Tag Archives: force

A DEA Agent Who Helped Take Down Silk Road Is Going to Prison for Unbelievable Corruption

by HayleyU75kbrx Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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A corrupt former drug enforcement agent who played a central role in taking down the popular online drug bazaar Silk Road will serve six and a half years in prison for corruption, a federal judge ruled Monday.

Carl Mark Force IV pleaded guilty to extortion, money laundering, and obstruction of justice this past summer, after working for two years as an undercover agent for an interagency team tasked with identifying the owner of Silk Road. Force, who spent 15 years with the Drug Enforcement Administration, used his position in the investigation to swindle his way to a payout of more $700,000 in Bitcoin and a Hollywood contract. (Another member of the investigative team, ex-Secret Service Agent Shaun Bridges, also pleaded guilty over the summer to pocketing $820,000 from the accounts of Silk Road users.) Force has also been ordered to pay $340,000 in restitution.

In case you haven’t been following the Silk Road case, here’s a primer:

What exactly was Silk Road, again? Silk Road was a darknet marketplace that connected buyers and sellers dealing in a vast array of narcotics, false documents, weapons, and other contraband. “The idea was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them,” creator Ross Ulbricht wrote in his journal. Users paid in Bitcoin—around $1.2 billion worth—and could only access the site using an anonymous internet browser called Tor. Ulbricht ran Silk Road using the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts” from January 2011 until 2013, when he was caught red-handed at his laptop by a law enforcement sting in a San Francisco coffee shop.

Depending on whom you ask, the site was either a radical experiment in libertarian principles or “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal market on the Internet,” as the criminal complaint against Force put it.

Ulbricht, who earned a commission on each transaction, was found guilty of drug trafficking, money laundering, and hacking, and he was sentenced to life in prison during the summer. At the sentencing hearing, the federal judge didn’t hide her intention to make an example of Ulbricht: “What you did was unprecedented, and in breaking that ground as the first person you sit here as the defendant now today having to pay the consequences for that.” Ulbricht’s family, defense counsel, and supporters have mounted a public campaign to protest what they call a “draconian sentence.”

Okay, but what does Carl Force have to do with all that? As the lead undercover cop for a Baltimore-based team of federal investigators, Force was in charge of communicating with Ulbricht. To that end, he created and used a fake persona, “Nob”—ostensibly a US drug smuggler—to make contact and gain Ulbricht’s trust. In his communication with Nob, Ulbricht commissioned the murder of an employee, Curtis Green, whom he suspected of stealing Bitcoin from Silk Road accounts. (That money turned out to have been stolen by Bridges.) Force and the rest of the Baltimore team then staged the murder of Green. The incident was the first of six hits that Ulbricht has been accused of arranging, though those charges were not pursued in the final prosecution.

At what point did Force start breaking the law? In addition to Nob, Force created unauthorized personas, including “French Maid” and “Death from Above,” which he used to extort more than $200,000 from Ulbricht in exchange for fake identification and inside information on the federal investigation. Because many of the communications were encrypted, it’s impossible to tell whether the intelligence Force sold to Ulbricht was entirely junk, or whether he truly was a mole. What we do know is that once Ulbricht paid, Force has admitted to transferring the funds to a personal account, not a government one.

“Carl Force crossed the line from enforcing the law to breaking it,” Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said in a statement after Force’s guilty plea, adding that the agent was “seduced by the perceived anonymity of virtual currency and the dark web.”

That sounds like something straight out of The Shield. There’s more: Force, who has invested heavily in Bitcoin since learning of it through the case, became the acting chief compliance officer at the Bitcoin company CoinMKT in 2013. There, he illegally seized more than $300,000 in assets from a user that the company had flagged for suspicious activity and transferred the money to his personal account.

And to top it all off, in March 2014, Force entered into a $240,000 contract with 20th Century Fox Film Studios for a film about the Silk Road investigation—without notifying his superiors.

