A drift of rescued piglets (yes, that is what a group of pigs is called) is at the center of a controversy between animal rights advocates and the Wiltshire fire department. After fire fighters pulled 18 piglets and two sows from a fire, the farmer, Rachel Rivers, wanted to thank them so the farm butchered the pigs, made them into sausage, and served them to their rescuers.
Without much notice or debate, Maryland officials ordered the removal of the statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney due to his authorship of the Dredd Scott decision. At midnight, workers quietly dismantled the statue in response to the violence in Charlottesville. Taney’s statue stood for 145 years on the Maryland State House and his removal follows calls for the removal of statues not simply of confederate figures but founders like George Washington and others associated with either slavery or segregation. I have cautioned against the wholesale removal of historical images and monuments and names at universities. The flaws and failures of historical figures are often as more important than their triumphs. The Taney removal reflects a widening array of figures who are now subject to call for removal — beyond confederate statuary. It is not clear what Maryland will do with the US Coast Guard Cutter Taney which currently is part of the Baltimore Maritime Museum. It is last surviving active ship from the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941. I have spent nights on the Taney with the Cub Scouts. While this is not on state lands, it is not clear if there will also be a demand that the ship be removed given its namesake or how far this movement to remove historical references will do.
In a move that frankly reads like it came out of The Onion, ESPN pulled its sportscaster Robert Lee in coverage of University of Virginia football game — because his name is the same as the Confederate general. The company believed that having a sportscaster named Lee for a Virginia game could be painful for some after the protests in Charlottesville. It does not matter that the sportscaster is Asian or that such an association is facially absurd.
This is not what most people want from “bring your daughter to work day.” A mother-daughter duo composed of Anne Dodge, 55, and Jennifer Dodge, 30, were arrested for alleged prostitution at their home in Sarasota, Florida. Police alleged that they ran an unlicensed massage parlor offering sexual favors. The charges have an interesting element, as discussed below.
Continue reading “Mother and Daughter Arrested In Florida Prostitution Ring”
Protesters are mounting a widening movement against statues to historical figures across the country. What began with protests of confederate statues after the Charlottesville protests has expanded to include Supreme Court justices, presidents, founders, and now explorer Christopher Columbus. In Detroit, protesters gathered around the Columbus statue to demand removal as a symbol of “white supremacy.” In Baltimore, the Columbus statue was vandalized.
Continue reading “Columbus Statues Protested In Detroit And Damaged In Baltimore”
The push to remove confederate statues has been spreading across the country after the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats have been making the removal of such statues a priority issue. Pelosi has called for statues to be removed in the Capitol even though those statues were there when she was Speaker of the House of Representatives. A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, however, has found that 54 percent of adults said Confederate monuments “should remain in all public spaces.” Only 27 percent said they “should be removed from all public spaces” while 19 percent had no opinion.
Continue reading “Poll: Majority Of Americans Oppose Removal Of Confederate Statues”
Callie Fullerton, 8 and Haleigh Fullerton, 17, were at home watching television on July 12th when a car crashed into the house. Both were killed Behind the wheel was Alia Sierra, 17. While the same age as Haleigh, Sierra will be tried as an adult after she crashed her car into a house a 107 mph. She has been charged ten felony counts, including reckless homicide, causing death while operating a motor vehicle with a controlled substance in the blood and criminal recklessness.
Below is my column in the Hill Newspaper on the call for the removal of the statue of George Washington in my hometown of Chicago. This is not the first such call to remove statues of confederate figures or those who supported segregation. The most recent such removal was the removal of the statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney due to his authorship of the Dredd Scott decision. There have been demands that monuments and the names of slave-owning founders be removed.
Here is the column: Continue reading “GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE CALL FOR THE REMOVAL OF STATUES OF SLAVE-OWNING FOUNDERS”
As many on this blog know, I am a military history nut so the one story this weekend was particularly exciting: the crew of billionaire Paul Allen has located the wreckage of the USS Indianapolis, which sank 72 years ago. We last discussed the Indianapolis during my visit to Tinian where it dropped off the atomic bomb parts in World War II. The ship rests in the Philippine Sea some 18,000 feet below the surface. Of 1,196 crew aboard the ship, only 317 survived.
If the expression of Brandy Lerma, 31, seems a bit shocked, it may be in response to the results of her blood alcohol level.
Continue reading “Too Much Brandy: Video Captures Arrest For Florida Woman With .20 BAL”
An entire country mourned the death of Heather Heyer, a paralegal, who went to Charlottesville to protest the hateful march of neo-Nazis and clansmen — only to be murdered when James A. Fields, 20, allegedly rammed his car into protesters. Now the organizer of the racist march has sent out a tweet calling her a “fat, disgusting Communist” — a tweet he later blamed on being drugged out of his gourd. Jason Kessler explained that he has been doing some heavy drugs and drinking lately.
While people often chide the United States for our torts system and personal liability laws, occasional stories from other countries remind us of how important liability can be to influence accident avoidance. Sharon Regoli Ciferno, 50, a teacher at Charles A. Huston Middle School in western Pennsylvania, was vacationing in Mexico when she fell off a hotel roof that used a deck ledge as a bench. Ciferno laughed so hard that she lost her balance in throwing her head back and fell off the roof.
Continue reading “Pennsylvania Teacher Falls Off Hotel Roof In Mexico After Laughing Too Hard”
Every terrorist attack brings a myriad of tragic stories of lives cut short by extremists who believe that mowing down innocent people will please God and guarantee them a place in paradise. I had to share this picture on one such tragedy in the death of American Jared Tucker, 42, who took this picture one hour with his wife Heidi Nunes before being murdered in the streets of Barcelona Spain. They were celebrating their one-year anniversary. Continue reading “A Picture Frozen In Time: California Man Killed In Spanish Terror Attack”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
There are some cases where probable cause is questioned and there are a few others that leave me shaking my head in disbelief of how ridiculous some officers can be.
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals recently handed down a stinging rebuke of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and its deputies some of whom, Plaintiffs claim, lied about a field test of a suspected Marijuana product, finding evidence of marijuana grow derived from purchasing tools at a gardening retailer somehow established probable cause sufficient to send in a SWAT team to execute a search warrant and detain a couple for several hours.
The leafy green vegetable matter in question was not marijuana but tea leaves.
It is a classic example of department officials promising to make a publicity garnering drug sweep and when arrests are not made, someone must be sent to jail at all costs. And as can often be the case with such maligned efforts the end result was a civil rights lawsuit in federal court.
The spokesman for the New York State Court system has been fired after a disastrous butt-call to a reporter in which he admitted barely working to earn his $172,000 job. David Bookstaver, 59, was previously stripped of his duties but he remained as “communications director” with his high salary and virtually no work. That is when the spokesman was undone by the accidental dialing of a reporter and a four-minute tirade in which he laughed about this sweet job.