fihe tazed Burk, and after he put handcuffs on him, the officers got Burk’s identification out of his pocket.However, instead of releasing Burk, the officers forced him into the back of a cruiser until other officers arrived.
Burk has filed an excessive force lawsuit in federal court against the city of Columbus and the two police officers. The complaint alleges Burk was trying to confiscate an illegally-held firearm when the suspect called 911 and the dispatcher sent officers Joseph Fihe and Kevin Winchell.
Burk contends this sort of confusion isn’t unheard of. However, in a typical situation, the police officers would have checked his credentials and then either assisted with retrieving the firearm or left the scene.
Why it matters: Kemp did not blame Trump for the attacks, even though the president has openly raged against the governor, promoted false claims of election fraud and attempted to encourage officials to overturn Biden’s victory.
Context: Trump asked Kemp over the phone in early December to call a special legislative session aimed at overturning the presidential election results in Georgia.
- Kemp refused, and Trump in turn denounced the governor in a tweet.
What they’re saying: “It has gotten ridiculous — from death threats, bribes from China, the social media posts that my children are getting,” Kemp said. “We have the ‘no crying in politics rule’ in the Kemp house. But this is stuff that, if I said it, I would be taken to the woodshed and would never see the light of day.”
- “I can assure you I can handle myself. And if they’re brave enough to come out from underneath that keyboard or behind it, we can have a little conversation if they would like to.”
The big picture: Kemp said his relationship with Trump is “fine.”
- “I know he’s frustrated, and I’ve disagreed on things with him before,” the governor said, adding: “Look, at the end of the day, I’ve got to follow the laws and the Constitution and the Constitution of this state.”
Trump, however, has called Kemp a “fool” and a “clown” and said he was “ashamed” for endorsing him in 2018.
Newly unearthed body camera footage captured by Boston police during the demonstrations protesting racial injustice and police brutality in May shows officers using force against nonviolent protesters, pepper-spraying crowds, and, in one instance, speaking about hitting protesters with a car.
The clips are at the center of a report published Friday by The Appeal, a national online news and commentary website that focuses on how the legal system, policies, and politics affect the country’s most vulnerable populations.
The footage was an exclusive for the outlet, which says it was given the videos by Carl Williams, an attorney representing some of the protesters who were arrested during the protests overnight between May 31 and early on June 1. Williams received 44 videos — over 66 hours of body camera footage — as part of a discovery file, according to the publication.
The demonstrations — an outcry after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis — in downtown Boston that day were largely peaceful until later that night, when the situation grew aggressive with cases of looting and vandalism reported. In all, 53 people were arrested by police, 18 bystanders were hospitalized, and nine officers were treated for nonlife-threatening injuries.
Police Commissioner William Gross, the following day, remarked that some protesters “came hellbent on destroying our city.” He praised officers who “said, ‘No one is going to take over our city and burn it to the ground.‘”
The videos published Friday show officers pushing nonviolent demonstrators to the ground apparently unprovoked, spraying pepper spray on individuals and into crowds to force them back, and one department member explaining how he possibly hit people with a car on Tremont Street.
In that instance, the officer whose camera is recording the remarks walks away so his colleague is no longer in frame and says, “This thing is on!”
“It’s this mob mentality,” Williams told The Appeal regarding the police behavior. “And I use ‘mob’ as a sort of a double entendre—mob like the mafia and mob like a group of a pack of wild people roaming the streets looking to attack people.”
Several local officials and advocates have raised questions about and condemned the actions depicted on video, including Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins.
“I have not watched the entire video, but the snippets that I have seen are incredibly troubling,” Rollins told the outlet.
She said the clips have been shared with her team of special prosecutors.
Boston Police Sgt. Det. John Boyle told Boston.com Friday the department has opened an internal affairs investigation on “what the report brought to our attention” but could not provide additional comment because of the ongoing probe.
Nearly a dozen immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were kept in solitary confinement for more than two months, including two people who were isolated for more than 300 days, according to a draft Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s report obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The draft, which highlighted a February inspection of the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California, also documented how food at the facility had expired and gone moldy.
ICE has come under fire in recent years for issues related to medical care provided at its detention centers. In some facilities, ICE provides medical care directly; in others, a few employees assist contractors; and in many cases, the agency oversees care provided by a contractor.
In September, the House Oversight Committee found that ICE detainees died after receiving inadequate medical care and that jail workers “falsified records to cover up” issues. That same month, a separate committee report issued by the House Homeland Security Committee found that ICE detainees are often given deficient medical care and that detention centers use segregation as a threat against immigrants.
The draft report obtained by BuzzFeed News documents how officials at the detention facility in Calexico were using solitary confinement as a long term “solution” for immigrants in “protective custody,” or those who need special supervision or housing due to risks to their safety.
Detainees can request protective custody at any time. ICE also allows detainees to be placed in solitary confinement, called “administrative segregation” for those isolated for nonpunitive reasons, if their presence would pose a threat to the lives of other detainees or themselves.
“During our inspection, we identified serious violations regarding the administrative segregation of detainees at [Imperial Regional Detention Facility],” the report states. “Specifically, IRDF was using administrative segregation as a long-term solution for detainees in protective custody and overly restricted detainees by not offering privileges similar to those offered to detainees in general housing units.”
In addition to finding 11 immigrants had been kept in solitary confinement for more than 60 days and two others for more than 300 days, inspectors said there had been no documented review to evaluate the continued solitary confinement and the immigrants were not afforded recreation time for an hour a day, as required. The inspectors also said the detainees received inadequate medical checks.
“Our examination of segregation records showed the facility inaccurately reported to ICE that detainees were receiving recreation time when, in fact, they were not,” the inspectors wrote. “Moreover, detainees in administrative segregation were restricted to their individual cells for approximately 22 to 23 hours a day without access to the same group activities or opportunities as those in the general population.”