Could this affect a potential appeal by Ulbricht? Yup. His defense attorney, Joshua Dratel, has indicated that the appeal will challenge the decision to ban any reference to the corruption from the courtroom. “We knew that the case agent who made the first contact with Dread Pirate Roberts was, in fact, entirely corrupt,” Ulbricht’s lawyer said following the sentencing. “We were prevented from using any of that at trial. That is going to be an issue.” Dratel had previously called for a retrial after the corruption charges came to light, but the request was denied—in part because a second, concurrent investigative team based in New York was the one that ultimately busted Ulbricht, not the Baltimore team. The appeal, which has not yet been scheduled, will go before a panel of three judges in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

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A DEA Agent Who Helped Take Down Silk Road Is Going to Prison for Unbelievable Corruption

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Jim Webb Misses His Moment

by MaryjoQuigley Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jim Webb needed to make a splash at Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, and his chance to do it arrived early. As the rest of the field sparred over the Iraq War and use of force in Libya and other countries, Webb tried to interject. It was time for the former Marine infantryman, the only person on stage with military experience, to lay the hammer of his combat experience and Pentagon leadership down on the rest of the field.

But when he finally got a chance to speak, Webb’s answer was more of a lecture than a smackdown. He wandered from ethnic divisions in Iraq to a nuclear Iran before unexpectedly diving into the issue of China’s rising power, one of the former Virginia senator’s pet themes. He then finished by picking the first of many fights with moderator Anderson Cooper over his speaking time.

It’s those moments, which came off as petulant, that may define Webb among voters who know little about him. That, or for his jarring answer to the final question of the night, where he said the enemy he was proudest of making was one he killed in Vietnam:

Outside of that, Webb’s debate performance was mostly soft. He was seen as the “wild card” in the days before the debate, an intelligent and unpredictable candidate whose straight talk could catch Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton off-guard. But during the debate he was more often heard demanding airtime than he was seen on camera. When he was, his answers tended to be discursive, with essentially no big moments like Sanders’ “damn emails” line or effective policy shots like Clinton’s jabs at Sanders’ gun record that might grab the attention of media or voters.

His finest moment was a respectful exchange with Sanders, in which Webb gracefully declined to take shots at Sanders’ status as a conscientious objector during Vietnam and Sanders praised Webb’s service and key role in passing the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Both men came off as thoughtful and humane, and Webb got a competitor to talk about his biggest political achievement. But in a debate that was generally civil and substantive, it wasn’t enough.

The question for Webb was always one of organization: Even if he did turn in an outstanding performance, would his small campaign have the resources to make something big of that moment? After tonight’s debate, that question seems less relevant.

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Jim Webb Misses His Moment

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This American Trophy Hunter Allegedly Beheaded Zimbabwe’s Most Beloved Lion

by SwenJanousek Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update, July 28, 4:40 p.m.: Walter Palmer released a statement Tuesday afternoon saying he “deeply regrets” killing Cecil the Lion and implied he may have been misled by local guides.

A Minnesota dentist has been identified as the big game hunter who allegedly paid $50,000 to kill Cecil the Lion, one of Zimbabwe’s most beloved animals, and a main tourist attraction for the Hwange National Park. Zimbabwean police said Walter Palmer is now being investigated for baiting the 13-year-old lion and then killing the animal with a crossbow.

“They went hunting at night with a spotlight and they spotted Cecil,” Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force’s Johnny Rodrigues said, according to The Guardian. “They tied a dead animal to their vehicle to lure Cecil out of the park and they scented an area about half a kilometer from the park.”

“He never bothered anybody. He was one of the most beautiful animals to look at,” he added.

Palmer has been accused of paying local hunters, two of whom have since been arrested, to aid the hunt. According to Zimbabwean officials, Cecil was also skinned and beheaded.

According to Minnesota’s Star Tribune, Palmer is preparing to dispute some of the allegations. “Obviously, some things are being misreported,” he said, according to the report. Palmer’s spokesman told The Guardian that “Walter believes that he might have shot that lion that has been referred to as Cecil,” but added that Palmer believed “he had the proper legal permits and he had hired several professional guides.”

News of Cecil’s killing was swiftly met with outrage on social media. Since being identified as Cecil’s alleged killer, Palmer’s dental business in Minnesota—which was closed on Tuesday—has been flooded by negative Yelp reviews condemning the allegations.

