Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalRed fox part of 'bizarre' agent impersonation case
An unusual case has landed a Tennessee man accused of impersonating a Homeland Security agent behind bars.
The case is centered around a red fox known as “Lu Lu” that Keith Rediker claimed was a federal K-9, according to investigators.
“It’s bizarre, it’s very bizarre,” said Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis.
The investigation began after the fox was shot and killed by a neighbor in New Johnsonville. “It was killing her chickens, the animals on the property there that she had,” Davis explained.
That’s when the investigation took another turn. “Mr. Rediker had reached out to her and identified himself as a Homeland Security agent and said she was going to be in big trouble, that she had shot and killed a federal K-9 that was used in bomb detection and search and rescue,” said Davis.
The sheriff shared photos of the red fox inside a K-9 cage in the back of a vehicle and a service dog registration for Rediker and the fox that said K-9 search and rescue, K-9 explosive.
https://www.wate.com/news/alleged-homeland-security-impersonator-claims-fox-was-federal-k-9/
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Dude is taking cosplay to a whole new level......
GOP Congressional Candidate Believes 'Abortion Is A Human Sacrifice' To Demons
Tim Reichert, a businessman who has described abortion as “the sacrifice of a child at the altar of Baal,” is running for Congress in Colorado’s 7th District, and is so far the only candidate who has qualified for the Republican primary ballot.
Reichert, an economist from Golden, Colorado, threw his name into the competitive primary in January, committing half a million dollars of his own money to the campaign. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D) currently represents the district, but has said he will not seek re-election in the fall. Although Democrats usually have an advantage in the region, the district was redrawn last year, shifting west, which experts believe will make it a slightly more competitive race.
Reichert, who has a doctorate in economics, has spent much of his career doing financial consulting. He says he is running to help strengthen the middle class or “the little guy” ― a term that appears several times on his campaign website.
But Reichert also holds extreme views on abortion, birth control and other reproductive health care issues, arguing in published articles and presentations that contraception irrevocably harms women by destroying the institution of marriage.
And it’s an issue that he has, not surprisingly, avoided talking about on the campaign trail in a cycle where Republicans are trying to win back suburban women.
Past statements uncovered by HuffPost suggest that Reichert believes abortion is murder and birth control is deeply detrimental to society because it increases infidelity in marriage.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abortion-human-sacrifice-tim-reichert-colorado_n_62474c24e4b0587dee697374
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What nut tree did this guy fall out of?
Top VA Doc Ignored Red Flags About Neo-Nazi Son, Judge Says
A teenage neo-Nazi accused of torching a Texas synagogue last Halloween suffers from “a myriad of mental health issues,” but his parents—one of whom is a well-respected physician now serving as a high-ranking Veterans Affairs official—never got him the treatment he desperately needed, according to a federal magistrate judge.
Further, the judge said, after doctors at a leading psychiatric hospital evaluated Franklin Barrett Sechriest in 2016 and warned his mother and father that their son “should not have access to firearms,” they subsequently “allowed [him] to acquire a small arsenal of firearms, including one shotgun, three rifles and three handguns.”
The explosive details are revealed in a detention order handed down in December by Judge Mark Lane of the U.S. District Court of Western Texas, and are now being reported for the first time by The Daily Beast.
Sechriest, 18, was arrested on arson charges last November for allegedly causing more than $150,000 in damage to Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. Criminal investigators with the Austin Fire Department identified the Texas State University freshman using surveillance footage from the temple’s parking lot that showed his Jeep’s license plate. The plate was traced back to Sechriest’s home in San Marcos, where he was living with his mother, Nicole. Sechriest’s father, Vernon Franklin Sechriest, is a U.S. Navy veteran and orthopedic surgeon who was appointed chief of staff for the VA Healthcare System in Loma Linda, California on Nov. 21, 2021—about three weeks after his son allegedly set Congregation Beth Israel ablaze.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/veterans-affairs-doc-v-franklin-sechriest-ignored-red-flags-about-neo-nazi-son-franklin-sechriest-judge-says?ref=home
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Between Ronnie Raygun, mental health activists, and Second Amendment nuts, we apparently can't do anything to keep guns away from people like this, or make them get treatment.....
The jokes kinda write themselves
Spousal unit and I were on the way back from a shopping trip musing about the prevalence of John Deere tractors in Ukraine and videos of them hauling away various bits of Russian military equipment amid the start of planting season. He suggested that John Deere could have a whole new series of commercials featuring Ukrainian farmers, with a percentage of sales going to Ukrainian relief.
"And you think YOU got trouble planting potatoes?"
Your contributions welcome. 
Senators call for investigation of Hertz after hundreds of rental car customers claim false arrest
Two U.S. Senators are urging the federal government to investigate Hertz rental car company's business practices that have led customers to make hundreds of allegations of false arrest.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who chairs the Senate's Consumer Protection Subcommittee, wrote to the company this week about Hertz customers being arrested for driving rental vehicles the company incorrectly reported as stolen.
That currently is the focus of a lawsuit in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.
Blumenthal requested information on the company's policies and practices and demanded that Hertz "swiftly correct course."
Blumenthal cited USA TODAY's reporting on the false arrest claims in his letter calling Hertz practices "staggering in magnitude and devastating in impact."
