Since we’re talking about Flint.

Flint Water Prosecutors Drop Criminal Charges, With Plans to Keep Investigating
By Mitch Smith, The New York Times
June 13, 2019

Prosecutors stunned the city of Flint, Mich., on Thursday by dropping all pending charges against officials accused of ruining the community’s drinking water and ignoring signs of a crisis, casting doubt on what some residents had seen as a small but tangible step toward justice.

Fifteen state and local officials, including emergency managers who ran the city and a member of the governor’s cabinet, had been accused by state prosecutors of crimes as serious as involuntary manslaughter. Seven had already taken plea deals. Eight more, including most of the highest-ranking officials, were awaiting trial.

On Thursday, more than three years after the first charges were filed, the Michigan attorney general’s office, which earlier this year passed from Republican to Democratic hands, abruptly dropped the eight remaining cases. Prosecutors left open the possibility of recharging some of those same people, and perhaps others, too.

But in Flint, a city where faith in government was already low and where many residents still refuse to drink the tap water, the news was seen by some as a sign that they had been wronged once again.

“This is not justice,” said Melissa Mays, a Flint resident and advocate for safe drinking water. “It just seems like a political ploy.” She added: “The only thing it tells me is our lives don’t matter.”

Flint’s water crisis, which started in 2014, was a failure of government at all levels. A state-appointed emergency manager switched the city’s drinking water source from Detroit’s municipal water system to the Flint River in an effort to save money. Local officials failed to implement corrosion controls, allowing lead to leach from pipes. Health agencies assured residents the water was safe even as people complained that it smelled bad, tasted funny and was discolored.

Those officials were wrong: Children drank water with dangerous quantities of lead. At least 12 people died in a Legionnaires’ outbreak that prosecutors linked to the new water source. Trust in government was ruined.

As officials scrambled to fix the water system and rebuild trust, Michigan’s Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette, appointed a team that began investigating and announcing criminal charges. Still, from the start, some officials and legal observers raised questions about the prosecutors’ approach. And residents asked why the governor at the time, Rick Snyder, also a Republican, had not been charged.

After Mr. Schuette left office in January and was replaced by Dana Nessel, a Democrat, there were signs of a change in course. Todd Flood, the lead prosecutor appointed by Mr. Schuette, was dismissed. New prosecutors assigned by Ms. Nessel expressed concern about evidence collection and took steps to seize Mr. Snyder’s phone. Then, most drastically, Ms. Nessel’s team dropped all charges on Thursday and pledged to investigate more, saying “all evidence was not pursued” by their predecessors.

“Upon assuming responsibility of this case, our team of career prosecutors and investigators had immediate and grave concerns about the investigative approach and legal theories,” said the two lead prosecutors, Fadwa Hammoud and Kym Worthy, in a statement. They said they would meet with Flint residents later this month and noted they were “not precluded from refiling charges against the defendants” or adding new charges and defendants.

Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver, said she took the prosecutors at their word and hoped they would follow through with new charges. She said that there was some confusion and frustration in her city about the decision to drop charges, but that she believed it could ultimately be a positive.

“It is frustrating, but I’d rather be frustrated at this end and know that they’re going to do a deep dive into what happened,” Ms. Weaver said in an interview. She added: “I think this way, they may have the evidence they need to be able to hold them accountable and throw away the key.”
…
Ms. Nessel, the new attorney general, defended her prosecutors’ decision to drop the charges, but she also sought to reassure Flint residents. “I want to remind the people of Flint that justice delayed is not always justice denied,” she said.

That message was a tough sell for some in Flint, where residents said they had waited for years for justice and been disappointed with the results. Monica Galloway, a member of the Flint City Council, called the decision a setback on Thursday and said she hoped new charges would be filed.

“I think anyone that lives in the city of Flint that is affected by this wants justice,” Ms. Galloway said. “And justice can only be done if this is not just redone, but done properly.”

My Scots/German is from Flint, my Viking and English pure Yooper. Richard and Emily met at Michigan State shortly after it’s foundation in 1855 (what about “mid-thirties” in 1926 do you not understand?).

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Nazi Germany’s troops enter Paris during World War II; TWA Flight 847 hijacked; Stars and Stripes adopted as official U.S. flag; Leftist guerrilla Che Guevara and real estate mogul Donald Trump born.

