More than a year after shocking allegations emerged about Duke University's lacrosse team, prosecutor Mike Nifong is heading to trial -- as a defendant. The North Carolina State Bar has charged Nifong, the district attorney in Durham County, with several violations of the state's rules of professional conduct, all tied to his handling of the lacrosse case.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/12/2007 11:57 ||
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Hope he gets the max; it is abusers of the system like him that give the honest lawyer a bad name (singular used intentionally)
The man who shot and killed an intruder in his Tech Terrace home over the weekend will most likely not be charged with any crime, the district attorney said Monday. Charles Mire shot Ross Baker inside Mire's home in the 3000 block of 24th Street about 3:35 a.m. Saturday. Mire, 43, told authorities he feared for his and his family's safety when Baker entered the home and set off an alarm, according to Lubbock police reports.
Lubbock County Criminal District Attorney Matt Powell said the law allows a person to use deadly force if they fear injury or death. "Finding a stranger in your home at that time in the morning - that's about as scary as it gets," Powell said.
Friends of Baker say that the 23-year-old Texas Tech engineering major must have been lost or disoriented when he entered Mire's home. Baker had recently moved into a home four blocks from the Mire residence in the Tech Terrace neighborhood.
Marcus Davis, Baker's roommate, said Monday that Baker was not the criminal type. "He didn't have any enemies," Davis said. "Everybody he met loved him. He would never hurt anybody."
Police say Baker entered the house through an unlocked side door. Baker, who grew up in Weatherford, doesn't have a criminal history in Lubbock, according to police records. Toxicology tests are still pending to determine if Baker was under the influence of drugs or alcohol when Mire shot him in the stomach with a 9mm pistol, according to police.
Prior to firing the fatal shot, Mire ordered Baker to surrender several times and fired a warning shot, according to police. The district attorney's office will make a final determination in the case after the police hand over all the details of the shooting, including the toxicology report.
The shooting comes three months after Gov. Rick Perry signed into law a bill that gives Texans a stronger legal right to defend themselves in their homes, cars and workplaces. The bill, backed by the National Rifle Association, states that a person has no duty to retreat from an intruder before using deadly force and provides civil immunity for a person who lawfully uses it. There have been several recent incidents here in which younger people especially just did not seem to take deadly force seriously. We had a weird one recently with an IT contractor from Iowa who was working out of his truck on the dock of my warehouse. We have video and audio monitoring of the area.
As confirmed by the playback, our uniformed and armed security guard approached the back of the truck and simply said "hello." The IT contractor, who was a few feet inside and facing the other direction, turned and yelled, "that's a good way to get a knife through your chest!"
The startled guard, a very tough and imperturbable type, answered, "Oh? How's that?"
He was giving the fool a chance to back down from a terroristic threat charge by saying he wasn't serious, but the fool didn't bite. Instead, the moron jumped down into the guard's face, made a motion toward his pocket and then a throwing motion and said, "Like that!"
The guard retreated about 10 feet and started to call the police. The IT idiot yelled, laughing, "You can't arrest someone for that!" and lunged toward the guard, knocking the phone out of his hand.
Before it was over, the guard had kicked the idiot's ass, the local police had added an additional ass-kicking and a trip to jail, and the inmates there probably added their own greetings, skinny midwestern geeks being something of a novelty in the Lubbock County lockup.
Uniformed security guards in Texas are licensed by the Department of Public Safety and have the same protection from threats and violence as police officers. Assault or threaten one and he might as well be a Texas Ranger. The IT fool is looking at ten years of hard time for assault and terroristic threats.
If it is up to me, and it just might be, this asshole won't see the free world again until 2017. ALL employees and representatives of his company are banned from our property until Doomsday and their contract is null and void under the gross misconduct clause.
#1
Someone in the house is scary enough, someone ignoring surrender demands while you point a gun at them and ignores a warning shot, that's definately fear for your life. It doesn't matter if the guy in your house was drunk or stoned either, cause if he's that out of it, he certainly can be considered a serious danger to you and your family.
CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh - Floods, landslides and lightning strikes have left dozens dead in Bangladesh as torrential monsoon rains pounded the disaster-prone country, officials said Monday. At least 66 people were killed when weekend rains flooded the southeastern port city of Chittagong and set off landslides in surrounding areas. A further seven people were struck by lightning in the north.
These are the worst ever rain-triggered landslides in Chittagong, said fire brigade chief Rashedul Islam, adding that it could take at least another 24 hours to recover all the dead. Home after home has been buried in tonnes of mud and we still havent reached all the affected areas yet, he said.
Military and civilian rescue teams had been mobilised while mosques were asked to provide shelter to those evacuating their homes, Rahman said.
"Just push the ammo crates to the side!"
One-third of the city is now under three to four feet (around one metre) of water, affecting more than 1.5 million people, said Chittagongs mayor, Manjurul Alam.
Bangladeshs meteorological office has also warned that low-lying areas in coastal districts and small islands were likely to be submerged under tidal water. It said further heavy rains were expected all over Bangladesh during the next 24 hours.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/12/2007 00:00 ||
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I heard that Halliburton was going to consolidate its Earthquake division. It was going to incorporate earthquakes, fire, flood, pestilence and disease under a new Division, known as the Division of "Natural" Disasters. I guess Bangladesh is their first "target" - not that Bangladesh needs much help.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
06/12/2007 12:30 Comments ||
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An elephant in eastern India has sparked complaints from motorists who accuse it of blocking traffic and refusing to allow vehicles to pass unless drivers give it food.