Yelp

In 2009, Palmer was profiled by the New York Times for a feature on the controversial sport of trophy hunting in which he described his ambition for setting new hunting records. He told the paper he learned to shoot at the age of five. In 2008, Palmer pled guilty to lying to federal officials about where a black bear had been killed.

“We are extremely saddened by the news of Cecil the Lion being illegally killed for sport—not only from an animal welfare perspective, but also for conservation reasons,” Jeff Flocken, North American Regional Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare said in a statement. “African lion populations have declined sharply, dropping nearly 60 percent in the last three decades.”

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This American Trophy Hunter Allegedly Beheaded Zimbabwe’s Most Beloved Lion

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Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

by UlrichLompdh Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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The death of nine innocent worshippers may achieve what decades of civil rights activism failed to do: Force South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag from grounds of its capitol building.

The Confederate battle flag flew over the capitol dome in Columbia, S.C., from 1962, when the legislature hoisted it as a symbol of defiance against integration, to 2000, when huge protests convinced state lawmakers to move it elsewhere. But it didn’t go far: The flag has flown over a Confederate soldiers’ memorial on the capitol grounds ever since.

The shooting in Charleston is leading to new calls to take down the Confederate flag for good, including one from the mayor of Columbia:

Now we’ve also seen some tentative hints that figures on the right may actually be willing to let that happen:

Nikki Haley

The South Carolina governor infamously called a non-issue during her re-election campaign last year because she “had not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag” during calls with business leaders. She also rejected at least one previous call by the NAACP to remove the flag.

But during an interview on Friday with Reuters, Haley seemed open to re-examining the deal that moved the Confederate flag to its current spot

“If they want to have this conversation again, they will,” Haley said of the state legislature. “They had it 15 years ago. They came to a consensus, that’s where it was. I think they’ll have another conversation, and we’ll bring people together.”

Lindsey Graham

Many people, including us, blasted the South Carolina senator and Republican presidential candidate when he told CNN on Friday morning that the flag is “part of who we are” in his state. But he also said he was open to changing the capitol’s awkward compromise on the flag.

“It’s time for people in South Carolina to revisit that decision,” he said. “It would be fine with me.”

During the 2012 GOP primaries, Graham called the use of the flag at the Confederate War Memorial a “bipartisan” solution and advised candidates to avoid the topic altogether. “Any candidate who brought that up wouldn’t be doing themselves any favors,” he said to The Hill.

The National Review

Writers at the conservative magazine—which firmly backed the South’s mantra of states’ rights during the civil rights era—debated the use of the flag on Thursday. Executive Editor Reihan Salam came out firmly against it:

It could be that the Confederate battle flag has come to mean something entirely different in 2015 than it did in the mid-1950s, when it was closely tied to resistance to federal desegregation efforts. But is its value such that we ought to continue giving it quasi-official status, even when doing so alienates the descendants of enslaved southerners, who have just as much claim to deciding which symbols ought to represent southern heritage as the descendants of Confederate veterans? I don’t believe so.

Others were more skeptical: Ian Tuttle argued that “objections to the flag are not raised in good faith” but rather for political gain. But even he then acknowledged that the flag can cause serious harm and offense.

One can recognize, understand, and sympathize with the revulsion symbols of the Confederacy occasion in some quarters, particularly among black Americans — and a compromise should be possible. If reducing the visibility of these symbols would offer relief to those genuinely hurt, and would remove an object of contention keeping persons of different races from cooperating to advance true racial justice, that is something supporters of Confederate symbols should be able to do.

Charlie Baker

The pro-choice, pro-marriage equality Massachusetts governor is hardly an arch-conservative, but his experience on Thursday shows how the shock of the shooting may be acting on politicians. Baker told Boston’s WGBH early on Thursday afternoon that while he was against the flag personally, it was a “tradition” of South Carolina. “My view on stuff like this is that South Carolinians can make their own call,” he said.

Within hours, Baker was backtracking hard. “What were you thinking?” was the message he received from friends, he told the Boston Globe that evening. “I just want to be clear: I abhor the symbolism and the history of that flag as much as anybody, and I am more than cognizant of the fact that literally millions of Americans died over what it represents in the Civil War,” he said. “I think they should take the flag down.”

