With malice aforethought

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

New LAPD Car In Fron Of City Hall

Cops are just out of control. Just crazy:

Los Angeles police officers removed antennas from police cars in several predominantly Black neighborhoods to disable the recording equipment and avoid being monitored while on duty, according to an inspection by LAPD investigators.

The department review found about half of the 80 cars in the Southeast division—which includes Watts and the Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens housing projects—were missing the antennas that help capture what officers say in the field. The review discovered at least 10 more cars in nearby divisions also had antennas removed.

Members of the Police Commission, which oversees the department, said they were alarmed by both the actions of the officers and the failure of the department to reveal their actions when they were first detected.

“On an issue like this, we need to be brought in right away,” commission President Steve Soboroff told the Los Angeles Times. “This equipment is for the protection of the public and of the officers. To have people who don’t like the rules to take it upon themselves to do something like this is very troubling.”

But LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said the department did not purposely try to hide the matter from the commission and pointed out that he has always been a strong advocate of the recording devices. LAPD officials decided it would be futile to try to figure out which officers were responsible for removing the antennas, since so many of them use the cars during their shifts. Instead the department warned officers about removing the antennas and put checks in place to account for the equipment at the start and end of each patrol shift.

One of the main reasons a federal judge agreed to lift the Department of Justice’s oversight of the notoriously corrupt LAPD last year, after more than a decade, was because of safeguards such as the cameras.

This is pretty amazing

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

9thstreetclinic

From the Mena Star in Polk County, Arkansas, an announcement about the closing of a free clinic:

It was announced last week that 9th Street Ministries will be concluding their medical clinic mission, which had been ongoing monthly to offer free medical services to those in need since first starting in 1998. The final day for the medical clinic will be Thursday, April 24, and that will conclude the mission that has been in place for almost 16 years.

“Because people are qualifying for insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, our free medical clinic will not be needed anymore,” Stacey Bowser RN, 9th Street Ministries Clinic Director, stated. “We’ve gone from seeing around 300 people a month on a regular basis, but as people were enrolling in Obamacare, the numbers we were seeing have dropped. We were down to 80 people that came through the medical clinic in February, all the way down to three people at the medical clinic in March. Our services won’t be needed anymore, and this will conclude our mission.”

The free medical clinic at 9th Street Ministries was started to reach out to those who could not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare, and did not have any other health insurance policy. If anyone has any form of health insurance, they then become ineligible to received the free medical clinic care through 9th Street Ministries.
“Once people are enrolled in Obamacare, we can’t see them anymore,” Bowser said. “This complete dropoff of numbers of people coming to the clinic is a result of all those who have successfully enrolled in an insurance policy now.”

The last day will officially be Thursday, April 24, and it will only be open until noon.
“There was such a need for many years that we would have people coming through the medical clinic from the time the doors opened early in the morning all the way until 4:00 in the afternoon.”

9th Street Ministries had always been open on the last Thursday of each month, and was providing services on a first come first serve basis.

Heartbleed

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

UPDATE via Steveeboy: Paypal not affected. Check this list of sites or try this. If you use Chrome, you can add this extension to warn you of any unsafe website.

I am so tired of changing my passwords. One of my friends told me I should use a password service that generates a random stream of characters — but who’s to say that can’t be hacked? I’m at the point where I think I just want to pay cash and buy things in person:

The cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has been writing about computer security for more than fifteen years, is not given to panic or hyperbole. So when he writes, of the “catastrophic bug” known as Heartbleed, “On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” it’s safe to conclude that the Internet has a serious problem. The bug, which was announced on Tuesday—complete with an explanatory Web site and a bleeding-heart logo—is a vulnerability in a widely used piece of encryption software called OpenSSL.

Heartbleed is as bad as it is possible for a security flaw to be. It can be easily exploited by anyone on the Internet without leaving a trace, and it can be used to obtain login names, passwords, credit-card information, and even the keys that keep our encrypted communications safe from eavesdroppers. The bug first appeared in OpenSSL code that was released in March, 2012—so the vulnerability has been open to exploitation for more than two years. The Internet-security firm Netcraft reported that up to five hundred thousand sites thought to be secure were, in fact, vulnerable—including Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr, and Dropbox.

Double standard

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

SchultzDinner_022214_web-12

Remember what I said about MSNBC not really being a liberal station?

The MSNBC double standard is on full display as the network made Ed Schultz cancel an appearance at a Democratic fundraiser, but is allowing Joe Scarborough to speak at a Republican cash grab.

In December of 2013, Ed Schultz was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for the Broward Democratic Party’s big Unity Dinner in Florida, but he was forced by his bosses at MSNBC to cancel the appearance and claim that he didn’t know it was a fundraiser.

However, Republican Joe Scarborough is being allowed to deliver a keynote address for Cheshire County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner in New Hampshire in May. The fundraiser that Scarborough is appearing at costs $50 per person, and all of the money goes to the Republican Party.

MSNBC has turned down repeated requests for comment from media reporters who want to know why Scarborough is allowed to appear at a fundraiser, but Schultz was not.

Haunted

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I thought this was interesting:

SOMERVILLE, N.J. — Someone, or some thing, is tickling people, rearranging shoes and otherwise wreaking havoc at the historic Hotel Somerset, a Main Street boarding house and home of the popular McCormick’s Pub.

It might sound funny, but residents and the hotel owner said suspected ghosts that have been reported over the past five years is no laughing matter.

Three residents have complained of their feet being tickled while sleeping, most recently during the past three weeks by Curtis Jones, a resident of the hotel for seven years. Jones said his neck also gets tickled in the middle of the night, and something messes up the order of his shoes underneath his bed.

“I just want it to go away!” said Jones, a 67-year-old Vietnam veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

So does third-generation operator Tom McCormick. That’s why he called East Brunswick-based Paranormal Diagnostics Group to investigate.

McCormick said he believes the ghost story because two other residents complained of tickled feet four and five years ago in a different room from Jones, but the same one where a tenant had died many years before.

On two separate evenings during the past week, McCormick said, his new night-vision surveillance system picked up what he said appeared to be three orbs darting in and out of a storage room. He also said that he, his wife, Shannon, and their 5-year-old son have experienced several run-ins with ghosts.

“I was getting soda down in the basement, when I heard a woman or a girl whisper to me, ‘Help me,'” Shannon said about an incident that occurred last year.

Two hours later, their son said he saw the ghost of a girl in the basement.

“We get to the bottom of the basement stairs, and he takes four steps and plants,” McCormick said. “I said, ‘Is she here?’ He pointed to the same exact same spot as my wife. I just grabbed his hand, and we ran up the stairs.”