The Los Angeles Fire Department is investigating an incident in which a firefighter “responded inappropriately” after being handed a letter to comply with the city’s vaccine mandate, a department spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The Stentorians of Los Angeles City, a group representing African American firefighters, said Wednesday that the LAFD member responded to receiving the non-compliance letter by dropping his pants and wiping his buttocks with the letter, leaving fecal matter on the document. He then dropped the letter on the ground.

The alleged incident underscores the deep resistance among some within the Fire Department over the city’s mandate that employees be vaccinated.

LAFD spokeswoman Cheryl Getuiza said the alleged incident occurred on Nov. 18. “The department is aware of the seriousness of the allegations and took immediate action upon learning of this incident,” she said Wednesday, but declined to comment on the details.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/l-a-firefighter-accused-of-wiping-butt-leaving-fecal-matter-on-non-compliance-letter-in-protest-of-vaccine-mandate/

In related news...

LAFD spent more than $22.5M on overtime related to COVID, much of it to cover for sick firefighters
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/lafd-spent-more-than-22-5m-on-overtime-related-to-covid-much-of-it-to-cover-for-sick-firefighters/

Authorities were able to find a missing 16-year-old girl after she caught the attention of a driver by using hand gestures popularized on the social media platform TikTok.

According to the Laurel County Sheriff's Office in Kentucky, the girl was inside a silver-colored Toyota car when the driver saw her using hand signals known on TikTok "to represent violence at home — I need help — domestic violence."

After recognizing what the signals meant and seeing that the teen "appeared to be in distress," the driver called 911, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

https://twitter.com/HaltonPolice/status/1430218446281875463

The alert led to the arrest of 61-year-old James Herbert Brick of Cherokee, North Carolina, Thursday afternoon while driving near a Kentucky interstate. The teenager found inside the car Brick was driving had been reported missing by her parents in Asheville, North Carolina, Tuesday morning, Laurel County Sheriff John Root said in a statement.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/missing-n-c-teen-found-after-using-tiktok-hand-sign-n1283401

MOUNTAIN CREEK, Ala. — Down a country road, past a collection of ramshackle mobile homes, sits a 102-acre "shrine to the honor of Alabama's citizens of the Confederacy."

The museum’s exhibits explain what the White Alabamians who took up the cause of the Confederacy felt was on the line — Alabama was 10th of the then 33 states in the value of livestock, seventh in peas and beans, and second in cotton production. The only hope to save its economic position, the exhibit quotes a former state governor as saying, was for it to secede from the union, and though not mentioned directly, maintain the bondage of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans. On a recent morning, there was just one visitor on the property and he didn’t enter the museum.

There are a number of museums that tell those stories spread across Alabama, but the Confederate Memorial Park is different. It is the only museum in the state that has a dedicated revenue stream codified in the state’s constitution. So while other museums struggle to keep their doors open, search for grants for funding and depend on volunteer staff, the Confederate Memorial Park is flush with cash. In 2020 alone, the park received $670,000 in taxpayer dollars. That’s about $22 per visitor and more than five times the $4 admission price for adults.

The fight over how to fund Alabama’s museums comes as state lawmakers debate what and whose history should be taught and promoted. In August, the Alabama State Board of Education passed a resolution that banned the teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework that examines the role of race and racism in the crafting of American laws and social norms.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/alabama-spends-more-than-a-half-million-dollars-a-year-on-a-confederate-memorial-black-historical-sites-struggle-to-keep-their-doors-open/2021/10/03/77953f7e-222a-11ec-8fd4-57a5d9bf4b47_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F34df4dc%2F615b29e59d2fda9d41fb49d9%2F5bc97fa5ae7e8a50f8217d42%2F38%2F74%2F615b29e59d2fda9d41fb49d9

Source: NBC News

A California father who said he was enlightened by QAnon to kill his 10-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son with a spear fishing gun in Mexico was indicted by a San Diego federal grand jury Wednesday.

Matthew Taylor Coleman, 40, is charged with two counts of foreign first-degree murder of United States nationals, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California.

Coleman, a surfing instructor from Santa Barbara, could face the death penalty.

A criminal complaint filed last month accuses Coleman of killing his children "by shooting a spear fishing gun into their chests."



Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-qanon-believer-indicted-charges-killing-his-2-children-spear-n1278802

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QAnon believers should be labeled a terrorist organization. They are a danger to our country.

The president made a difficult but necessary choice.

By Daniel Silverberg

In 2017, I arrived at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport as part of a congressional staff delegation. Even though the U.S. embassy stood a mere four miles away, safety concerns necessitated our helicoptering from a recently constructed multimillion-dollar transit facility instead of traveling by road. As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.

Kabul was not lost yesterday; the United States and our Afghan partners never truly had control of the country, nor of its capital. Once the Taliban had secured an agreement that the United States would be pulling out and that forces would be reduced to minimal numbers before Joe Biden’s presidency began, they merely had to wait.

The dozens of congressional briefings I attended over 14 years of working on Capitol Hill underscored this dynamic. The intelligence community would commence each briefing with a stark assessment regarding the fragility of conditions in Afghanistan. Senior defense leaders would then provide a far more optimistic view, one that often gave a sense of progress, despite the Herculean challenge with which they had been tasked.  