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Finally, Conservatives Begin To Back Away From the Confederate Flag

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Police Kill Black Women Too—and We Don’t Talk About It Enough

by ArnoldoRobillar Posted on June 11, 2015

Mother Jones

During protests that shook Baltimore in April, Freddie Gray’s name became a rallying cry in calls for criminal justice reform nationwide. But how many of us have heard of Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed black woman who was fatally shot by a police detective in Chicago back in 2012? Just five days before demonstrations erupted for Gray in Maryland and then across the country, a judge acquitted the Chicago detective who killed Boyd, despite finding that he had acted in a manner that was “beyond reckless”.

Read “What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?“—Charlie LeDuff’s examination of what one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

Last month, activists in about 17 cities rallied to highlight Boyd’s name—and the names of other black women who have lost their lives to police violence, such as Yvette Smith, Shereese Francis, and Tanisha Anderson. In New York, activists carried a coffin through the streets; in San Francisco, some protesters bared their breasts, borrowing from traditions of resistance in Liberia and other African nations. Others took to Twitter with the hashtag #SayHerName, in conjunction with the African American Policy Forum’s launch of a report by the same title, which called on policymakers and the media to include women’s experiences in conversations about police brutality.

“Black women and women of color can no longer be expected to lead movements challenging police brutality but be silent about our own experiences,” wrote co-author Andrea Ritchie in an introduction to the report. Ritchie, a police misconduct attorney in New York, has fought against inappropriate policing of black women and LGBT citizens for two decades. She co-wrote a book on the subject, Queer (In)Justice, and has testified before the UN Committee Against Torture and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Two weeks after the report dropped, I caught up with Ritchie, who’s now a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, to talk about why some disturbing videos of excessive force never went mainstream and how her years of activism are paying off.

Andrea Ritchie

Mother Jones: We’ve been hearing much more lately about police violence against black men. To what extent is the media to blame for framing the issue in a narrow way?

Andrea Ritchie: I’ve been doing a workshop for maybe 10 years now where I start with a pop quiz, asking, ‘What’s the first image that comes to mind when I say police brutality?’ and ‘What’s the first image that comes to mind when I say violence against women?’. No matter who I’m talking to, the first name that comes to mind is always that of a man—either Rodney King, Oscar Grant, or Eric Garner or Michael Brown. It’s generational. And the image is always of a shooting or a beating. For violence against women, the image is very much one of private violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault, but not physical violence by police officers or sexual violence by police officers.

When I ask folks why they think that is, the media is the number one answer—they say, ‘That’s what we hear about, that’s the story we’re told.’ Even when a case comes up involving a black woman, it’s framed as an anomaly, or shoved into a narrative that makes black men the primary target. In Rekia Boyd’s case, for instance, they said she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, next to a bunch of black men the police were targeting. There’s a story that state violence affects men and that interpersonal violence affects women, but what this ends up doing is erasing men who experience interpersonal violence and women who experience state violence. We need to pick apart that narrative.

MJ: Is part of the problem that violence against women hasn’t been caught on camera, like the killing of Eric Garner in New York was, for example?

AR: I don’t think that’s the case. An example is Duanna Johnson, a black trans woman who they arrested for loitering for the purposes of prostitution. She was in the precinct being processed, and the police officer called her over to be fingerprinted using slurs—she didn’t answer to the slurs. He walked over, grabbed metal handcuffs around his knuckles, and proceeded to start pounding her in the face while another officer held her down, and the security camera from the police facility recorded the whole thing. She was on the floor, they pepper sprayed her face. Again, it got some coverage locally, but that didn’t become the video that sparked uprisings around the nation. And it did not become the image that comes to mind when we think about police beatings.

Several weeks after Eric Garner was killed, a pregnant black women was placed in a chokehold by police officers. Now, thankfully she did not die—she and her baby were fine—but the video was there, and again, that wasn’t the thing that sparked outrage.

MJ: There seems to be a common belief in the US that black men fare worse than any other group, particularly in the criminal justice system. They are known for being locked up at higher rates and fatally shot by police officers. Do you think this notion of “black male exceptionalism” contributes to the exclusion of women’s experiences from conversations about criminal justice?