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

Laurie Colwin

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Why Nintendo, Google and others may want to move some manufacturing out of China

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business

Gulf of Oman tanker attacks: US says video shows Iran removing mine

The US military has released a video which it says shows Iran’s Revolutionary Guard removing an unexploded mine from the side of an oil tanker damaged in an attack in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday.

US officials also shared a photo of the Japanese tanker, apparently showing the unexploded mine before it was removed.

A Norwegian tanker was also damaged.

The US accused Iran of being behind the mine attacks. Iran said it “categorically rejects” the allegation.

The blasts came a month after four oil tankers were damaged in an attack off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. The US blamed Iran for that attack, but did not produce evidence. Iran also denied those accusations.

Hong Kong’s digital battle: tech that helped protesters now used against them

Wary of being tracked and targeted like activists inside China, protesters are keeping a low profile online

Lily Kuo in Hong Kong

Fri 14 Jun 2019 06.51 BST

In early June, Ivan Ip, 22, joined a public chat group on Telegram called “Parade 69”, named for a mass demonstration planned in central Hong Kong to protest a bill allowing for the transfer of suspects from the city to China. According to Ip, an administrator of the group of more than 30,000 people, they discussed things like bringing sunscreen, water, and umbrellas to block the sun or rain.

Two days after the protest, which saw as many as one million Hong Kong residents march against the proposed extradition law, authorities arrived at Ip’s apartment in the evening. Banging on the door, they yelled: “Police! Open up the door!”

Syrian refugees in Lebanon tear down walls to keep their homes

Syrian refugees are facing a wave of hostility in Lebanon, writes Richard Hall

The sound of a hammer striking concrete echoes around the sprawling refugee camp. Outside almost every tent, piles of broken breeze blocks show the hard work of the past few days. An exhausted Salah Mustafa, a 35-year-old Syrian refugee who fled to Lebanon five years ago, is one of the last to finish tearing down the walls of his home.

“I built these walls to keep my mother warm,” he says, during a break. “She has trouble with her kidneys so she feels the cold more than anyone else. But even with the walls, the winter is unbearable.”

The next winter is likely to be much worse for Mustafa’s family, and for the thousands of other Syrian refugees here in the Lebanese border town of Arsal, who have spent days dismantling the concrete shells of their shelters in order to save them from being demolished entirely.

Apocalypse NowA Moroccan Oasis Struggles with Climate Change

Droughts, sandstorms and flash flooding: In the southern Moroccan oasis M’Hamid El Ghizlane, the effects global warming is likely to have on the Mediterranean region can already be observed today.

By Raphael Thelen
A sandstorm moves over the oasis town of M’Hamid El Ghizlane, coating buildings and streets with a fine yellowish coating that makes breathing more difficult and burns the eyes. Halim Sbai, 48, looks out at the remnants of the clay walls of his birth home on the edge of the oasis. “Whenever I’m here, the old and the new image of this place are superimposed on each other,” he says. “It’s then that I see the differences.”

Before the rain stopped falling and the sandstorms grew stronger, palm trees used to grow in this oasis in southern Morocco. Date palms reached to the sky while pomegranate trees, wheat and watermelons grew in their shade — so dense that Sbai had to fight his way through jungle-like vegetation when he wanted to swim in the Draa River near his home after it rained.

My video’s funnier than yours: Pakistan, India trade parodies before Cup clash

Islamabad (AFP)

A video parodying an Indian air force pilot who was briefly captured by arch-rival Pakistan earlier this year has gone viral ahead of a highly-anticipated World Cup clash between the two cricket-mad nations.
The 33-second video shows an actor posing as handlebar-moustached Abhinandan Varthaman, who was shot down over the disputed region of Kashmir earlier this year and held briefly by Pakistan.

He was released in a “peace gesture” aimed at defusing tensions between the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours, who have been fierce rivals since independence from Britain in 1947.
 

I speak from personal experience that it can take months and months for you to get your YouTube feed right, that is- not suggesting terrible things like NewsMax and InfoWars when once you click, no matter how innocent your purpose.

Try watching any World of Warships video, or better yet don’t.