"I write to express serious alarm over reports suggesting that Hertz has, for years, wrongly reported customers to law enforcement for vehicle theft," the letter addressed to Stephen Scherr, CEO of Hertz Global Holdings Inc. said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/03/31/hertz-arrests-senate-warren-blumenthal-investigation-rental-car/7233969001/
Anti-Abortion Activist Bragged About 'Dumpster Diving' for Fetuses
The anti-abortion activist accused of storing fetal remains in her home has spent years tweeting about scouring abortion clinic grounds for fetuses and then burying them.
Lauren Handy, indicted Wednesday for allegedly blockading an abortion clinic, has not hidden her interest in creeping around abortion clinics. In a Twitter thread published in October 2020, Handy said that, by 2016, she was “regularly dumpster diving” at a Maryland abortion clinic to retrieve fetuses for a “proper burial.”
The anti-abortion activist accused of storing fetal remains in her home has spent years tweeting about scouring abortion clinic grounds for fetuses and then burying them.
Lauren Handy, indicted Wednesday for allegedly blockading an abortion clinic, has not hidden her interest in creeping around abortion clinics. In a Twitter thread published in October 2020, Handy said that, by 2016, she was “regularly dumpster diving” at a Maryland abortion clinic to retrieve fetuses for a “proper burial.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epx9dn/lauren-handy-fetuses-dumpster-diving
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What a HORRIBLE person
How a bunch of Starbucks baristas built a labor movement
For Reese Mercado, the decision to unionize came after they watched a customer physically assault a former coworker over enforcing vaccine requirements at their Starbucks store. For Hayleigh Fagan, it was when she got a company-wide letter from the Starbucks Vice President telling employees not to unionize. For Hope Liepe, it was the hypocrisy of calling employees “partners” but not treating them that way.
Since the first corporate Starbucks location voted to unionize late last year, 10 others have voted. Only one store has voted against unionizing. The latest and largest Starbucks to unionize is the company’s flagship store in Manhattan, which voted 46-36 on Friday to unionize. One of just three Starbucks roasteries in the country, this location is an important milestone for the Starbucks union since it has many more employees than a typical Starbucks (nearly 100) and shows that the Starbucks union can be successful in the company’s manufacturing arm as well. Even more notable, they’ve voted yes in the notoriously difficult-to-unionize food services industry, where high rates of turnover and a more easily replaceable workforce make union organizing extremely difficult.
Starbucks employees around the country say they’re seeing successful union votes at other locations and thinking they could improve conditions at their own stores by doing the same. Some 160 other locations in 28 states are slated to vote in the coming weeks and months.
They’re hoping to use collective bargaining to get a number of improvements, including higher pay, more hours, and better safety protections, a more necessary change since the erstwhile latte makers became front-line workers during the pandemic. They want more say in what their working lives are like, and they want to hold a company that talks of progressive values accountable.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22993509/starbucks-successful-union-drive
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Ya gotta start somewhere, why not Starbucks?
Why seed banks aren't just for doomsday
Imagine an eerie slice of concrete on a frozen northern isle, holding a vault of seeds against the end of the world. The words "seed bank", might conjure up the so-called Doomsday Vault, on the island of Svalbard. There, collections of the world's crops are held in stasis in case of future need, like a catastrophic volcanic eruption, a world war, or rapid sea level rise.
But what most people don't fully comprehend is that the Vault is primarily a back-up, a very placid hard drive of genetic material from a kaleidoscope of far more active facilities all around the world. These gene banks are managed by foundations, universities and governments. In some circles, the World Vegetable Center in Taiwan is famed for the completeness of their aubergine collection. Peppers, too, are a specialty, and gene bank manager Maarten van Zonneveld has a particular yen for the mung bean.
More than 132,000 samples of rice varieties reside in the International Rice Genebank in the Philippines. Wheat and corn and their little-known wild relatives swell the storage facilities of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center not far from Mexico City. Other crops have their devotees, and their collections, dotted around the globe.
By and large, these resources are available to plant breeders looking to create better, hardier, or tastier crops. "The gene bank is part of open science," says van Zonneveld. It's there to serve.
But with the rise of large-scale genome sequencing, these repositories are starting to play a new role. If you want to know the evolutionary history of the chili pepper, or how to breed a chickpea that can survive climate change, the seed bank is an intriguing dataset to draw on. It's not just for Doomsday. It's for the day after tomorrow.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220331-why-seed-banks-arent-just-for-doomsday
The heavy losses of an elite Russian regiment in Ukraine
In any war, there are units that distinguish themselves and others that become symbolic of failure. The 331st Guards Parachute Regiment had high hopes of being the first, but now represents the disintegration of Russia's plan for a quick war.
The regiment's commanding officer, Col Sergei Sukharev, was killed in Ukraine on 13 March, and was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation medal. At his funeral, deputy defence minister Gen Yuri Sadovenko said the colonel "lived for the future, for the future of our people, a future without Nazism".
In any war, there are units that distinguish themselves and others that become symbolic of failure. The 331st Guards Parachute Regiment had high hopes of being the first, but now represents the disintegration of Russia's plan for a quick war.
The regiment's commanding officer, Col Sergei Sukharev, was killed in Ukraine on 13 March, and was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation medal. At his funeral, deputy defence minister Gen Yuri Sadovenko said the colonel "lived for the future, for the future of our people, a future without Nazism".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60946340
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War's human toll and the lies of the enemy regime
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