Homeless Veterans Across America 4000 Sleeping On NYC Streets, #ODM In Arizona

autocollisionman

 

Published on Sep 4, 2015

They are sleeping in front of the Empire State building, sprawled in front of the doors of Macy's, and panhandling outside Grand Central.
New York is in the grip of a homeless epidemic so bad that it has raised fears of the city slipping back into the disorder of the 1970s and 1980s.
The city's police chief this week said that as many as 4,000 people are now sleeping rough in the city, in a crisis which even the city's ultra-liberal mayor has finally acknowledged after months of denials.
Police officers have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, 20 of which are so entrenched that they have their own furniture, while its former mayor Rudolph Giuliani has spoken scathingly of how his successor is failing to keep order.

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Blow Back : NYPD Twitter campaign reaps thousands of negative tweets and images of alleged police brutality an hour.

NYPD Twitter campaign backfires, thousands of negative tweets

By Chris Francescani

NEW YORK Wed Apr 23, 2014 3:18pm EDT

A pedestrian walks past a line of New York Police Department (NYPD) cars parked at Times Square in New York, October 18, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Gary Hershorn

(Reuters) - A New York Police Department campaign to burnish its image via social media instead produced a flood of pictures of apparent police brutality and tweets critical of the force being shared at a rate of thousands an hour.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said on Wednesday he would continue and expand the NYPD Twitter campaign a day after it backfired, triggering an outpouring of negative images including police violence at New York's Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, an NYPD officer pointing a gun at a dog, and an officer asleep in a subway car.
"The reality of policing is that oftentimes our actions are lawful, but they look awful," Bratton told a news briefing at New York City Hall.

"Most of those photos that I looked at are old news," said Bratton, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to take over from Ray Kelly, who served for 12 years under de Blasio's predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.

Read More Here

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• The Washington Post

NYPD commissioner welcomes attention from disastrous #myNYPD hashtag

• By Mark Berman

• April 23 at 5:22 pm

This file photo, from May 2012, shows a police lieutenant swinging his baton at Occupy Wall Street activists in New York. It was recirculated Tuesday in response to a police hashtag that went awry. (Mary Altaffer/AP)

The New York Police Department’s attempt at using social media to connect with constituents on Tuesday went…well, let’s say awry.
An initial tweet asked people to post photos of themselves with police officers along with the hashtag #myNYPD. Obviously this went poorly, because obviously it was going to go poorly, because these things can really only go poorly (we’ll get back to that in a moment). In response, people sent in lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of photos of New York police officers doing violent things to people. (Like the photo at the top of this post. It’s almost two years old, but thanks to the #myNYPD hashtag, it has been everywhere over the last 24 hours.)
William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, said he isn’t too bothered by the reaction:

“I kind of welcome the attention,” Bratton said Wednesday as the negative tweets kept coming nearly 24 hours after cops invited the cyber-submissions….
“Most of the pictures I looked at, they’re old news,” Bratton said, tossing previous NYPD administrations under the patrol car. “They’ve been out there for a long time.”

Read More Here

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U.S.-Italy : Mafia Network Busted in 'Unprecedented' Sweep

• NBC News
  

Alessandra Tarantino / AP

U.S. and Italian authorities hold a joint press conference Tuesday after the anti-mafia operation.

By Claudio Lavanga and Alexander Smith

ROME - Police in Italy and the United States have broken up a major organized crime network made up of powerful mafia clans plotting to smuggle huge amounts of illegal drugs and weapons, officials said on Tuesday.

Officers on both sides of the Atlantic worked together in what they called an "unprecedented" two-year operation involving wiretaps and undercover officers penetrating deep into the heart of the alleged network, American and Italian officials said at a press conference in Rome.

Seventeen people in Italy and seven in New York were arrested in coordinated sweeps just after 7 p.m. ET on Monday. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars in cash were also recovered in the raids.