AR: I hate thinking about who is experiencing oppression the most because in black communities we’re all experiencing racial oppression and anti-black racism in different ways. But this notion that black women aren’t experiencing the same kinds of racial disparities is not borne out by the numbers available. In 2013, black women were stopped by police cars more than black men, white women, and white men in Ferguson, Missouri. Black girls have a higher rate of school suspensions relative to white girls than black boys do relative to white boys, and that’s much worse if they’re gender nonconforming, if they’re trans, or if they are queer, but that’s not part of the conversation about the state of black youth in the United States. For almost three decades, black and brown women were the fastest growing prison population, but somehow that didn’t feature in the conversation around the ‘new Jim Crow’ or mass incarceration. The rate of poverty for black women is growing and it is high, the rate of homelessness for black women is high, and black women are marginalized economically on many fronts.

MJ: It’s tough to get data on police violence broken down by both gender and race. A recent Guardian investigation found that 5 percent of people killed by cops so far this year have been women, including seven black women. But as your report makes clear, black women also experience many other forms of state violence that often aren’t included in the narrative of police brutality.

AR: You need to look beyond beatings and shootings to sexual violence, to police responses to domestic violence, their treatment of pregnant and mothering women, and their treatment of LGBT folks. If a police officer responds differently to a black woman survivor of domestic violence, by shooting or beating her, for instance, than they do to a white woman under identical circumstances, I don’t understand how that’s not considered racial profiling—making a decision about whether someone is a victim or threat based on race.

MJ: Can you talk more about the problem of sexual harassment by police officers?

AR: Sexual assault and harassment is the most frequently reported form of police misconduct after the use of force. And despite a 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police that identified the problem and called out departments across the country to enact policies to prevent and address it, very few departments actually have policies to prevent, detect, and hold officers accountable for sexual harassment and assault of members of the public. They have that for officers interacting with each other, because that’s part of federal law, but they don’t have anything specifically targeting sexual harassment and assault of members of the public by police.

MJ: It seems there’s more momentum now behind the #SayHerName movement, with the launch of your report and the demonstrations last month. What comes next?

AR: It feels like we’ve turned a corner. Now the challenge is to get the president to start talking about this issue. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing just made a bunch of recommendations that are very specific to women and LGBT folks’ experiences, including that departments should adopt comprehensive profiling bans that prohibit profiling based on gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation alongside race, religion, and ethnicity. Those things are happening now, but nobody is talking about them. So on the one hand, the floodgates are open; on the other, there are a few more that need to be opened before we can really start having the kind of conversations we need to be having to keep all of our communities safe.

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Police Kill Black Women Too—and We Don’t Talk About It Enough

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Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Philadelphia, a city with a vastly smaller population than that of New York City, has seen a much higher rate of police shootings in recent years. According to a new report published on Monday by the US Department of Justice, police violence disproportionately affects Philadelphia’s black community, and officers don’t receive consistent training on the department’s deadly force policy.

The 174-page report results from an investigation the DOJ launched in 2013 at the request of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, during a time when officer-involved shootings, including fatal incidents, were on the rise, even as violent crimes and assaults against the police was on the decline. “Police carry baggage and lack legitimacy in some communities,” Ramsey, who has been appointed to chair the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, recently told the New York Times. “And for us to change the paradigm, we have to understand why we are viewed in this way.”

The DOJ’s Philadelphia investigation, which examined nearly 400 deadly force incidents between 2007 and 2013, provides a rare close-up of the patterns of officer-involved shootings. The report follows on the heels of another damning report the DOJ published on the city of Ferguson, where federal investigators found systematic racial discrimination among public officials and police.

While it’s nearly impossible to know how much the findings in Philadelphia represent police practices across the country—there is no comprehensive national data on police officers’ use of force, as we reported last year—the DOJ probe does reveal an alarming rate of shootings when compared to other large departments. Philadelphia’s police force, which is one-fifth the size of the NYPD, saw dozens more officer shootings resulting in deaths and injuries than those by the NYPD over the same period.

