October 26, 2014

animated sign language interpreter at ebola conference steals the show

http://politics.suntimes.com/article/washington/sign-language-interpreter-steals-show-during-de-blasio-speech/fri-10242014-130pm



"I want to repeat what I said last night: There is no cause for alarm," by the doctor's diagnosis Thursday, said Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as officials described Spencer riding the subway, taking a cab, bowling, visiting a coffee shop and eating at a restaurant in the past week. "New Yorkers who have not been exposed to an infected person's bodily fluids are simply not at risk."

During the press conference though, it was the sign language interpreter who stole the show. While sign language interpreters use facial expressions and body language to help convey the dialogue, he takes it to a whole new level.

October 25, 2014

Ebola scare allowed Cuomo to take center stage, repub challenger left on sidelines

ALBANY — The Ebola scare allowed Gov. Cuomo to take center stage on Friday, leaving Republican challenger Rob Astorino on the sidelines 11 days before the election.

Displaying the advantages of incumbency, Cuomo hit five morning television shows — four of them with national audiences — within 90 minutes Friday morning to provide updates.

Later, he took the subway to show that it is Ebola-free, before holding a joint press conference with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to announce new screening rules for airline travelers arriving from the Ebola hot zone.

By embracing quarantines for people who’ve had contact with Ebola patients, Cuomo moved closer to the position of Astorino, who for weeks has been demanding a ban on all travel from Ebola-stricken West African countries.

But Astorino and his campaign largely became an afterthought, at least for a day, showing how a crisis can give an incumbent a platform to communicate with voters without appearing political.


JIM FITZGERALD/AP
Republican candidate Rob Astorino and his campaign largely became an afterthought, at least for a day, showing how a crisis can give an incumbent a platform to communicate with voters without appearing political.


Http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ebola-scare-city-puts-spotlight-cuomo-casting-astorino-article-1.1986666

October 25, 2014

man kills two cops today, with assault rifle

http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_26792925/sacramento-county-deputies-killed-suspect-caught


SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A man armed with an assault rifle shot three sheriff's deputies and a civilian, killing two of the deputies and leading dozens of police officers on a wild six-hour chase and manhunt Friday. The pursuit spanned two Northern California counties before the 34-year-old suspect was taken into custody.

Marcelo Marquez, of Salt Lake City, was taken alive Friday afternoon from a home in Auburn in Placer County after the initial shooting hours earlier in a strip mall in a commercial area of Sacramento, said Placer County Sheriff's spokeswoman Dena Erwin.

"This guy was on a one-man crime spree today. He has no idea of the damage he did," she said.


View Crime spree in a larger map
The four shootings sparked a massive manhunt by multiple agencies backed by search dogs, helicopters and armored vehicles. Residents nearby were told to stay indoors, and schools were locked down during the search. The owner of the home said officers used tear gas to drive the suspect from the basement.

October 25, 2014

Americans are withdrawing their 401k money early - experts are calling it "a flood"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/your-money/401ks-and-similar-plans/combating-a-flood-of-early-401-k-withdrawals.html?referrer=

In a paper he wrote with a colleague, he noted that industry veterans tend to refer to these retirement withdrawals as “leakage.” But as the two of them wrote, it’s really more like a breach. And while that term has grown more loaded since their treatise appeared last year and people’s debit card information started showing up on hacker websites, it’s still appropriate. Millions of people are clearly not using 401(k) plans as retirement accounts at all, and it’s a threat to their financial health.

“It’s not a system of retirement accounts,” said Stephen P. Utkus, the director of retirement research at Vanguard. “In effect, they have become dual-purpose systems for retirement and short-term consumption needs.”Which is all fine and dandy for the well-heeled and the frugal. But one of the biggest problems with these accounts has nothing to do with how much we can put in. Instead, it’s the amount that so many people take out long before they retire.