YouTube Famous

Amway Money

50 Years of Stonewall Pride

Puppy Pumpitude

Better living through chemicals.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

The Pentagon Papers hits newsstands amid the Vietnam War; Thurgood Marshall nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court; The ‘Miranda’ warning; Pioneer 10 leaves solar system; Swing legend Benny Goodman dies.

Government by blackmail is incompatible with democracy.

Jerrold Nadler

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Hong Kong extradition protests leave city in shock

Authorities have shut some government offices in Hong Kong’s financial district after the worst violence the city has seen in decades.

By Thursday morning the crowds had largely dispersed around government headquarters – where police and protesters had pitched battles on Wednesday.

The protesters are angry about plans to allow extradition to mainland China.

Despite the widespread opposition, the government has not backed down.

However, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) delayed a second reading of the controversial extradition bill and it is unclear when it will take place.

State projects leave tens of thousands of lives in the balance in Ethiopia – study

British Navy’s Maritime Trade Operations arm urges ‘extreme caution’ amid report of explosion involving oil tankers.

The US Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet is assisting two tankers in the Gulf of Oman after receiving distress calls from the vessels amid a “reported attack”.

“US naval forces in the region received two separate distress calls at 6:12am local time and a second one at 7:00am,” the fleet said in a statement issued on Thursday. “US Navy ships are in the area and are rendering assistance.”

The statement came after the UK’s Maritime Trade Operations, which is run by the British navy, put out an alert earlier on Thursday claiming an unspecified incident had taken place in the area. It did not elaborate further but said it was investigating the incident and urged “extreme caution” amid heightened United States-Iran tensions.

Hundreds protest across Japan over acquittals of men in sex crimes

KYODO

Hundreds of people took to the streets across Japan on Tuesday to protest a recent series of court acquittals of men in sex crime cases, including a man found not guilty over having sex with his underage daughter.

Holding flowers as a symbol of empathy for victims, participants gathered in Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka and Kagoshima, as the “Flower Demo” movement spread to nine locations.

The campaign started in April when hundreds demonstrated in Tokyo and Osaka against rulings including the March 26 decision by the Nagoya District Court’s Okazaki Branch in the incest case, which sparked public outcry and criticism by some legal experts.

The fight over the 2020 census citizenship question, explained

The battle over a simple question involves both Congress and the Supreme Court. And the stakes are high.

By Dara Lind and Libby Nelson 

The latest face-off between House Democrats and President Donald Trump is over the proposed citizenship question on the 2020 census.

The House Oversight Committee voted Wednesday to recommend holding Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the committee’s investigation into how and why the question was added.

Trump invoked executive privilege earlier in the day, refusing to share documents that House Democrats want for their investigation.

All of Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio’s problems with breaking laws, obstruction of Justice, lying, etc. can not be attributed to the Russian Treason Plot. For instance Stephanie Clifford, hush money to a Porn Star is a violation of election law and Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has certainly lied and obstructed Justice in that case, but it seems to me the kind of thing he would have done without any Russian involvement at all. The only connection is some of the actors.

Likewise pro-Republican Gerrymandering (in this instance Citizenship Questions on the Census designed to intimidate non White Male Republicans from filling it out for a true count) is just the normal course of action for the Party of Racist, Bigoted, Misogynists who are too weak to win an election fairly and have to cheat.

The Obstruction and Contempt of Congress are about the same, but because the actual activity is entirely different the thin excuses of Executive Privilege that are transparently threadbare in the Russian Treason Plot. The material being denied with no justification at all really is neither a Communication not a Deliberative Process and under even the broadest interpretation is not protected by Executive Privilege, which actually means something and not just what Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio wants it to mean.

The Trump administration’s desperate census coverup continues
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
June 12, 2019

The Trump administration really, really doesn’t want Congress and the public to know any more than they already do about its decision to add a citizenship question to the Census.
…
I’m not going to go over all the details in this case (see our previous coverage here, here, or here). The short story is that the Trump administration decided to add a citizenship question to the Census precisely because they knew that doing so will make immigrants (both documented and not) less likely to answer, which will make the places where they live look smaller.

That, in turn, will draw resources and representation away from those places to places where there are more whites and more Republicans. The undercount could be as high as 4 million people.

