A New Zealand charity that works with low-income people says it unknowingly distributed candies containing potentially lethal levels of methamphetamine.
[…]
Ben Birks Ang, a spokesperson for the NZ Drug Foundation, told the AP that each candy had a street value of 1,000 New Zealand dollars ($608), suggesting the donation was not intentional. Authorities said it was possibly a smuggling attempt that had gone wrong.
A Massachusetts Salon owner feels ‘violated’ after the United States Secret Service broke into her business during a nearby fundraiser for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Footage from a Ring security camera shows an agent approaching the front door of the business in Berkshire, Massachusetts last week before coming back to tape over the video camera.
Alicia Powers, the salon owner, said after the camera was covered, agents broke into the building by picking the lock and then allowing multiple people to use the bathroom inside over a two-hour period.
We have a right to our private property and that right is strongly protected in several places in the U.S. Constitution. Without a warrant or probable cause, these agents broke into a private business to use for their own purposes. The purpose is immaterial. The Secret Service had no more right to enter that building without permission than any thug on the street. If a rando had broken in, they would be prosecuted and put in jail. The same thing should happen to the agents. They don’t get to say, “ope, our bad” and move on. I wouldn’t be able to do that. They should be held to the same or higher standard.
The whole thing speaks to a culture at the Secret Service that disregards the rights of citizens and does not hold itself accountable. It speaks to a culture of an agency that considers itself above the law. They are behaving as a modern Praetorian Guard instead of as a law enforcement and protection agency in a Constitutional Republic.
It seems that all of our federal agencies have become rotten to the core.
Protests erupted in the Venezuelan capital the day after President Nicolás Maduro claimed victory.
The opposition has disputed Mr Maduro’s declaration as fraudulent, saying its candidate Edmundo González won convincingly with 73.2% of the vote.
[…]
A heavy military and police presence was on the streets of Caracas with the aim of trying to disperse protesters and prevent them from approaching the presidential palace.
Crowds of people chanted “freedom, freedom!” and called for the government to fall.
[…]
In a speech on Venezuelan state television, Mr Maduro said it is his “obligation to tell you the truth”.
“We are all under the obligation to listen the truth, to gear up with patience, calmness and strength because we are familiar with this movie and we know how to face these situations and how to defeat the violent.”
[…]
Mr Maduro has accused the opposition of calling for a coup by disputing the results. “This is not the first time we are facing what we are facing today,” he said.
“They are trying to impose in Venezuela a coup d’etat again of fascist and counter-revolutionary character.”
The Venezuelan attorney general warned that the blocking of roads or breaking any laws related to disturbances as part of protests would be met with the full force of the law.
Does that rhetoric look familiar? The claim to speaking the “truth” and labeling all opponents as liars? The claim that opposing an obviously fraudulent election is a “coup?” The rigorous enforcement of laws against political opponents while allies run wild? All of this after disarming average citizens in the name of “safety.” Only those ignorant of history don’t know what’s going on. This is the classic Communist playbook and we are seeing it here in America.
French rail company SNCF says 800,000 passengers have been affected by what the country’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal described as “acts of sabotage”.
A series of fires caused the disruptions early on Friday morning, hours before the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
Several high-speed TGV lines have been hit to the west, north and east of the capital and SNCF has warned the disruption could last for days. Eurostar has also warned customers of longer journey times and cancellations.
Good for them. We win back this country at the local level with work like this.
HARTFORD — The Hartford Union High School (HUHS) Board voted not to accept a revised definition of the term “sex” under Title IX on Monday night.
[…]
The current HUHS process regarding students wanting to use different pronouns or a different name would not change. The school would still contact the parents and set up a meeting or have conversations with the parents, and only the parents’ written permission would allow HUHS to address the student by that name or pronouns.
School Board President Tracy Hennes, also a Moms for Liberty member said the Title IX document itself is very long and complex and it feels like the Department of Education is trying to force districts to accept it in an election year, as well as that there are required trainings for staff that would have to be implemented before the school year.
[…]
HUHS Board member Nolan Jackett said he was hesitant to accept the revised policy, due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises V. Raimondo, which struck down Chevron Deference (an administrative law principle that compelled federal courts to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute).
“The Department of Education, without congressional authority, they shouldn’t be going and making drastic changes like this,” said Jackett.
[…]
According to HUHS Board member Heather Barrie, based on paraphrasing what both Hennes and Lacy said, if this is not a reasonable way for the government to act, the district shouldn’t go along with it and they should wait for the current challenges to the policy to go through the court system (which could take “years and years and years,” according to Lacy).