Over a quarter of households that use one of these plans take out money for purposes other than retirement expenses at some point. In 2010, 9.3 percent of households who save in this way paid a penalty to take money out. They pulled out $60 billion in the process; a significant chunk of the $294 billion in employee contributions and employer matches that went into the accounts.

These staggering numbers come from an examination of federal and other data by Matt Fellowes, a former Georgetown public policy professor who now runs a software company called HelloWallet, which aims to help employers help their workers manage their money better.

October 25, 2014

PGA president ousted for calling a man a "lil girl" as an insult

Bishop added later in a statement: "I want to apologize to Ian Poulter and anyone else that I might have offended with my remarks on social media that appeared on October 23, 2014. Particularly, I have great remorse that my comments contained the words 'little girl' because I have always been a great advocate for girls and women in golf."


PGA of America board has removed Ted Bishop as president after he lashed out at Ian Poulter via social media for his critical comments of the Ryder Cup captaincy of Nick Faldo and Tom Watson, calling the British golfer a "lil girl."

Poulter criticized the golfing greats for their performance as Ryder Cup captains in a new book. Faldo led the European team that lost in 2008; Watson oversaw the Americans' lopsided defeat in Scotland last month.

"Faldo's record stands by itself," Bishop tweeted on Thursday night. "Six majors and all-time RC points. Yours vs. His? Lil Girl."

On Facebook, the president wrote: "Really? Sounds like a little school girl squealing during recess. C'MON MAN!"



------http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-81769986/

October 25, 2014

Calif Highway Patrol "game". take explicit photos from phones of female arrestees to share

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Disturbing-texts-in-CHP-officers-nude-photo-5846327.php#photo-7048262


CHP officers are accused in court documents of taking photos from suspects’ phones and forwarding them to others.
California Highway Patrol officers have been sharing explicit photos of female suspects for years as part of a “game,” an officer implicated in the scandal told investigators, court records show.

CHP Officer Sean Harrington, 35, of Martinez, acknowledged to Contra Costa County prosecutors that he had forwarded photos from the cell phone of a woman he had arrested in a DUI case, sent them to his own phone and had shared them with at least two other CHP officers, according to a search warrant filed in Superior Court.

Harrington said he had done the same thing to at least six other female arrestees in the past several years, authorities said. After taking arrestees’ photos, officers would share pictures with one another and exchange comments about each woman’s looks, Harrington told district attorney inspectors. Harrington said he first learned of the practice while working for the CHP in Los Angeles, investigators said.

“Harrington described this scheme as a game,” Darryl Holcombe, a senior inspector wrote in a search warrant affidavit.
One alleged victim was a 19-year-old woman, identified in court records only as Jane Doe 2, who had been involved in a DUI crash in Livermore on Aug. 7. The woman had two photos of her in a bikini taken from her phone as she was undergoing X-rays after being in a crash, investigators said.

October 24, 2014

Reddit pervs respond to pic posted by woman before knowing what they were looking at

http://gawker.com/horny-redditors-jerk-off-to-photo-of-dudes-butt-thinki-1648913295





http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--8RkxeGSd--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/awnjwnlklkhj8jzxr6rq.jpg



The photo above shows a pair of underwear wedged between a man's asscheeks. But for one magical night, dozens of enthusiastic masturbators believed they were looking at a woman's alluring cleavage.

The prank went down on Reddit's /r/gonewild, a space for naked dudes and ladies to look and be looked at. The original poster was "poshpink330," a woman, but the glutes in the photo belonged to her husband.

That didn't stop fans from pleasuring themselves to the photo and sending personal messages begging poshpink for more. When she revealed her ruse in a follow-up post, she also shared 51(!) flirty notes from guys who contacted her based on a photo that looked kind of like breasts

October 24, 2014

Amazon projected to lose 40 million in 2014

As Amazon heads into the lucrative end-of-year shopping period, the company yesterday posted its biggest quarterly net loss since at least 2003, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It also forecast sales and profit for the fourth quarter that missed analysts’ projections. That puts Amazon on track to lose an estimated $40.5 million for the year, which would be the company’s largest annual loss for at least the past 11 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The only other annual loss for Amazon since 2003 came in 2012.

