May 25, 2018

Scotland horrified by female employee bound with duct tape

?quality=90&auto=webp

She said her co-workers made fun of her for having a miscarriage, hurled sexist and racist language at her and others, and then, the final straw: They duct-taped her to a chair and gagged her. Now, per the New York Times, DeeAnn Fitzpatrick will get her day in court. The 49-year-old will next month seek a judgment against her former employer, a Scottish government fisheries agency, over what she says was a work environment rife with harassment, sexism, and bullying. What's causing the most shock waves: a picture of her (see it here) reportedly taken by two Marine Scotland co-workers in 2010 as a "warning." It shows her wrapped in duct tape and bound to a chair, with duct tape also covering her mouth. "I was taped to a chair by two of my colleagues and told, 'This is what happens when you speak out against the boys,'" she told a judge in 2017, the year she launched her case over the "threatening and misogynistic culture."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/world/europe/scotland-woman-bound-work.html


http://www.newser.com/story/259758/scottish-leader-horrified-at-photo-of-bound-female-worker.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top

May 25, 2018

Trump Furious After Nobel Committee Gives Him Participation Trophy

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-furious-after-nobel-committee-gives-him-participation-trophy

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump was reportedly furious after the Nobel committee informed him on Thursday that he would not receive a Nobel Peace Prize but would get a participation trophy instead.

In Oslo, a Nobel spokesman said that Trump would have the distinction of becoming the first world leader to receive such a trophy, also known as the Nobel Consolation Prize.

The spokesman displayed the prize, a gold-painted plastic trophy measuring eleven inches in height and featuring a small man at its pinnacle, holding a tiny laurel wreath over his head.

Announcing the award, the Nobel representative said, “Although Donald Trump did not actually achieve peace, he did talk a lot about it, and that should be worth something.”

May 24, 2018

Scott Pruitt Twice Introduced Anti-Abortion Bills Giving Men 'Property Rights' Over Fetuses

n 1999, Scott Pruitt, then an Oklahoma state senator, introduced a bill to grant men “property rights” over unborn fetuses, requiring women to obtain the would-be father’s permission before aborting a pregnancy.

Pruitt, now the embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, submitted the legislation again in 2005.

The bill, which did not pass either time, faded from Pruitt’s political legacy. But the legislation merits new examination as the EPA chief faces down an avalanche of corruption accusations. As HuffPost previously reported, Pruitt’s support from right-wing evangelical Christians, a group that largely opposes abortion, has helped him keep his job amid calls from droves of Democrats and a handful of Republicans to fire the administrator.

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By contrast, the bill from his time as a state legislator stated that “it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” referring to a “fetus” as “property” that has been “jointly created by both father and mother.”

The legislation would have barred doctors from performing abortions without signed statements of permission from the father, or evidence that the man could not be located “after diligent effort.” If the pregnancy resulted from rape, the woman would be required to show “such assault has been reported to a law enforcement agency having the requisite jurisdiction.”

Doctors who performed the procedure without that documentation would have risked losing their medical licenses, been “civilly liable to the father of the aborted child for any damages caused thereby,” and had to pay punitive fines of $5,000.

In a statement to The Associated Press in 1999, Pruitt said a pregnant woman who were to obtain an abortion without meeting the bill’s criteria would face legal consequences. “She’ll be held accountable for it,” Pruitt said.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-abortion_us_5b06ce55e4b05f0fc845a4aa

May 24, 2018

"We'd Spend Hours Each Week Unpacking & Throwing the Food Away" donated from Amazon

This wasn’t the first charitable gift Amazon has given Mary’s Place. In 2016, the company provided the nonprofit with one of its unused properties in downtown Seattle, a former Travelodge, to create a temporary homeless shelter. After that building closed for construction, the shelter moved to another unused Amazon building in the same area, a former Days Inn, where it’s currently based. A few months after that, in late 2016, the company also started offering Mary’s Place free food for residents. It had just opened its new checkout-free Amazon Go store down the street from the shelter—at first as a service for its own employees, though it opened to the public earlier this year. Like most grocery operations, at the end of the day the store had leftover, pre-made food that was still good to eat but wouldn’t be sold the following day.

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The sandwich handoff was supposed to be simple. At first, according to three former Mary’s Place employees, Amazon would deliver crates of pre-made food to the shelter; once the shelter moved to the Days Inn location in 2017, it was close enough to the Amazon Go store that Mary’s Place employees went to pick up the food themselves. But former and current staff told me it was hard to predict how much food the shelter would receive each day, with the haul ranging anywhere from five to 40 crates filled with packaged meals, like tuna and chicken-salad sandwiches, the bulk of which needed refrigeration. At around 9:30 p.m. on Monday through Friday, Amazon Go would have the food ready for pickup. Not only did staff not know how much to expect, they often didn’t have enough refrigerator space back at Mary’s Place to store it all—which meant the small, already time-strapped shelter staff on evening or overnight shifts had to throw away the food or else find another home for it, since it was too late to serve it at that evening’s meal.

