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Six former Mississippi cops known as ‘The Goon Squad’ plead guilty to torturing and abusing two black men during raid on their home

Six former Mississippi law enforcement officers have pleaded guilty to charges accusing them of torturing and abusing two black men during a raid.

Members of the self-called ‘Goon Squad’ each carried a coin with the name emblazoned on one side and the other with Rankin County Sheriff’s Office’s badge. 

Lieutenant Jeffrey Middleton appeared to be the ringleader of the group, with his coin embossed with ‘Lt Middleton’s Goon Squad’. 

Five other deputies for the Sheriff’s Office, and one from the Richland Police Department, have been charged with conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice.

Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, and ex-police officer Joshua Hartfield, were all charged in relation to the assault of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker in January. 

Elward was charged with home invasion and aggravated assault for shoving a gun in the mouth of Jenkins and pulling the trigger – in what prosecutors called a ‘mock execution’.

They are accused of assaulting them with sex toys, firearms, stun guns, milk, eggs, alcohol and chocolate syrup on January 24. 

The cops are potentially facing a maximum combined sentence of 641 years and two life sentences in prison for state and federal charges, as well as a combined $12.25 million in fines. 

Dedmon was charged with home invasion after kicking in a door, with McAlpin, Middleton, Opdyke and Hartfield each facing an additional charge of first-degree obstruction of justice.

Middleton admitted in court that he was convicted of vehicular manslaughter in 2007 for hitting/killing a man. 

The victims stared down their attackers after arriving together in court, sitting in the front row just feet away from their attackers’ families.  

Prosecutors say that some of the officers nicknamed themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover it up.

They were targeted after a white neighbor complained that two black men were staying at the home with a white woman. 

Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who has been paralyzed since she was 15 – and he was helping to care for her.  

All of the officers have pleaded guilty to the state charges on Monday, and previously pleaded in a connected federal civil rights case. 

In January, the officers entered a property in Mississippi without a warrant, and handcuffed Jenkins and Parker before assaulting them. 

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States With Legal Medical Marijuana See ‘Significant And Sizable’ Reductions In Health Insurance Premiums, Study Finds

A new study in the International Journal of Drug Policy found that states with legal medical marijuana enjoyed significant reductions in health insurance premiums compared to states where cannabis remained completely illegal.

Analyzing a decade’s worth of private health insurance data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, researchers determined that in the years following a state’s implementation of a medical cannabis law, premiums dropped dramatically.

While the reductions were modest immediately following implementation, the study found that by seven years afterward, annual premiums had fallen $1,663 compared to states in the control group. Similar reductions were seen after eight years ($1,542) and nine years ($1,626), indicating that the decline was fairly stable over time.

“Although the effect does not begin until seven years post-medical cannabis law implementation,” the authors conclude, “there is a significant and sizable reduction in health insurance premiums” in states that legalize medical marijuana.

“Due to the nature of insurance pooling and community rating,” they add, “these savings are appreciated by cannabis users and non-users alike.”

As the study’s authors point out, the findings undermine concerns that legalization would risk increasing healthcare costs. “Initial concerns about medical cannabis legalization leading to increases in medical care costs, which would be reflected in higher insurance premiums, appear to be unfounded,” they wrote.

Researchers were specifically looking at individual private health plans rather than employer-sponsored insurance plans or Medicaid. The study notes that health insurance spending in the U.S. accounts for between 16 percent and 34 percent of the average household budget.

In an attempt to control for other variables, authors focused on states where only medical marijuana was legal, excluding from the analysis states where adult-use legalization was already in effect. States in the control group, meanwhile, included those without medical cannabis or those that had passed but not yet implemented a such a policy

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Biden Admin Sanctions Don’t Apply Again to Russian Oligarchs Who Paid Biden Family

President Joe Biden’s administration spared Hunter Biden’s Russian billionaire business associates from a sanctions list recently issued by the State Department.

Late Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina — who dined with then-Vice President Biden in April 2014 — and oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov — who arranged at least two meetings with Hunter Biden while his father was vice president — again escaped the crushing sanctions from the Biden administration levied on the Russian elites as a result of the Ukrainian war.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated Friday that the United States added four more Russian oligarchs to its sanction list. Despite their qualifications of resembling fellow Russian oligarchs, Baturina and Yevtushenkov were kept off the list.