Here are a few key findings from Monday’s report:

In a city where blacks and whites each make up about 45 percent of the population, almost 60 percent of the officers involved in shootings between 2007 and 2013 were white, while 81 percent of suspects involved were black.

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In nearly half of officer-involved shootings of an unarmed victim, the officer mistook a nonthreatening object for a gun.

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Black suspects were the most likely to get shot because of a misidentified object. White suspects were the most likely to be involved in a physical altercation that resulted in the officer shooting.

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Among officer-involved shootings in which the victim was black, black and Hispanic officers were more likely than their white counterparts to have shot at a suspect after mistaking a plain object for a gun.

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While the overall number of officer-involved shootings declined between 2007 and 2013, the share of victims who were unarmed during those incidents more than tripled, from 6 percent in 2007 to 20 percent in 2013.

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Officers initiated the encounter in 43 percent of officer-involved shootings in 2013, down from nearly 60 percent in 2007 and nearly 70 percent in 2008.

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Out of 382 suspects involved in the shootings between 2007 and 2013, about 88 were killed, 180 injured, and 115 unharmed. The majority of suspects brandished a weapon but did not shoot, held a weapon other than a firearm, or were unarmed. Forty-nine suspects (13 percent) shot at the officer, injuring six and killing one.

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The average time spent on investigating an officer involved shooting has declined from 417 days in 2007 to 264 days in 2013.

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Out of 88 officers who were found to have violated department policy during a shooting incident, 73 percent were not suspended or terminated. Some interviewees told the Justice Department they believed that the department’s board of inquiry undermined findings from internal reviews of officer shootings, resulting in “too little discipline.”

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Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD

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The Biggest News Stories of 2014, in Photos

by JacquieSpencer Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been a tumultuous year marked by civil war in Syria and Ukraine, the spread of the Islamic State in the Middle East, massive protests against police violence in the United States, air disasters for Southeast Asian airlines, a spirited campaign for control of Congress, and major policy announcements via executive order by President Obama. Here a look back at some of the best images from the year’s major news stories.

January 25: A protester hurls a Molotov cocktail during a clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine. Sergei Grits/AP

January 31: Palestinians line up for food in Yarmouk, a refugee camp in Damascus, Syria. UNRWA/AP

March 22: Relatives of passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 shouted their demands at reporters after Malaysian government representatives left a briefing in Beijing. The airplane has still not been found. Ng Han Guan/AP

April 3: A Spanish officer assists a migrant who fainted atop a fence that divides Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Thousands of sub-Saharan migrants live illegally in Morocco, and regularly try to enter Melilla in the hope of later making it to the Spanish mainland. Santi Palacios/AP

April 12: Supporters of rancher Cliven Bundy fly the American flag in celebration after the US Bureau of Land Management released the family’s cattle onto public land near Bunkerville, Nevada. Armed backers of rancher Bundy lived along a state highway in southern Nevada for almost three weeks following an armed standoff with the BLM, which had rounded up the cattle saying Bundy owed $1.1 million in grazing fees and penalties. Jason Bean/Las Vegas Review-Journal/AP

April 16: A South Korean rescue team and fishing boats try to rescue passengers of the sinking ferry Sewol off the country’s southern coast. The ferry capsized with 476 people aboard, many of them students—and 307 died. South Korea Coast Guard/Yonhap/AP

May 9: Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a parade marking Russia’s forcible annexation, two months earlier, of much of Crimea, previously Ukrainian territory. Ukraine and NATO quickly condemned the victory lap. Ivan Sekretarev/AP

May 12: This image from a video by Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist network shows missing girls the group abducted from the northeastern town of Chibok. More than 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haran in April. They were forced to convert to Islam and married off to the group’s members. AP

May 16: Supporters write congratulatory messages for India’s Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi at his party’s headquarters in New Delhi. Modi’s victory, the most decisive in more than a quarter century, swept the long-dominant Congress party from power. Manish Swarup/AP

May 24: Richard Martinez, whose son Christopher was killed in a mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, lashed out at the NRA and politicians who support the group. The previous day, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded 13 before killing himself. Jae C. Hong/AP