“It would be this panicked scramble,” one of the former Mary’s Place employees said. “It was always more than we could fit in the refrigerators that we had, which were mostly full of the food that we as a shelter bought to feed people.”

“It would be this panicked scramble.”
— A former Mary’s Place employee
Staff also weren’t told how long it had been since the food was last refrigerated. “We often don’t know how long the food has been sitting out,” the current Mary’s Place employee said. “We care about the people who the food is meant to serve, and even if [the food] does get to guests, it’s not in the best condition.”

In addition to the downtown location, Mary’s Place operates six other shelters in Seattle, serving individuals and families with 680 beds each night. But Amazon didn’t deliver the food to the other Mary’s Place locations, nor did the shelter consistently set aside additional resources to distribute the donations each night, according to four sources. Often that meant Mary’s Place employees had to drive some food to other locations themselves—that is, when they didn’t simply toss it because of refrigeration space or concerns over its freshness. And since Seattle has strict composting rules, the foodstuffs had to be separated from the packaging first. “The last thing we wanted to do was throw out food,” one former Mary’s Place employee told me. “Still, we’d spend hours each week unpacking and throwing the food away.”

https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/amazon-gives-seattles-marys-place-free-food-and-real-estate-and-is-a-total-pain.html

May 24, 2018

right wing radio understood the plan... "spy gate", "spy gate" now just like "bengazi" a few years

they picked up the phrase and began using it immediately

May 23, 2018

Driving while black with vegetation stuck to car

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/22/us/police-kansas-detain-man-vegetation-trnd/index.html





When police in Winfield, Kansas, pulled Rudy Samuel over, the 31-year-old felt he had done nothing wrong. So he started recording the encounter on Facebook Live.

"Officer says I failed to put my signal light on within a hundred feet," he says to the camera. "And it wasn't a hundred feet, but whatever."

The video, shot on May 13, begins after Samuel provides Winfield police officers with his license and registration.

When the two policemen approach Samuel's car again, they offer a different reason for the traffic stop.

"Hey Mr. Samuel, what caught my attention was this vegetation stuff right here," one of them says, pulling something from the seal of the car's driver's-side window.

Samuel responds that it must be from a tree and adds that he does not smoke. Later, he asks officers about the original reason he was pulled over.

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The officers released Samuel after searching the vehicle, which did not turn up any suspicious substances, according to Wright.
Wright claims police did not test the "vegetation" and did not give Samuel any citations.
In the video, Samuel repeatedly says he did not give his consent to be searched. He also tells officers he has a licensed firearm in his car.
Wright said Samuel is suffering from nightmares and trauma related to the incident, although he is grateful for the support people have given him on social media.

May 22, 2018

Humans Are Just 0.01% of Life on Earth, But We Still Annihilated The Rest of It

Humans Are Just 0.01% of Life on Earth, But We Still Annihilated The Rest of It
Ruining things since 298,000 BCE.

PETER DOCKRILL 22 MAY 2018
Humankind is pathetically lightweight in comparison to the mass of almost all other living things on Earth, but while our bodies (and thinking) may be tiny, our crushing footprint is not.

The most comprehensive study ever of the weight of all living biomass on the planet has discovered humans account for only about 0.01 percent of life on Earth – but despite our physical insignificance compared to the teeming masses around us, history shows there's no doubt over whose dominion this is.

"I would hope this gives people a perspective on the very dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth," biologist Ron Milo from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel told The Guardian.

"It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth."

Milo and fellow researchers spent three years combing the existing scientific literature on the planet's biomass to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive estimate on the mass of all the kingdoms of life.
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-are-just-0-01-of-life-earth-but-we-annihilated-rest-biomass-animals-mammals-plants

May 22, 2018

Students say USC "deliberately concealed" gynecologist's sexual abuse, prez asked to step down

Four former students are suing the University of Southern California, claiming that the school intentionally hid the alleged sexual misconduct of longtime campus gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall, CBS Los Angeles reports.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court Monday against USC and Tyndall, alleges that "despite the fact that USC has publicly admitted that it received numerous complaints of Tyndall's sexually abusive behavior, dating back to at least the year 2000, USC actively and deliberately concealed Tyndall's sexual abuse for years, continuing to grant Tyndall unfettered sexual access to the young female USC students in his care, all to protect USC's reputation and financial coffers."

