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U.S. police shot and killed a man who took three people hostage, waving a gun and apparently fitted out with explosives, in the headquarters of the Discovery Channel near Washington on Wednesday.
Officers who had been watching the hostage drama on a building security camera crept in while police negotiated with the emotional gunman and shot him when he pointed his pistol at one of the three men he held hostage.
“A hostage moved, he pulled his gun, and a shot was taken,” Montgomery County police chief Tom Manger told reporters. He said the suspect was killed and the hostages were safe.
The man, named by a U.S. law enforcement official as James Lee, had been arrested before for protesting against Discovery Channel over environmental issues.
“He had a history … of conflict with Discovery,” Manger said.
The incident caused chaos in Silver Spring, Maryland, a shopping and office district and commuter hub on the edge of the U.S. capital.
Police sealed off the area around the building and SWAT teams deployed shortly after the suspect entered the building carrying a handgun at about 1 p.m. Manger said county and state police, FBI and Homeland Security agents joined the operation.
The building, where nearly 1,900 employees work, was evacuated and children were rushed from a day-care centre.
Police said they were still trying to determine whether two boxes and two backpacks that the hostage-taker had were explosive devices. Bomb-sniffing dogs checked the area before workers were allowed to leave neighbouring buildings.
A federal appeals court ruled Monday that California’s ban on gay marriage will remain in place indefinitely as judges consider whether it is constitutional.
The decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturns the order of judge Vaughn Walker last week that would have permitted same-sex couples to marry as soon as this week.
The three-judge panel that issued the decision said the 9th Circuit will expedite the challenge to California’s voter-aproved ban on gay marriage, though the case will not be heard in court until December.
Earlier in the month, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the ban, known as Proposition 8, amounts to unconstitutional discrimination. Just last week, Walker ordered it to be lifted on Wednesday, Aug. 18.
Opponents of same-sex unions responded harshly to Walker’s decision, saying it reflected his judicial activism.
“When a lower judge makes an unprecedented ruling that totally overturns existing Supreme Court precedent, the normal thing for that judge to do is to stay his decision, and let the higher courts decide, in an orderly fashion that respects the rule of law, if he’s right or if he’s way off-base,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage.
The appeals court decision is a further setback for gay rights advocates, many of whom were planning wedding ceremonies for 5 o’clock on Wednesday, when same-sex marriages would have resumed for the first time since November 2008, when voters approved Proposition 8.
A judge is ordering Wells Fargo Bank to pay customers $203 million for overdraft fees.
According to reports, the bank has been manipulating accounts to make customers pay for unwarranted overdraft fees.
The bank has been in some trouble for its deceptive practices for years, including accused loan
discrimination against Blacks.
San Francisco U.S. District Judge William Alsup has also ordered the bank stop its deceptive practice of charging excess overdraft fees.
Wells Fargo will appeal the ruling.
The case is Gutierrez v. Wells Fargo
07-05923, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
This story is nearly unbelievable, but anything is possible in America. Two teens are claiming Craigslist helped them sell their bodies and become sex slaves.
They say, “Craigslist makes horrific acts like this so easy to carry out, and the men who arrange them very rich,” said one of the teens, who said she was forced into prostitution at the age of 11.
The girls submitted an open letter to the Washington Post about the Internet classifieds site in a time when a federal judge kept an investigation of Craigslist “adult services” section. The Letter was posted as an ad.
One of the young ladies said a pimp “put my picture on Craigslist, and I was sold for sex by the hour at truck stops and cheap motels, 10 hours with 10 different men every night. This became my life,” read an account by “AK.” Men “answered the Craigslist advertisements and paid to rape me.”
Craigslist has been deemed the Wal-Mart of online sex trafficking. Ouch.
Sex trafficking: 1. Does happen 2. Happens in America 3. Happens via Internet.
In the words of Antoine Dodson, “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife, and yo’ husband cuz they rapin’ er’body out her’.”
On Thursday the US Senate confirmed Elena Kagan 63-37 to become an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, with a handful of Republicans joining almost all Democrats in making her the fourth woman to serve on the high court.
When the court’s new term starts in October, Ms. Kagan, 50, will join Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor to make up the first three-woman bloc in the court’s history.
Fifty-eight Democrats and independents as well as five Republicans voted for Ms. Kagan. Thirty-six Republicans and one Democrat, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted against the nominee. The five Republicans who supported Ms. Kagan were Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.
Stedman Graham was born on March 6, 1951 in Whitesboro, NJ, a community founded in 1901 by a group of prominent African-Americans which included Booker T. Washington and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Stedman attended Middle Township High School where the 6’6? phenom starred on the varsity basketball team.
After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Hardin-Simmons University, he played professionally in Europe for a few years before returning to the U.S. to work on his Master’s in Education from Ball State.