June 15: A helicopter circles over the Shirley Fire near Lake Isabella, California. The fire ultimately burned 2,645 acres and caused more than $12 million in damage. It was just one of 5,597 wildfires that altogether burned more than 90,000 acres, according to Cal Fire. Stuart Palley/ZUMA

June 18: Immigrant children who crossed the US/Mexico border without a parent sleep in a holding cell at a Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas. Eric Gay, Pool/AP

July 8: Brazil midfielder Fernandinho reacts after Germany scores its third goal during the World Cup semifinals. Germany humiliated the host nation with a 7-1 victory before eliminating Argentina in the final to win its fourth World Cup title. Natacha Pisarenko/AP

July 14: Palestinians who fled their homes under heavy bombardment by Israel take refuge at a UN-run school in Gaza City. Many such schools came under attack during the seven weeks of fighting between Israel and Hamas. Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/ZUMA

July 17: NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo restrains Eric Garner with a chokehold in this still from an eyewitness video. Garner died shortly afterward, and a grand jury decision not to indict the officer sparked massive protests across the nation. YouTube

July 19: Emergency workers carry a body bag from the site of a Malaysia Airlines crash near the eastern Ukrainian village of Hrabove. Ukraine accused Russian separatist rebels of shooting down the plane, a charge the rebels deny. Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

July 29: Israeli soldiers, family, and friends mourn Sgt. Sagi Erez, killed in combat after militants used a tunnel to sneak into Israel from Gaza. Ariel Schalit/AP

August 13: A demonstrator throws a teargas container back at riot police in Ferguson, Missouri, where the killing of an unarmed black man by a police officer set off weeks of street protests. Robert Cohen/St Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS/ZUMA

August 14: US servicemen discuss the deconstruction of a command operation center in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. On October 26, after 13 years, America, Britain, and Australia formerly ended Afghan combat operations. Cpl. John A. Martinez Jr./U.S. Marine Corps

August 26: A pro-Russian rebel patrols through the rubble of a market damaged by shelling in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. Mstislav Chernov/AP

August 28: A worker prepares to remove the corpse of an Ebola victim in Unification Town, Liberia, part of the most severe outbreak since the virus was discovered. Kieran Kesner/Rex /ZUMA

Mid-September: Businessman Jon Gamble near Dunblane on the eve of a Scottish independence referendum. On September 18, a majority of the voters chose to remain part of the United Kingdom. Andrew Milligan/PA Wire/AP

September 23: Air Force Maj. Gena Fedoruk and 1st Lt. Marcel Trott take off in a KC-135 Stratotanker as part of a mission to conduct airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Syria. Senior Airman Matthew Bruch/U.S. Air Force

September 27: Riot police use pepper spray on pro-democracy activists who forced their way into Hong Kong government headquarters, challenging Beijing’s decision to backpedal on promised democratic reforms. Apple Daily/AP

October 20: An airstrike by a US-led coalition in Kobani, Syria, as seen from a hilltop near the Turkey-Syria border. Kobani and the surrounding areas has been under assault by Islamic State extremists since mid-September. Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

November 4: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell casts his ballot at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He easily won a sixth term. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

December 8: Protesters rallying against police violence and the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police, stop traffic on Interstate 80 in Berkeley, California. Noah Berger/AP

December 20: In Havana, members of the so-called Cuban Five celebrate a recent exchange of imprisoned spies, part of a historic agreement to restore relations between the United States and Cuba. Ramon Espinosa/AP

December 26: A protester in Mexico City displays painted hands and the number 43, signifying the number of students taken from a rural teachers college and handed over to a drug gang to be killed, according to an investigation by Mexican government authorities. Marce Ugarte/AP

December 27: The casket of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos is carried from a church in Queens after funeral services. Ramos and his partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, were shot to death in Brooklyn on December 20 by a man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who said it was in retaliation for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Brinsley later killed himself. Julio Cortez/AP

December 29: Indonesian Air Force officials study a map during search and rescue efforts for the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501. Wreckage from the plane, along with dozens of floating bodies, were found in the Java Sea on December 30. Sijori Images/ZUMA

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The Biggest News Stories of 2014, in Photos

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Quote of the Day: "That Could Have Been Any One of Us"

by CasimirSavoy Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Michelle Conlin of Reuters, who interviewed 25 active-duty and retired black NYPD police officers, nearly all of whom said they themselves had been treated harshly by fellow cops when they were out of uniform:

At an ale house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last week, a group of black police officers from across the city gathered for the beer and chicken wing special. They discussed how the officers involved in the Garner incident could have tried harder to talk down an upset Garner, or sprayed mace in his face, or forced him to the ground without using a chokehold. They all agreed his death was avoidable.