“[T]he United States is imposing sanctions on four prominent members of Russia’s financial elite who have served on the supervisory board of the Alfa Group Consortium, one of the largest financial and investment conglomerates in Russia,” Blinken wrote:

We are also imposing sanctions on the Russian Association of Employers the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), a Russian business organization involved in the technology sector of the Russian Federation economy. The organization has promoted import substitution and convened meetings to promote responses to sanctions.

The United States will continue to take all appropriate action to hold accountable those who enable and profit from Russia’s war against Ukraine.

According to the Atlantic Council, the U.S. has more than 2,700 sanctions against Russia. Since the Ukrainian war began last year, the Biden administration imposed approximately 1,500 new and 750 amended sanctions and export controls against Russia.

Russian oligarchs Baturina and Yevtushenkov, however, are somehow immune to sanctions.

In March, they were also left off a list of sanctioned Russians, as Breitbart News reported. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to answer why the Biden administration refused to sanction the Russian oligarchs.

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CA preschool teacher blasts ‘innocence,’ says toddlers should be taught ‘queerness,’ sexuality in classroom

A preschool teacher repeatedly attacked the idea of “childhood innocence” and claimed that topics considered “inappropriate” can be shared with children, according to his scrubbed social media accounts. 

The California teacher, William “Willy” Villalpando, has said the idea of “childhood innocence” is a “myth,” and claimed topics deemed “inappropriate” – such as “queerness” – can be suitable for the pre-K age group. The district has repeatedly ignored Fox News’ requests for comment. 

The Rialto Unified School District was asked months ago whether Villalpando was currently employed there and working with its schoolchildren. They did not respond. However, after receiving a tip from a concerned source – it can now be confirmed the teacher works at Trapp Preschool. 

“There is a common mythology that children live in this world of pure innocence, and that by introducing or exposing them to the real-world adults are somehow shattering this illusion for them. Therefore, there is a banning of topics and issues that children should not be exposed to, as if they are not experiencing them already,” he said. 

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Does the IRS think you’re DEAD? Taxman has incorrectly ‘deceased locked’ 90,000 accounts despite filers still being alive

More than 90,000 taxpayers have had their IRS accounts locked because the government agency incorrectly thought they were dead, a new watchdog report states.

The blunder – which the IRS blamed on ‘human and computer programming issues’ -has left legitimate and living citizens unable to file tax returns and receive rebates. They were also then lumped with the burden of rectifying the issue.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) issued a report last week claiming that prior to January 2022 it identified 77,868 accounts with potentially erroneous locks and a further 20,222 over the next ten months.

The IRS has since confirmed those affected can notify the service and file new returns once their accounts are unlocked.

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Two Princeton, MIT Scientists Say EPA Climate Regulations Based on a ‘Hoax’

Two prominent climate scientists have taken on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new rules to cut CO2 emissions in electricity generation, arguing in testimony that the regulations “will be disastrous for the country, for no scientifically justifiable reason.”

Citing extensive data (pdf) to support their case, William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argued that the claims used by the EPA to justify the new regulations are not based on scientific facts but rather political opinions and speculative models that have consistently proven to be wrong. 

“The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule,” Mr. Happer and Mr. Lindzen stated. “None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.”

“All of the models that predict catastrophic global warming fail the key test of the scientific method: they grossly overpredict the warming versus actual data,” they stated. “The scientific method proves there is no risk that fossil fuels and carbon dioxide will cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.”

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CHINESE MILITARY SAYS IT’S FIGURED OUT HOW TO BUILD LASER WEAPONS THAT CAN FIRE INDEFINITELY

The Chinese military has announced what could be a major breakthrough in energy weapon tech — if it holds up.

As the South China Morning Post reports, representatives from the country’s National University of Defence Technology say they’ve developed a state-of-the-art cooling system that would allow high-energy lasers to remain powered up “infinitely” without getting too hot.

While laser technology has existed for decades, these high-energy beams generate so much excess heat that they often go haywire, hampering previous attempts at similar weapon systems around the world.