...
Some critics also argue that the United States should have preserved a residual force in Afghanistan, much as we have in South Korea. There are any number of ungoverned spaces today, however, which pose as great a threat, if not greater, to U.S. security as Afghanistan, and few are calling for U.S. deployments to those areas. There is a cost—financial and military—to tying forces down in a project that was ultimately doomed to fail.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/biden-afghanistan-taliban-reality/619776/

A man was stabbed outside L.A. City Hall after a fight broke out during an anti-vaccine protest on Saturday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The protest was held to push back against the recent vaccine mandates and requirements, according to the Los Angeles Times.

LAPD responded to the scene where a man was stabbed. The victim was treated by the Los Angeles Fire Department and remains in serious condition, according to the LAPD.

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/1-stabbed-at-los-angeles-city-hall-protest-lapd/




Lots of posts from people furious that LAPD apparently stood there and let this violence happen:

https://twitter.com/PplsCityCouncil/status/1426669000608468994?s=20

The most basic principles of democracy are that the candidate who gets the most votes is elected and that every voter gets an equal say in an election’s outcome. The California system for voting in a recall election violates these principles and should be declared unconstitutional.

Unless that happens, on Sept. 14, voters will be asked to cast a ballot on two questions: Should Gov. Gavin Newsom be recalled and removed from office? If so, which of the candidates on the ballot should replace him?

The first question is decided by a majority vote. If a majority favors recalling Mr. Newsom, he is removed from office. But the latter question is decided by a plurality, and whichever candidate gets the most votes, even if it is much less than a majority, becomes the next governor. Critically, Mr. Newsom is not on the ballot for the second question. By conducting the recall election in this way, Mr. Newsom can receive far more votes than any other candidate but still be removed from office. Many focus on how unfair this structure is to the governor, but consider instead how unfair it is to the voters who support him.

Imagine that 10 million people vote in the recall election and 5,000,001 vote to remove Mr. Newsom, while 4,999,999 vote to keep him in office. He will then be removed and the new governor will be whichever candidate gets the most votes on the second question. In a recent poll, the talk show host Larry Elder was leading with 18 percent among the nearly 50 candidates on the ballot. With 10 million people voting, Mr. Elder would receive the votes of 1.8 million people. Mr. Newsom would have the support of almost three times as many voters, but Mr. Elder would become the governor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/opinion/california-recall-election-newsom.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

[Great legal opinion piece written by Erwin Chemerinsky and Aaron S. Edlin. Chemerinsky is the dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the forthcoming book “Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.” Mr. Edlin is a professor of law and of economics at Berkeley.]

A conservative radio host in Tennessee who expressed skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines and was unvaccinated is hospitalized in critical care with the disease, his station announced Friday.

Phil Valentine, who hosts a show bearing his name on WWTN-FM in Nashville, contracted the coronavirus a little more than a week ago and is battling pneumonia, his family said in a statement posted on Twitter.

“He is in the hospital in the critical care unit breathing with assistance but is NOT on a ventilator,” the family said. “Phil would like for his listeners to know that while he has never been an “anti-vaxer” he regrets not being more vehemently “Pro-Vaccine”, and looks forward to being able to more vigorously advocate that position as soon as he is back on the air, which we all hope will be soon.

"Phil & his family would like for all of you to know that he loves ya’ll and appreciates your concern, thoughts & prayers more than you will ever know. Please continue to pray for his recovery and PLEASE GO GET VACCINATED!”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/conservative-radio-host-former-vaccine-skeptic-ill-covid-19-n1274889

Source: Washington Post

The top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after a Catholic media site told the conference it had access to cellphone data that appeared to show he was a regular user of Grindr, the queer dating app, and frequented gay bars.

Some privacy experts said that they couldn’t recall other instances of phone data being de-anonymized and reported publicly, but that it’s not illegal and will likely happen more as people come to understand what data is available about others.

Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill has since last fall been the general secretary of the USCCB, a position that coordinates all administrative work and planning for the conference, which is the country’s network for Catholic bishops. As a priest, he takes a vow of celibacy. Catholic teaching opposes sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage.



Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/07/20/bishop-misconduct-resign-burrill/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3433384%2F60f84b259d2fda945a1005ab%2F5bc97fa5ae7e8a50f8217d42%2F29%2F70%2F60f84b259d2fda945a1005ab

A rightwing, anti-LGBTQ activist who tried to stop her state from distributing coronavirus vaccines has died due to complications from COVID-19.

Linda Zuern of Bourne, Massachusetts passed away last week at age 70 at a hospital in Boston. She had to be flown to the hospital due to her severe case of COVID and was in a coma at the end of her life, breathing through a ventilator. She was not vaccinated against coronavirus, according to people who knew her.

Zuern went to South Dakota to visit her mother and, when she was returning to Massachusetts, both she and her mother developed COVID-19 symptoms. Her mother survived.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/07/anti-lgbtq-activist-tried-stop-vaccine-distribution-dies-covid-19/