Said one officer from the 106th Precinct in Queens, “That could have been any one of us.”

It shouldn’t be too hard to hold two thoughts in our minds at once. Thought #1: Police officers have an inherently tough and violent job. Split-second decisions about the use of force come with the territory. Ditto for decisions about who to stop and who to keep an eye on. This makes individual mistakes inevitable, but as a group, police officers deserve our support and respect regardless.

Thought #2: That support shouldn’t be blind. Conlin reports that in her group of 25 black police officers, 24 said they had received rough treatment from other cops. “The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.”

Respect for the police is one of the foundation stones of a decent and orderly society. But police work as a profession is inherently coercive, and police officers have tremendous amounts of sometimes unaccountable power over the rest of us. Thus, it’s equally a foundation stone of a decent and free society to maintain vigilant oversight of professions like this, and to deal vigorously with the kinds of systemic problems that the routine exercise of power and authority make unavoidable. Belief in the latter does not exclude belief in the former.

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Quote of the Day: "That Could Have Been Any One of Us"

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Quote of the Day: What Mysterious Force is Preventing Passage of a Roads Bill?

by PollyGandy Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx, at a meeting of the Business Roundtable with President Obama:

Why not, before the Congress goes home for December, just pass a bill that takes the two bipartisan bills that I just mentioned, up, and solves the problem?

Smith is referring to a couple of bills that would restore the gasoline tax to its old level and increase funding for transportation projects. He raises a good question. I suppose there could be several reasons it’s hard to pass either of these bills:

Democrats are in thrall to labor unions, who are opposed to funding more infrastructure projects.
All our roads and bridges are in pretty good shape and we don’t really need more money for them.
As a socialist, President Obama opposes these bills because they would increase the profits of billionaire construction company CEOs.
Vladimir Putin has threatened to invade Nova Scotia if we pass these bills.
Santa Claus is coming to town and we’re all hoping we’ve been good enough to get the bridge repairs we asked him for.

Or, of course, it could be because Republicans are less afraid of letting our roads crumble into dust than they are of Grover Norquist saying mean things about them if they were to maintain the gasoline tax at historical levels. Because, you know, taxes.

Nah. That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the Putin thing.

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Quote of the Day: What Mysterious Force is Preventing Passage of a Roads Bill?

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President Obama Wants More Cops To Wear Body Cams

by donkorleone842 Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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The White House wants Congress to spend $75 million on body cameras for law enforcement. The funding, which could pay for as many as 50,000 devices, comes as part of a larger proposal to provide $263 million in new funding to train and equip local police departments.

Calls for more body cams have increased in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson. As we reported in August:

“I think body cameras are definitely a net good,” says David Harris, a law professor and police behavior expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “They are one of the most prominent technologies to come along in a long time in terms of accountability, evidence gathering, and in terms of, frankly, changing behavior on either side of the camera. Nothing is a silver bullet, but this has the potential to be a substantial advance.”

Harris, who consults for law enforcement agencies on the side, points to a study by police in Rialto, California. After introducing body-worn video cameras in February 2012, that department reported an 88 percent reduction over the previous year in complaints against officers—and the use of force by its officers fell by nearly 60 percent. A separate British study of one small police department looked at data collected in 2005 and 2006 and found a 14 percent drop in citizen complaints in the six months after cameras were introduced compared to same six-month period of the previous year.

Obama’s proposal could pay for as many as 50,000 body cams but, as the Verge points out, there are 750,000 police officers in the US—and even if each of them had a body cam on it still probably wouldn’t be a panacea for police abuse. A bad cop with a body cam is still a bad cop.

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President Obama Wants More Cops To Wear Body Cams

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