The new Chinese cooling system, according to the report, would use gas that blows through the weapon to remove excess heat and allow for weapons to shoot precise laser beams for an indefinite amount of time without losing power or getting distorted.

“High-quality beams can be produced not only in the first second, but also maintained indefinitely,” the team wrote in a new paper on the purported cooling tech, published in the Chinese-language journal Acta Optica Sinica.

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The IRS Misplaced Millions of Taxpayer Records. Again.

Do you know where your tax records are? It’s a serious question in the case of millions of Americans whose records the IRS carelessly misplaced. That’s the big reveal in a recent inspector general’s report telling us that the federal mugging agency continues to be mindbogglingly incompetent at safeguarding the sensitive financial information it forcibly extracts from us all.

“The IRS was unable to locate any of the FY 2010 microfilm cartridges that should have been sent from the Fresno Tax Processing Center to the Kansas City Tax Processing Center,” the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed in an August 8 report on the tax agency’s data-handling practices. “As a result of the lack of adequate inventory controls, the IRS cannot account for thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive business and individual tax account records.”

That’s bad—remarkably bad given the bait the information in those records represents for criminals inclined “to commit tax refund fraud identity theft,” as the report goes on to warn. You could omit the “tax refund” part since the details we’re required to submit to the IRS could enable scammers to rob us blind in a host of ways that don’t matter to the government but are extremely serious to anybody on the receiving end.

As you might expect of a government agency, the incompetence doesn’t stop there.

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Dash cam footage shows Delaware cops conspiring to drum up bogus charge against motorist who flipped them off

A Delaware man is suing the state police, saying they destroyed a sign he made to warn people about their speed trap and they created a bogus reason to charge him with an infraction because he gave them the finger, Delaware Online reported.

Jonathan Guessford had launched a mini-protest by holding a hand-made sign that read, “Radar ahead.” Body cam footage shows Cpl. Stephen Douglas and Officer Nicholas Gallo approach Guessford and incorrectly tell him he could not stand on the side of the road with the sign. Gallo eventually pulled the sign from Guessford’s grasp and ripped it up.

As he was leaving, Guessford gave the officers the finger, prompting them to follow him. When they pulled him over, Master Cpl. Raiford Box arrived on the scene and told Guessford that he was going to be locked up for disorderly conduct and have his child taken away. The officers issued him a citation “under a law that governs hand signals for non-motorized vehicles like bicycles,” Delaware Online’s report stated.

New dash cam footage that was recently released shows officers conspiring to drum up a bogus charge against Guessford. Douglas was warned by Box that the hand-gesture charge was bogus, but that didn’t stop him of issuing it.

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‘Stressed beyond her limits’: co-owner of Kansas newspaper dies after police raid

The co-owner of a small Kansas newspaper whose offices and staff were raided by local police officers conducting a leak investigation has died after the situation left her “stressed beyond her limits”, according to the publication.

Joan Meyer, 98, collapsed on Saturday afternoon and died at her home a day after she tearfully watched officers who showed up at her home with a search warrant cart away her computer as well as an internet router, reported the Marion County Record, which she co-owned. After officers also photographed the bank statements of her son, Record publisher Eric Meyer, and left her house in mess, Meyer had been unable to eat or sleep, her newspaper said.

Meyer was “in good health for her age”, the weekly newspaper asserted. And the headline of its report on her death said the police’s decision to raid the Marion Record’s offices along with the homes of its reporters and publishers was not only illegal – but had also contributed to bringing on the end of Meyer’s life.

Attempts to contact both Marion’s police chief – Gideon Cody – and the judge who authorized his agency to conduct the raids aimed at the Record, Laura Viar, for comment on Meyer’s sudden death were not immediately successful.

As the Record has told it, the weekly’s ordeal began when a confidential source leaked evidence that a local restaurant proprietor, Kari Newell, had been convicted of drunk-driving but continued using her car without a license.

The newspaper never published anything related to the information because its staff reportedly suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband during their divorce. Nonetheless, after police notified Newell that the information was going around, she alleged at a local city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents.

According to reporting from the Kansas Reflector, Newell had admitted to the drunk-driving arrest as well as driving with a suspended license. Yet she insinuated that the leak was meant to jeopardize her license to serve alcohol and harm her business.

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