An enduring, high-profile relationship with Oprah Winfrey has perhaps overshadowed the long list of business and charitable accomplishments accumulated over the course of Mr. Graham’s impressive career as Chairman and CEO of S. Graham & Associates, a management and marketing consulting firm specializing in the corporate and educational fields.
A prolific writer, he is also the author of ten books, two of which became NY Times bestsellers. And he has taught at several colleges, including a course on leadership at the University of Illinois and one on strategic management at Northwestern.
Most importantly, Mr. Graham has exhibited a lifelong commitment to community via Athletes Against Drugs (AAD), a non-profit organization he founded in 1985 which remains dedicated to developing leadership in underserved youth through scholarships and education. Recently, Stedman talked to me about his work with AAD and other projects.
The devil’s in the details. Not only do states have different statutes of limitations for different debts, but two states may treat the same debts differently. A credit card debt might be considered an open-ended account in one state and a written contract in another. The only way to know for sure is to check your state laws or consult an attorney.
You can inadvertently restart the clock. Generally, the statute of limitations starts ticking from the “date of last activity” on the accounts, said Los Angeles bankruptcy attorney Scott Bovitz. (If the account is still listed in your credit reports, the date of last activity should be noted there.) On a credit card debt, that could be the last payment you made or the last purchase you charged. But in some states, making a payment on an old debt, agreeing to an extended repayment plan or even acknowledging that the debt is yours can extend the statute of limitations or restart the clock.
A creditor may still sue you after the statute of limitations has run out. Suing or threatening to sue you after the statute of limitations has run out violates the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. To prevent the creditor from winning a judgment against you, you’ll need to show up in court and point out that the statute has expired.
The creditor may try to pick a better venue. If you sign a credit contract and move to a state with different limits, the creditor may try to sue you in the state that has the longer statute. If that’s not the state in which you now live, you should protest, because generally the state where you reside is the one whose statutes should apply.
Debts can still exist even if the creditor can’t sue. Some people erroneously believe that debts are erased after the statute of limitations has run out. Although the creditor’s ability to sue you has been curtailed, it can still try other methods to persuade you to pay, including calls and letters. The debt can also be sold to another collector that can renew efforts to get you to pay. A legitimate debt is truly gone only when it’s paid or erased in bankruptcy court.
Collectors can’t legally restart the seven-year clock by “re-aging” the debt (giving it a new delinquency date) or by selling it to another agency. The Federal Trade Commission shut down one large collection agency, Capital Acquisitions and Management, after charging the company repeatedly had re-aged debts in its attempts to collect.
In truth, there is nothing evil, only objective phenomena and experience.
If you want guarantees in life, then you don’t want life. You want rehearsals for a script that’s already been written. Life by its nature cannot have guarantees, or its whole purpose is thwarted.
Tea Party & NAACP just stop it! You two act like children in the school yard playing keep away. Put the ball down, and grow the hell up.
The person of great wisdom needs little sleep.
Nothing in this universe occurs by accident. There is no such thing as an “accident,” nor is there any such thing as “coincidence”.
Power comes from inner strength. Inner strength does not come from raw power. In this, most of the world has it backwards. Power without inner strength is an illusion. Inner strength without unity is a lie. A lie that has not served the race, but that has nevertheless deeply embedded itself into our race consciousness.
Automakers are operating in terra incognita as they prepare for the biggest change in the way cars are powered in a century. As they begin to add battery-powered cars to their lineups, they will have to solve some fundamental problems about how the cars are built and sold.
For engineers, the questions include:
Should automakers be technology leaders or fast followers?
Should they develop their own batteries or leave that to specialists?
Should they focus on one technology or hedge their bets with several?
For marketers, the issues are:
Should automakers use existing body styles and model names or create new ones?
Should they start slowly and wait for demand to develop or try to grab market share immediately?
Should they distribute cars through existing dealer networks or start from scratch?
There are few guideposts to follow. The only equivalent parallel in recent history has been the launch of the hybrid gas-electric vehicle, where, arguably, only one company has been successful.
That is Toyota (TM), which unlike most other manufacturers, built a hybrid-specific car, the Prius. The car’s unique character attracted early adopters as well as the environmentally-conscious who wanted to visibly demonstrate their commitment, and Toyota promoted it effectively.
Honda tried to drive the same road with its own hybrid, the Insight. But both the first- and second-generation vehicles sold poorly.
Other automakers installed their gas-electric powertrains in existing models, essentially making the hybrid device an option. The cars lacked a distinctive identity, most have suffered weak sales.
If there lessons to be learned from Prius, they haven’t been reflected in current battery-electric strategies, no two of which seem to be alike.
Two French automakers, for instance, are using sharply different approaches.