HUHS Board member Craig Westfall motioned to approve the revised policy, but no other members, which included Hennes, Jackett and Barrie, seconded the motion, thus it failed and the current policy will stay on the books. HUHS Board member Don Pridemore did not attend the meeting.
[…]
Lacy said it is likely that HUHS will be hit with an audit from the U.S. Department of Education, through the Wisconsin Department of Instruction, for not approving the revised Title IX policy.
That last sentence is why we need to get rid of the Department of Education. Not only has it failed to improve educational outcomes despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars, but it is also how they federal government bullies local communities into adopting their ideology.
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez will resign his office on Aug. 20 following the conviction in his federal corruption trial, according to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.
Murphy, who will select an interim replacement, said Tuesday afternoon he has received Menendez’s resignation letter.
In the resignation letter to Murphy, obtained by ABC News, Menendez said he intends to appeal the verdict but does not want the “Senate to be involved in a lengthy process that will detract from its important work.”
Federal prosecutors in New York alleged the New Jersey Democrat accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and more in exchange for the senator’s political clout. Three New Jersey businessmen who were also charged, along with the governments of Egypt and Qatar, were the alleged recipients. Two of those co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, were also convicted of all counts they faced.
Meh. It’s not an act of honor or worthy of respect if it is only done after being forced into it.
US Secret Service director Kim Cheatle has resigned after security failures surrounding an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
“As your director, I take full responsibility for the security lapse,” Ms Cheatle said in a resignation letter to agency staff on Tuesday.
She had faced calls from both Democrats and Republicans to step down after a contentious House committee hearing on Monday about the incident.
Lawmakers became increasingly frustrated when she refused to answer questions about the shooting at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania earlier this month.
For a few days after the assassination attempt on Trump, I took it for what it looked like. It was a loony, disaffected, young man – probably radicalized by toxic anti-Trump rhetoric – who acted out his hate trying to enter immortality. I don’t usually go for conspiracy theories – Occam’s Razor and whatnot.
But after the infuriating testimony of Cheatle, the missing recordings, the refusal to beef up Trump’s protection after repeated requests, the deliberately ignored perfect shooting platform, the encrypted comms, and more and more and more. I’m beginning to think there’s more to this.
Attorneys for President Joe Biden‘s son Hunter Biden, citing the recent decision by a federal judge in Florida to dismiss the classified documents case against Donald Trump, filed a pair of motions in California and Delaware Thursday seeking to dismiss both federal criminal cases against him.
“The Attorney General relied upon the exact same authority to appoint the Special Counsel in both the Trump and Biden matters, and both appointments are invalid for the same reason,” attorneys for Biden argued in the filings.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled this week that special counsel Jack Smith‘s appointment in Trump’s classified documents case was unconstitutional, prompting several legal observers to argue that the same logic should apply to Hunter Biden.
Cannon’s order, however, draws a distinction between Smith and other special counsels.
Attorney General Merrick Garland pulled Smith from The Hague, where he was prosecuting war criminals — not the Justice Department. By contrast, the special counsel in Hunter Biden’s cases, David Weiss, previously served as U.S. Attorney in Delaware, where he had been appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Cannon characterized Smith as a “private citizen exercising the full power of a United States Attorney,” saying that his appointment was unconstitutional because it “effectively usurps” the authority of Congress.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives analysts at a facility in West Virginia search through millions of documents by hand every day to try to identify the provenance of guns used in crimes. Typically, the bureau takes around eight days to track a weapon, though for urgent traces that average falls to 24 hours.
[…]
In an era of high-tech evidence gathering, including location data and a trove of evidence from cell phones and other electronic devices used by shooting suspects, ATF agents have to search through paper records to find a gun’s history.
In some cases, those records have even been kept on microfiche or were held in shipping containers, sources told CNN, especially for some of the closed business records like in this case.
The outdated records-keeping system stems from congressional laws that prohibit the ATF from creating searchable digital records, in part because gun rights groups for years have fanned fears that the ATF could create a database of firearm owners and that it could eventually lead to confiscation.
BUFFALO TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) — The former fire chief who was killed at a Pennsylvania rally for Donald Trump spent his final moments diving down in front of his family, protecting them from the gunfire that rang out Saturday during an assassination attempt against the former president.
Corey Comperatore’s quick decision to use his body as a shield against the bullets flying toward his wife and daughter rang true to the close friends and neighbors who loved and respected the proud 50-year-old Trump supporter, noting that the Butler County resident was a “man of conviction.”