Introduction
The Postal Service is many things—among them, a public service; part of the nation’s critical infrastructure; a regulated monopoly; a good employer, especially for Black workers and military veterans; and a government enterprise competing with and supplying services to private companies.
To take advantage of network economies, the United States and other countries shield their postal services from competition in exchange for delivering mail to far-flung and poorer regions. Like transportation and communications networks that are often publicly owned or function as regulated utilities, a national service with standardized pricing promotes commerce and guards against the concentration of economic power.
Social value of the Postal Service
The social value of the Postal Service extends beyond the economic benefits provided by its delivery operations. It connects family and friends, fosters democracy, and is a key part of our emergency and national security infrastructure. It has operated without interruption during the COVID-19 pandemic and other national catastrophes.
Career jobs in the Postal Service are good jobs for workers without bachelor’s degrees. Postal workers are better compensated than many other workers with similar education, years of experience, and hours worked. This is typical for unionized workers, workers employed by large employers, and public-sector workers without bachelor’s degrees. However, this advantage is shrinking as the Postal Service increasingly relies on noncareer employees who receive meager benefits, and there is pressure to cut benefits for career employees as well.
Challenges faced by the Postal Service
The Postal Service’s financial woes, exacerbated by the pandemic, are due to a confluence of factors: a mail monopoly that is declining in value with the rise of electronic communication; a public service mandate to deliver to every address in the country six days a week; caps on postal rates, borrowing limits, and other restrictions that limit its ability to raise revenue and make necessary investments; and an onerous requirement to rapidly prefund retiree benefits, among other factors.
President Trump’s push to privatize the Postal Service and his party’s antipathy toward government partly explain Republicans’ reluctance to provide the same pandemic relief to the Postal Service as it has to airlines and other private companies facing a similar collapse in demand. Privatization is a long-standing goal of conservative think tanks and corporations that stand to gain from weakening or dismantling the Postal Service. The administration has also been motivated by the president’s animus toward Amazon, a major Postal Service customer, and a desire to impede voting by mail.
In the wake of news that lame-duck President Donald Trump on Thursday was dissuaded by White House aides from publicly demanding stimulus checks as large as $2,000 in the next relief package, progressives called on Democratic leaders to use the leverage offered by Trump’s behind-the-scenes push to demand more than the $600 payments currently on the table.
The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported late Thursday that the outgoing president “was in the middle of formally drafting his demand for the larger payments when White House officials told him that doing so could imperil delicate negotiations over the economic relief package.”
Trump was preparing to demand one-time direct payments of “at least” $1,200 per person and as large as $2,000, according to Stein. “Trump ultimately did not call for the larger stimulus payments,” Stein noted. “His only public comments on the matter came in the morning when he wrote that ‘stimulus talks [are] looking very good.’”
Direct payments of $1,200 per person would be double the size of the checks congressional negotiators are currently considering in a relief package that could be finalized and passed within days. Progressive lawmakers, and one Republican senator, have been vocally urging congressional leaders to include larger direct payments as tens of millions of people across the U.S. struggle to afford basic necessities.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced an amendment last week calling for payments of $1,200 per working-class adult and $500 per child; members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are publicly demanding checks of “at least” $2,000.
While a substantial change in the size of direct payments is unlikely at this stage of the relief negotiations, Democrats are facing pressure to use Trump’s apparent desire for larger payments and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) expressed need for a deal to fight for the inclusion of bigger checks.
“Trump is privately demanding $2,000 stimulus checks. McConnell is quietly fretting over Georgia,” Sawyer Hackett, senior adviser to Julián Castro, tweeted Thursday, referring to the Kentucky Republican’s warning Wednesday that Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) “getting hammered” over the GOP’s opposition to direct payments.
“Democrats control the leverage, they should demand larger stimulus in the package being negotiated,” Hackett said.
Rochester, New York’s former police chief alleges the city’s mayor pressured him to lie about her handling of the police killing of Daniel Prude, which was kept from the public for six months, and that she fired him because he refused to do so.
La’Ron Singletary, terminated in September after announcing plans to retire, says in legal papers made public Wednesday that Mayor Lovely Warren urged him to omit facts and give false information to back her claim that it wasn’t until months later that she learned key details of the March 23 encounter that led to Prude’s death from suffocation.
Singletary wrote in the papers — a notice of claim sent to the city as a precursor to a lawsuit — that Warren was especially worried that his testimony before a city council panel investigating Prude’s death would undermine her repeated assertions that the then-chief hid information from her.
Singletary wrote that those assertions, made by Warren at news conferences and in TV interviews after news of Prude’s death became public in September — were false, defamed his character and harmed his reputation as an upstanding law enforcement official.
Warren said Singletary initially told her Prude’s death was a drug overdose.
Singletary wrote in his notice of claim that he texted her Prude was “likely high on PCP” but that he updated her with additional information on April 13 when the medical examiner ruled Prude’s death was a homicide.
A city spokesperson, Bridgette Burch White, said in a statement that Rochester will “fully defend taxpayers against this frivolous suit.”
She added that Singletary’s version of events confirms Warren’s claim that the former chief never showed her body camera footage from the officers involved in Prude’s arrest and that she only saw it in August, when a city lawyer provided it to her.
Burch White said that was “a fact that Mr. Singletary refused to acknowledge until now.”
Singletary’s notice of claim, sent to the city on Dec. 3, was included Tuesday as an exhibit in the city council’s court petition seeking to enforce a subpoena for him to testify and provide documents for its investigation into Prude’s death.
Singletary didn’t specify the monetary damages he’s seeking from the city, but he noted that his Sept. 14 firing cost him the lifetime health benefits he would have received had he been allowed to retire on Sept. 29.