"We realized the 'Ndrangheta wanted to create a bridge with the U.S. to move narcotics across the ocean," U.S. magistrate Marshall Miller said, referring to the powerful criminal organization in Calabria, Italy.

Read More Here

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New York governor set to allow limited medical use of marijuana

• Andrew Cuomo in surprise reverse of hardline position
• Small but significant change to highly restrictive laws

• Joanna Walters in New York
• 
  
• theguardian.com, Sunday 5 January 2014 15.42 EST

Governor Andrew Cuomo at the inauguration of New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio on January 1, who has set a liberal agenda. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

New York is poised to become the latest US state to relax its laws covering marijuana. Governor Andrew Cuomo will make a surprise turnaround in policy later this week, to allow limited use of the drug for medical purposes.
As Colorado residents continue to flock to their local pot shops, after their state became from 1 January the first to allow the sale and possession of cannabis for recreational purposes, signs have emerged that New York will now make a small but important amendment to some of the strictest laws on the drug in the US. Cuomo is expected to announce an executive action in his annual state of the state address on 8 January, to permit a small number of hospitals to prescribe marijuana for medical use in the treatment of serious illnesses including cancer and glaucoma, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Cuomo, a Democrat, has always been staunchly against legalising cannabis, including for medical use. Even though the likely announcement would only loosen restrictions on the drug very slightly, it will be seen as a significant move at a time when a number of states are liberalising their laws in ways ranging from the use of medical marijuana to decriminalising basic possession of the drug, up to full recreational use. Voters in Washington state have also voted to allow recreational marijuana and it is expected to follow Colorado later this year and become the second state to implement such laws.
More than 20 states currently have laws allowing a variety of medical uses of marijuana.
Cuomo is expected to emphasise that medical marijuana will only be allowed for a tightly circumscribed list of illnesses, to be drawn up by the state Department of Health.
By announcing a unilateral executive action, the governor will sidestep the legislative process in the state capital, Albany, where the senate has repeatedly struck down bills passed in the lower assembly to permit medical marijuana.
Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told the New York Times Cuomo’s move was “bold and innovative”.
Even limited medical marijuana use is banned under federal law but the Obama administration has signalled that it is not interested in actively pursuing prosecution in states that have relaxed their laws around the drug. Whether there will be any clash between federal law enforcement and state authorities in Colorado and Washington state remains to be seen.

Read More Here

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Cost of Being Mayor? $650 Million, if He’s Rich

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has received over $30 million from him since 2002.

By MICHAEL BARBARO and KITTY BENNETT

Published: December 29, 2013

Michael R. Bloomberg loves tropical fish. So when he was elected mayor, he installed two giant aquariums in City Hall.

The cost to him for having the tanks cleaned out every week for the past 12 years: around $62,400.

The mayor likes to nosh, too. So he paid to feed his staff daily a light breakfast (coffee, bagels, yogurt) and a modest lunch (tuna salad, PB&J, sliced fruit).

The bill for his entire mayoralty: about $890,000.

Mr. Bloomberg, above all, enjoys hassle-free travel. When he took his aides anywhere, from Albany to Athens, it was by private plane.

The price tag for all that jetting around: roughly $6 million.

When Mr. Bloomberg leaves office at midnight Tuesday, he will bequeath a litany of record-shattering statistics on crime reduction, sidewalk safety and skyline-altering construction. But perhaps the most staggering figure is the amount of his own money that he devoted, day in and day out, to being mayor — much of it unseen by the public.

An analysis by The New York Times shows that Mr. Bloomberg has doled out at least $650 million on a wide variety of perks and bonuses, political campaigns and advocacy work, charitable giving and social causes, not to mention travel and lodging, connected to his time and role as mayor. (His estimated tab for a multiday trip to China, with aides and security in tow: $500,000.)

In the process, he has entirely upended the financial dynamics surrounding New York’s top job.

In the past, the city paid its mayor; Mr. Bloomberg paid to be the city’s mayor.