“He’s a literal hero. He shoved his family out of the way, and he got killed for them,” said Mike Morehouse, who lived next to Comperatore for the last eight years. “He’s a hero that I was happy to have as a neighbor.”
Comperatore died Saturday during an attempt to kill Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. At least two other people were injured: David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania, according to the Pennsylvania State Police. Both were listed in stable condition as of Sunday.
I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t see how the SCOTUS ruling would impact a state case about something that candidate Trump allegedly did. Even if one accepts the facts of the case, it would not be an official act of a president.
A New York judge has delayed Donald Trump’s sentencing until September as his lawyers seek to challenge his conviction after a Supreme Court ruling.
Trump was initially scheduled to be sentenced on 11 July.
His legal team asked for his conviction in a hush-money case to be overturned after the nation’s highest court ruled Monday that former presidents had partial immunity for “official” acts during their presidency.
Justice Juan Merchan said on Tuesday that he would issue a decision on the motions by 6 September.
If sentencing is necessary, the judge wrote, it will take place on 18 September.
Call me cynical, but I believe that the sentence will be in direct correlation to Trump’s position in the polls at that time.
Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.
Affirming that any person in our United States has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution” is a very, very serious thing. In this case, however, I think the court got it right.
Go read the whole opinion and the dissents. It’s an informative read and fairly easy to follow.
Such an immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution. At a minimum, the President must be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 754. Pp. 12–15.
(3) As for a President’s unofficial acts, there is no immunity.
In any system of government, the Executive is granted immense power and authority precisely to do things that regular citizens can’t do. We give the Executive the power to wage war, use violent power to strip people of their rights, enforce the collection of taxes, and so much more. Any of these powers, if exercised by an ordinary citizen, would be a crime. An ordinary citizen is not permitted by law to kill someone except in self defense. An ordinary citizen may not lock up their neighbor in prison. An ordinary citizen may not legally take their neighbor’s money to spend on other people.
Since the Executive is empowered and charged by the People to exercise these extraordinary powers on the People’s behalf, the Executive must be free of the threat of criminal prosecution for executing their charge within their official capacity. The People have ceded their right to exercise violent authority on their fellow citizens in exchange for an orderly society enforced by the government to which they ceded their power. It’s a trade.
In our system of government, the proper remedy for correcting an Executive who is using their extraordinary power inappropriately is found at the ballot box. In exceptional cases, an Executive can be removed from office via the Constitutional impeachment and removal process. Our Founders thought this out.
No, it’s not perfect, but no representative government is. It is merely the least objectional form of government necessitated by the pervasive evil imbued in our fallen race.
Once again, this court got it right. It is worth noting that no previous court has ever had to consider and opine on this issue because no previous DOJ had ever sought to prosecute a former president for acts done in office. But here we are…
by Owen | 0626, 1 Jul 24 | Crime, Law | 0 Comments
And another excellent ruling. The DOJ stretched the meaning and intent of this statute in an act of political retribution. This is not as much about Jan 6 as it is about a rogue law enforcement agency that is targeting political opponents wherever it can. I hope that every person prosecuted by the DOJ under this law sues and gets relief.
The Supreme Court on Friday threw out the charges against a former Pennsylvania police officer who entered the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the law that Joseph Fischer was charged with violating, which bars obstruction of an official proceeding, applies only to evidence tampering, such as destruction of records or documents, in official proceedings.
Friday’s ruling could affect charges against more than 300 other Jan. 6 defendants. The same law is also at the center of two of the four charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against former President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.
[…]
The law at the center of Fischer’s case is 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), which makes it a crime to “otherwise obstruct[], influence[], or impede[] any official proceeding.” U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols concluded that because the previous subsection, Section 1512(c)(1), bars tampering with evidence “with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding,” Section 1512(c)(2) only applies to cases involving evidence tampering that obstructs an official proceeding, and he dismissed the obstruction charge against Fischer.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed Nichols’ ruling, concluding that the “meaning of the statute is unambiguous,” so that it “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, other than the conduct that is already covered by” the prior subsection.
On Friday, the Supreme Court vacated the D.C. Circuit’s decision, interpreting the law more narrowly to apply only to evidence tampering.
Perhaps the most stunning about this ruling was the breakdown of the Justices. Barrett sided with the leftists and Jackson sided with the conservatives. Jackson even said in her concurring opinion:
Jackson suggested that it “beggars belief that Congress would have inserted a breathtakingly broad, first-of-its kind criminal obstruction statute (accompanied by a substantial 20-year maximum penalty) in the midst of a significantly more granular series of obstruction prohibitions without clarifying its intent to do so.”