The complaint alleges that Tyndall, who was the Engemann Student Health Center's only full-time gynecologist for nearly 30 years, forced the women to strip naked on multiple occasions, during which he "groped" and "digitally penetrated" them.

A lawsuit accuses former USC gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall of sexual misconduct and abuse of patients. CBS LOS ANGELES
One accuser claims Tyndall "grazed his ungloved fingers over her entire naked body, including her breasts, while another accused the doctor of forcing her "to strip completely naked, so that he could leer at her for his own sexual gratification."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/students-say-usc-concealed-gynecologist-sexual-abuse-dr-george-tyndall/

USC president urged to resign over response to complaints

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Two-hundred professors have signed a letter demanding that the president of the University of Southern California resign amid allegations that USC failed to properly respond to complaints of misconduct by a gynecologist who worked at a student health clinic for 30 years.

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that the letter addressed to USC trustees asserts that President C. L. Max Nikias has lost the moral authority to lead the university and its investigation into institutional failures.

An Associated Press email requesting comment from the president's office was not immediately returned.

Board of trustees Chairman John Mork released a statement saying its executive committee strongly supports Nikias.

https://www.news-journal.com/ap/state/usc-president-urged-to-resign-over-response-to-complaints/article_57dd48c5-9609-5c23-9cc9-097a2ef8144b.html

May 22, 2018

30 year old legally evicted by parents for not doing chores or paying rent

His parents,Christina and Mark Rotondo, are pictured on the right. They say they have been trying to kick him out of their house for months

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5758647/Judge-sides-parents-trying-evict-unemployed-30-year-old-son.html#ixzz5GG4cZ8ha

Get out! Judge sides with parents trying to evict their unemployed millennial 30-year-old son from their family home after he refused to pay rent or do chores
New York State Supreme Court Judge Donald Greenwood ordered Michael Rotondo, 30, to move out of his parents' Camillus home on Tuesday
Christina and Mark Rotondo have been trying to evict their only son for months
They wrote him five written notices, when he failed to pay rent or contribute in the household, but he refused to move
Michael claimed his parents had not given him enough time to move out, despite their multiple notices and offers of money to help him get a new place
He is unemployed and is locked in a legal battle with Best Buy who he says fired him for not being able to work Saturdays



A New York judge has ordered a 30-year-old man to move out of his parents' home - after the couple tried and failed for months to get their deadbeat son to fly the coop.

At a Tuesday hearing, which lasted about 30 minutes, New York State Supreme Court Judge Donald Greenwood sided with Mark and Christina Rotondo of Camillus, New York.

The couple have been trying to evict their unemployed only-son Michael for months because he refuses to pay rent or contribute in any way around the house.

Michael argued in court on Tuesday that legal precedent allowed him six months notice before his parents could kick him out. The judge pointed out another case that nullified that previous decision, and called six months an 'outrageous' amount of time to ask for. Michael responded that it was 'outrageous' to evict him.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5758647/Judge-sides-parents-trying-evict-unemployed-30-year-old-son.html#ixzz5GG4pjwjm
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May 21, 2018

2 NYPD cops die when rented Maserati crashes into large tree tree

Should these sports cars be rented out?

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Two NYPD cops – one of whom was the groom on his wedding day – were killed when their rented Maserati crashed upstate, authorities said Monday.

Michael Colangelo, 31, a 10-year officer with the NYPD’s ESU K-9 unit who had just gotten married, and Officer John M. Martinez, 39, who was assigned to Brooklyn’s 84th Precinct and had 16 years on the force, were killed in the Sunday night crash in Ulster County, state police said.

Both men, who lived on Long Island, were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash on Oliverea Road in the town of Shandaken.

A third person in the car, 28-year-old Cody Kalina of Wantagh, LI, suffered non-life threatening injuries and was rushed to Albany Medical Center.

State police said Martinez, a married father of two from Hauppauge, was driving the 2018 Maserati on Oliverea Road when the high-end sports car “left the roadway and struck a large tree” before flipping over and coming to a rest on its roof about 11:23 p.m

https://nypost.com/2018/05/21/2-nypd-cops-one-the-groom-die-in-wedding-day-car-crash/

A cause is under investigation; autopsies, including toxicology results, are pending, investigators said. State Police said the two men who died were not believed to have been wearing seat belts; the lone survivor likely had his buckled. State Police also say the road where the accident happened is a narrow, 40 mph county road with some curves -- and given the nature of the deadly crash, which involved an extreme rollover, they were likely speeding.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NYPD-Officers-Killed-Crash-New-York-483200081.html