In response, investors pushed Amazon shares down as much as 13 percent in extended trading yesterday. For the year, the stock is down 22 percent, compared with a 5.5 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. If that performance continues, the company is set for its worst annual stock decline since 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-24/amazon-ceo-bezos-faces-season-of-worsts-as-losses-mount.html

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Pattern - big companies kill off smaller ones, then they tank

October 23, 2014

Charlestown Ind trying to iminent domain a neighborhood for 6K per house.

Indiana residents are fighting to save their homes as their local government weighs a sweeping plan to demolish them to make way for new development, in a case critics are calling a “poster child” for the abuse of so-called eminent domain powers.

Charlestown, Ind., Mayor Bob Hall announced his plans earlier this year to demolish more than 350 homes in the city’s Pleasant Ridge neighborhood. The mayor contends the neighborhood is “blighted,” and therefore the city is eligible for state money to buy out the homeowners and tear down their houses.

His office argues the houses, originally bought by the Army in 1940, were meant to be temporary.

But the “temporary” houses remain very much occupied. And many residents are not interested in selling them, at least not for what the government might offer. According to the Institute for Justice, a national group that is aiding residents in their case, the state fund Hall wants to tap offers residents just $6,000 for their houses.

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Residents have turned to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm dedicated to defending private property rights, for help.

The institute’s Melinda Haring says the city of Charlestown is abusing eminent domain law, which is what local governments typically cite in seizing homes, for everything from road projects to developments. She said with the economy emerging from recession, this kind of practice is on the upswing.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/23/my-house-is-not-for-sale-indiana-residents-fight-citys-home-seizure-plan/?intcmp=trending

October 23, 2014

"Your house destroyed our privacy" - this is what McMansionization looks like in LA

Click on the links to see new big houses dwarfing smaller ones

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5446f25d/turbine/la-1999481-me-adv-mansionization-furor-03-fo-jpg-20141021/950/950x534
Pam Roberts-Malay shows the signs she posted in her windows after the house next door was replaced with one roughly twice the size as the old one, marring her views of Century City. "Your house destroyed our privacy," one sign says. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-mansionization-20140505-story.html#page=1&lightbox=80103727
"None of us are opposed to expansion and development -- when it's respectful of the neighborhood," Traci Considine says, showing a "before" photo of a home under construction in Faircrest Heights that she believes demonstrates "mansionization." (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5366e68a/turbine/la-1798545-me-0314-mansionization-5-als-jpg-20140504/750/750x422
Kathleen Clark, left, and Beth Marlis look from their backyard at a two-story house under construction in Faircrest Heights. Clark and Marlis brought in mature trees to try to preserve their privacy. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Return of 'mansionization' has some L.A. homeowners grumbling

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Builders are snapping up smaller, older homes, razing them and replacing them with bigger dwellings. Increasingly, sleek, square structures are popping up along streets known for quaint bungalows.

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But neighborhood groups have begun mobilizing, asserting that rules meant to control building sizes are still too porous. Critics argue that builders have exploited loopholes — bonuses that allow extra square footage — to erect homes too large for their lots. The recent surge of complaints prompted Michael LoGrande, director of the Department of City Planning, to tell lawmakers that more stringent controls might be needed.

In Hollywood, for example, members of a neighborhood group objected to a spec home exceeding 3,000 square feet, being built on a Stanley Avenue block lined with older, smaller homes — most of them under 2,000 square feet. Aggravated by the "out of place, enormous" residence, Amy Aquino of the Sunset Square Neighborhood Assn. said the group hired a land-use consultant to examine how it was allowed.

"Everything they were doing, hideous as it is, is all completely legal," Aquino said.

The builder behind the home, Amnon Edri, said that as long as his project meets requirements, it shouldn't be a problem.

"If the city code allows it, and you want a bigger house, you have the right to a bigger house," he said. "This is America. It's a free country."