The administration sold that plan — to the public, to Congress, and to the courts — with a preposterous lie, claiming that they wanted to add the question to the Census merely in order to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act. Which is like your eight-year-old telling you he needs to eat more Snickers bars because he’s so concerned about maintaining proper dental health. Enforcing the Voting Rights Act is the last thing the Trump administration wants to do.

We’ve already gotten documents proving that it was a lie, but there are obviously more, which is why they are refusing to comply with the congressional subpoena. Which brings us to this bogus executive privilege claim.

To begin with, the fact that Attorney General Barr asked for the privilege assertion in response to the threat of a contempt vote shows how disingenuous the administration is being. A contempt vote is essentially an expression of the House’s opinion; it doesn’t force the production of the materials they’re after. It has no direct legal consequence.

So Barr essentially said that because the House was being mean to him, in retaliation he’d get the White House to assert executive privilege so they couldn’t get the documents they’re demanding. This doesn’t end the controversy, because Democrats can sue over the privilege claim. And they ought to win.

Let’s examine that claim on the merits. When you hear “executive privilege,” you probably think of the president shielding his communications with key aides. The idea is that in order to get unvarnished advice when making decisions, he has to be able to have frank discussions without the threat that everything anyone says could eventually be revealed.

That’s one type of executive privilege, called the presidential communications privilege. There’s another, known as the deliberative process privilege, that applies a similar (though more limited) privilege for executive agencies. In this case that’s the Commerce Department (which oversees the Census) and the Justice Department. But courts have found that Congress can overcome the deliberative process privilege if they have a clear need for documents or testimony in order to carry out their oversight responsibilities.

How pressing is that need in this case? The administration is trying to make a significant change to the Census, a constitutionally mandated task with sweeping effects on all kinds of policies the federal government makes. The change they want to make, in the opinion of virtually every expert in the field, would have dramatically harmful consequences. The justification they have offered is an obvious lie; the secretary of Commerce has even lied about it under oath.

In short, if there’s a case that demands congressional oversight more than this one, it would be hard to think of what it might be. Which means that the administration’s assertion of privilege is weak to the point of being non-existent.

On a more basic level, we should be asking: What is the administration trying to hide?

If the story they’re telling were true — that they want to add a citizenship question to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act — then producing the documents would show that. But we all know that’s not what the documents will show.

We know that because emails produced in a lawsuit over the Census showed definitively that in fact, Commerce asked the Justice Department to turn back around and ask the Commerce Department to add the question, which makes no sense until you realize they were trying to create a phony paper trail for the lie they were telling about the Voting Rights Act. (The Justice Department at first resisted, but eventually gave Commerce what they wanted.)

What the administration may really be trying to prevent is not just Congress and the public seeing documents that will expose their lies and bad faith, but the Supreme Court seeing them, too. The court has heard oral arguments in a case challenging the addition of the citizenship question but has yet to issue its ruling. Once the administration has been fully exposed, it will be harder for the five conservative justices to rule in their favor.

Not that they won’t; the odds are that those five justices will do pretty much anything that’s in the interests of the Republican Party, as adding a citizenship question is (indeed, that was the whole point). But if nothing else, the court, and the rest of us, ought to see just how cynical and dishonest the administration has been. If we can’t stop their crimes against democracy, at least we can understand them fully.

I mentioned on D-Day that the Russians got their butt kicked in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The Battle of Tsushima was the critical one that cemented a Russian defeat. Early in the war Japan was able to neutralize the Russian Pacific Naval Squadron based in Vladivostock. With great fanfare Russia sent forth it’s Northern Fleet to sail almost exactly half way around the world to ‘teach the natives a lesson’, kind of a Falkland Islands thing.

Admiral Togo sprang an ambush while entering port after the journey and crushed them. Interestingly enough it was the last major clash of pre-Dreadnaught Battleships and influenced Dreadnaught design. The British Admiralty noticed that most of the damage was caused by the larger caliber guns (around 12″ in this case) and that manuvering close enough to employ the Secondary Armaments (6″ and 8″) exposed the ship to counterfire. Thus in the archetypical Dreadnaught the Secondaries were dispensed with entirely and the weight saved went into additional Primary Guns and extra Armor.

The Battle of Tsushima