In moves that would make a financial planner’s head spin, he rejected the $2.7 million worth of salary to which he was entitled (accepting just $1 a year) and, starting in 2001, turned on a spigot of cash that has never stopped gushing. He poured at least $268 million of his personal funds into three campaigns for mayor.

He donated at least another $263 million to New York arts, civic, health and cultural groups, personally and through his company, Bloomberg LP.

Campaign donations? He handed out about $23 million of them.

He even chipped in $5 million to renovate an official mayoral residence that he never inhabited. (He preferred the familiar privacy of his own nearby mansion.)

“A modern Medici” is how Mark Green, the former public advocate, described him, reaching back to 15th-century Italy for any kind of precedent.

Read More Here

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Sean Malone's "No Vans Land": How a Small Businessman Beat NYC's Public Transit Union

ReasonTV·

Published on Aug 18, 2013

 

"When you restrict someone like Hector from running his business, when you hit him with fines and prohibitions, and you give him all these restrictions" says Sean Malone, the Creative Media Director of the Charles Koch Institute, "you're not killing some big business. What you're doing, in this case, is harming immigrant guys."

Malone sat down with Nick Gillespie of ReasonTV to discuss his new online documentary, "No Vans Land." It tells the story of Hector Ricketts, a Jamaican immigrant who settled in New York City and started a commuter van service. Ricketts' vans catered to a neglected market: healthcare workers in the outer boroughs, far from Manhattan, who were underserved by public transportation. He offered fares that were lower than city buses, while receiving no subsidies from taxpayers.
As Ricketts' business grew, he came into conflict with the city. The metropolitan transit workers union perceived his vans as a threat to their livelihood. The politically powerful union pressured the city to crack down on the entire commuter van industry, imposing restrictions and fines that made it difficult to conduct business.
With time, tenacity, and the assistance of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm, Ricketts was able to take on the city bureaucracy, and win the right to stay in business.
Malone continues to make documentaries about the struggles of small entrepreneurs. His next project champions entrepreneurs in the hair braiding profession, who've created jobs in Mississippi by eliminating arbitrary barriers to enter the field.
Go to http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/08/16... for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.
Runs about 6:50.
Produced by Todd Krainin. Camera by Amanda Winkler and Krainin.

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Constitution Free Zones in The United States

Story Leak.com

Anthony Gucciardi

DHS ‘Constitution Free’ Zones Inside US Ignored By Media

by Anthony Gucciardi
August 5th, 2013
Updated 08/05/2013 at 12:00 pm

In what should be front page news blasted out nationwide as a breaking news alert, the DHS has openly established extensive ‘Constitution free zones’ in which your Fourth Amendment does not exist. 
It’s not ‘conspiracy’ and it’s not fraud, the DHS has literally created an imaginary ‘border’ within the United States that engulfs 100 miles from every single end of the nation. Within this fabricated ‘border’, the DHS can search your electronic belongings for no reason. We’re talking about no suspicion, no reasonable cause, nothing. No reason whatsoever is required under their own regulations. The DHS is now above the Constitution under their own rules, and even Wired magazine authors were amazed at the level of pure tyranny going on here.
This ‘border’ even includes where the US land meets oceans in addition to legitimate borders with Mexico and Canada. As a result, you have over 197 million citizens suffocated in these 100 mile ‘border zones’ that include major cities like New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Checkout the graphic below for a visual representation, with the orange area representing the Constitution free zone as designated by the DHS:

What’s even more amazing, is that this has been going on since 2008. That’s about 5 years of absolute unconstitutional abuse of power by the Department of Homeland Security that the media fails to even document. That’s 197 million citizens living without a Constitution as far as the DHS is concerned, and apparently the Department of Justice (DOJ) must be pretty content too. Amazingly, no one has challenged this besides the ACLU, which was contacted following the case of a man who was actually detained within the 100 mile ‘border’ area.


Read More Here

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