And, frankly, Barrett’s opinion is downright scary:
Although “events like January 6th” may not have been the target of subsection (c)(2), she acknowledged (noting in a parenthetical, “Who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination?”)… For Barrett, the text of subsection (c)(2) clearly supports the government’s broader interpretation. Subsection (c)(2), she asserted, “covers all sorts of actions that affect or interfere with official proceedings,” and the word “otherwise” does not limit its scope.
For Barrett, the DOJ should stretch statutes well beyond their intent or writing if something happens that Congress could not have anticipated. She is supporting a government in which the Executive Branch should act in response to events how they see fit even when they do not have Congressional authority to do so.
Jocelyn Nungaray was discovered Monday in a shallow creek after being strangled to death, according to the Houston Police Department.
A White House spokesperson said, “Our hearts go out to the family and loved ones of Jocelyn Nungaray.”
“We cannot comment on active law enforcement cases,” the spokesperson continued. “But fundamentally, anyone found guilty of this type of heinous and shocking crime should be held accountable, to the fullest extent of the law.”
Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 22, and Franklin Pena, 26, have been arrested and charged with her murder.
The two men had immigration violation holds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement on their court records. According to an ICE spokesperson, Martinez and Pena both illegally crossed the border, and on March 14, Martinez was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas. That same day, he was released on an order of recognizance with a notice to appear. Pena was apprehended by Border Patrol on May 28 near El Paso. He was released on an order of recognizance with a notice to appear the same day he was apprehended.
MIAMI — Recreational boaters found $1 million worth of cocaine floating in the ocean off the Florida Keys.
Samuel Briggs II, the acting chief patrol agent of the U.S. Border Patrol, wrote about the find in a social media post on X. Briggs posted video Monday night showing the wrapped packages of cocaine being wheeled away on a cart.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A U.S. Secret Service agent was robbed at gunpoint as President Joe Biden was visiting Los Angeles for a fundraising event over the weekend, officials said.
The agent was returning from work Saturday night when he was accosted in a residential community in Tustin, about an hour’s drive southeast of Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Secret Service.
Someone called the Tustin Police Department shortly after 9:30 p.m. to report the robbery. Police said the agent had his bag stolen at gunpoint. The agent, who was not injured, fired his gun during the confrontation, police said. The Secret Service said they did not know if anyone was shot.
Tustin Police said Monday they had not found a suspect. Officers did find some of the agent’s stolen belongings in the area. Police reported a silver Infiniti FX35 was seen leaving the scene.
I’ll admit it. I’m surprised. While it was obviously a slam-dunk case, I did not think that a Delaware jury would convict him. I don’t expect that he will see a day in jail, but the verdict surprises me. I doubt that the verdict moves a single vote for the presidential election, but it’s something.
Here’s where things currently stand:
Hunter Biden has been found guilty of lying about his drug use when buying a gun. After three hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty on all three counts.
Hunter faces a maximum of 25 years in prison for all three counts. An exact date has not been scheduled. The judge has said sentencing dates usually take place within a 120-day period.
Hunter showed little emotion as the guilty verdicts were read out, staring ahead with his arms folded before turning around to hug some of the associates on his legal team.
A shooting at a rooftop party in Wisconsin early on Sunday left at least 10 people injured, including teenagers, police said.
Nine people were injured by gunfire and another was injured by broken glass at the party at a high-rise apartment in downtown Madison.
[…]
The victims ranged in age from 14 to 23.
“It is truly a miracle that no one is dead,” the Madison police chief, Shon Barnes, said at a news conference. “As a community, our hearts are hurting.”
[…]
No one was in custody on Sunday in connection with the shooting. Police did not offer a motive.
“That this adult felt emboldened to behave in this way in front of hundreds of students and other adults should deeply trouble us all; this type of behavior will not be tolerated,” the school board said, adding that it “condemns such actions and asks the community to take a stand and speak out against this type of behavior that threatens the fabric of our democracy.”
The story is that a dad went up on stage during graduation and pushed the superintendent because the dad didn’t want the superintendent to shake his daughter’s hand. The dad’s behavior is completely inappropriate. He’s been appropriately charged with disorderly conduct.
To extrapolate this dad’s idiotic, isolated, behavior as something that “threatens the fabric of our democracy” that requires that the “community take a stand” is absolutely idiotic. Get over yourselves, Baraboo School Board. This is one guy and he’s been dealt with. His behavior is not indicative of anything other than he’s a dolt. And I’m willing to bet that the Baraboo School Board is not the paragon of democracy.