The Hindustan Times says the elephant was scouting for food on a highway in the eastern state of Orissa, forcing motorists to roll down their windows and get out of the car.
Local resident Prabodh Mohanty has come across the elephant twice.
"The tusker then inserts its trunk inside the vehicle and sniffs for food," he said.
"If you are carrying vegetables and bananas inside your vehicle, then it will gulp them and allow you to go."
If a commuter does not wind down his or her window, or resists opening the vehicle door, the elephant stands in front of the car until the driver allows the animal to carry out his routine inspection.
Posted by: John Frum ||
06/12/2007 06:02 ||
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The New York Times can find something to carp about anywhere and everywhere it looks.
Just about every major magazine has made some sort of nod to global warming, and Rolling Stone plans to do so in its June 28 issue: on top of the requisite interview with former Vice President Al Gore and an essay by the environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the magazine will start printing on paper that is said to have less of a negative impact on the environment.
Rolling Stone is devoting its June 28 issue to global warming. But as Rolling Stone and others try to be green, they draw criticism from environmentalists who think that if this is walking the walk, it is doing so with a pronounced limp.
Rolling Stone will be printed on what it calls carbon neutral paper, because it is made through a process that the magazine claims adds no carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The paper, which is considerably thinner than what Rolling Stone uses now, is made by a Canadian mill, Catalyst Paper, that the magazine says has reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 82 percent since 2005 and been cited by the World Wildlife Fund for its conservation efforts.
Catalyst offsets the small amount of carbon released in making the paper by planting trees that will not be harvested for more paper, but rather left standing to help cool the climate, said Lyn Brown, a vice president at Catalyst.
What neither an editors note in Rolling Stone nor a press release sent by the magazine mentions, however, is that the new paper has no recycled content, which prompted a mixed review by Frank Locantore, director of the Magazine Paper Project at Co-op America, a nonprofit group that works with publishers to reduce paper use.
Are the steps that Rolling Stone is taking good and important ones? Mr. Locantore asked. Yes. But what Im afraid they are doing in the process is diverting attention away from the need to use recycled paper. He added, All the evidence shows that the greatest ecological and social benefits come from using recycled paper. Eric Bates, deputy managing editor of Rolling Stone, said, We think recycled paper is great.
But, he added, were publishing some of the worlds greatest photographers and artists, and the print quality on recycled paper does not do them justice. What were trying to do is what we can do. We cant put out the magazine we put out on recycled paper.
Mansueto Ventures, which publishes Inc. and Fast Company, announced last week that it had switched both its publications to 100 percent recycled paper and had noticed no slip in quality.
It did really used to be true that you would lose quality by switching to recycled, but I dont think thats the case anymore, John Koten, chief executive and editor in chief of Mansueto, wrote in an e-mail message.
Hearst Magazines, which publishes 19 magazines in the United States including Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Esquire and O, The Oprah Magazine said in April that beginning in July, it would put a Please Recycle This Magazine logo prominently in all its magazines. Whether the company uses any recycled paper for those magazines, though, remains an open question.
In March, Marc Gunther, a senior writer at Fortune magazine, wrote a piece on his Web site about his fruitless attempts to get a straight answer out of Hearsts press office about whether O, The Oprah Magazine has any recycled paper content.
Asked by The New York Times whether Hearst was using recycled pulp in its magazines, Andrea Faville, a spokeswoman for Hearst, e-mailed what she called a backgrounder on Hearsts green efforts. It said the company is using more than 15 percent of post-consumer recycled fiber content across its portfolio of publications.
But is any of that recycled fiber going into magazines, or instead into the companys dozens of newspapers and trade publications? Right now, we dont have any info for you beyond what is in the backgrounder, Ms. Faville responded by e-mail. The media doesn't care about the 90% of the news that is good, and not much about the 9% that is bad. They like to focus on the 1% that is morally reprehensible. I read it at Rantburg.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/12/2007 06:39 ||
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I wasn't aware that anyone still read "Rolling Stone".
They really wanna do their part, tell 'em to fold...
#2
Heretic! It's not recycled paper! Gaia will smite you for that!
Posted by: Mike ||
06/12/2007 10:02 Comments ||
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I wonder why they don't push to use hemp paper? It would seem to be the best of all worlds. Really fine quality and long lasting paper, hemp grows everywhere on marginal land with little irrigation, fertilizer or pesticide, using it saves trees for higher value products like lumber.
It can also be used for a hundred other products, but it would be worth it for paper alone.
About the only down side, I suppose, is that it lowers the quality and strength of marijuana by cross breeding with it.
#6
I suppose High Times will be the first to print on Hemp Paper. Still Rolling Stone would have had a nice publicity stunt with that which would have played directly to their core audience.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh - Floods, landslides and lightning strikes have left dozens dead in Bangladesh as torrential monsoon rains pounded the disaster-prone country, officials said Monday. At least 66 people were killed when weekend rains flooded the southeastern port city of Chittagong and set off landslides in surrounding areas. A further seven people were struck by lightning in the north.
