Blog

Malcolm X’s daughters are set to sue NYPD and other city agencies for ‘concealing evidence around their father’s murder:’ Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump to defend family on 58th anniversary of activist’s death

The three remaining daughters of civil rights leader Malcolm X are planning to sue the NYPD together with various government agencies alleging their involvement in the assassination of their father, on the 58th anniversary of his death.

Ilyasah, 60, Attallah, 64, and Qubilah Shabazz, 62, are to allege how evidence relating to Malcolm X’s murder in 1965 was ‘fraudulently concealed’ by the authorities. 

Their case has been picked up by renowned civil rights and personal injury attorney Ben Crump with whom they have enjoyed a long partnership. 

Crump, together with co-counsel Ray Hamlin, is planning to file a ‘notice of intent’ and sue the NYPD together with various government agencies on behalf of the daughters, alleging their involvement in the assassination.

The suit will allege how evidence relating to Malcolm X’s murder was ‘fraudulently concealed’ by the authorities that were investigating his death.

The role played by federal and New York government agencies, such as the NYPD, FBI, and CIA, in his murder has been a matter of dispute for a long time.

Tuesday marks the 58th anniversary of civil rights leader Malcolm X’s death. 

On that day in 1965, while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X was assassinated at the age of 39 in front of his family, having been shot 21 times by several men. 

At the time, the agencies had access to factual and exculpatory evidence that Crump alleges they kept from Malcolm X’s family and the individuals wrongly convicted of crimes connected to his assassination.

Keep reading

Study: 70% of Suspects Freed from Jail Without Bail Arrested for More Crimes

More than 7-in-10 criminal suspects released from jail without bail go on to be rearrested for allegedly committing more crimes, a new study reveals.

In early 2020, amid the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, the California Judicial Council required counties to enforce an “emergency bail schedule” which effectively released thousands of criminal suspects from jail without having to pay bail under the guise of reducing prison overcrowding.

“This program designated that the bail for select crimes was dramatically reduced, many to zero dollars,” county officials state.

Yolo County, California, in particular, kept the $0 bail policy in place until June 2021 when the county’s Superior Court enacted a new bail schedule.

The Yolo County District Attorney’s Office, in analyzing release and arrest data during the period where the $0 bail policy was enforced, finds that more than 70 percent of those who were released without bail went on to be arrested for additional crimes.

The analysis also compared recidivism rates over an 18-month period, finding that 78 percent of suspects released without bail were found to be rearrested for crimes while only 46 percent of those who paid bail were rearrested.

Keep reading

Americans Blast Biden Over Tweet Declaring His Heart Has Been Captured By Ukraine

After Joe Biden’s train ride to Ukraine for a photo op and another $500 million handout, he posted a tweet declaring that his heart has been captured by Ukraine, prompting angry responses from Americans who charge Biden is ignoring problems at home.

Biden tweeted “I knew I would be back” and included a picture of a message he scrawled to the Ukrainian president Zelensky.

Critics were quick to point out that Biden’s heart doesn’t seem so captured by Americans dealing with a massive disaster at home.

Keep reading

The first legally recognized slaveholder in American History was a black man

When you hear or read the term ‘slavery’, the first thing that would readily pop into your mind is a black man being abused and used by white man. After all, this is the battle cry of the black community whenever they likened racism to slavery. While this may be true of most slave cases, do you know that the first legally recognized slaveholder in America was not a white but a black man?

A servant who became the master

Anthony Johnson was one of the first indentured servants who came to Virginia in 1619. The concept of ‘indentured servants’ was a concept introduced by the administrators of Virginia so that those without money can enter the New World by providing free labor to their benefactor who paid for their entry. Indentured servants will only work for a set period of time and they will be free afterward.

Anthony worked out his indenture period and together with his wife Mary, bought their way out of bondage. Anthony was fortunate enough to eventually acquire his own land. A former indentured servant having his own land was practically non-existent during that time. Since he and his wife were no strangers to hard work they were able to successfully grow their livestock and livelihood. By the 1650s their property had grown to 250 acres, a rare feat for an ex-servant.

Considering that Anthony owned his own plantation, he employed five Africans as indentured servants and one of them was John Casor. John completed his servant-period by laboring for seven years without pay. However, when John asked Anthony for his freedom, the ex-servant-turned-freeman (and then owner himself) refused.

Keep reading

Kavanuagh Rape Accuser Confesses She Lied, Was Never Raped, Never Even Met The Man

ICYMI| Because the mainstream media was not very interested in this story (for obvious reasons) it is likely that you did not see this when it broke.  For this reason we are posting it again.

The sh*t show the Democrats staged at the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was a disgusting group denigration of the high office Democrats have been entrusted with.

This was borne out again yesterday when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley made a third criminal referral, this one against a second Kavanaugh accuser, Judy Munro-Leighton.

Keep reading

Twitter Files: Sen. Angus King Targeted ‘Suspicious’ Americans for Blacklisting

According to the latest drop of the Twitter Files, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) flagged accounts his office disliked to the social media platform, accusing Americans of being “suspicious” for reasons including being excited by a Sen. Rand Paul visit, mentioning immigration in their tweets, or being followed by a political rival.

Twitter users have been sharing their ideas, opinions, and thoughts on the platform for a long time. But in recent years, the government’s role in policing this content has come under scrutiny. An intricate system of government involvement in Twitter moderation has been exposed by the Twitter Files, with journalist Matt Taibbi compiling a collection of thousands of moderation requests.

The Twitter Files have revealed a number of details about the internal workings of the social media platform in recent months. According to the latest batch released over the weekend, it has been discovered that government officials frequently misidentify Americans as fictitious Russians. Further complicating the role of governments in online content moderation is the discovery that Twitter has given the “U.S. intelligence community,” moderation authority.

Keep reading

Qualified Immunity Is Burning a Hole in the Constitution

The Supreme Court created qualified immunity out of thin air in 1967, just six years after the Court first recognized that people could sue police officers and other government officials for violating their constitutional rights. In that first qualified immunity case, Pierson v. Ray, the Court held that the officers were entitled to a “good faith” immunity in civil rights cases. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority, explained that this immunity from suit was necessary because, otherwise, officers could be held liable when they mistakenly believed the law authorized an arrest. As Chief Justice Warren explained, “A policeman’s lot is not so unhappy that he must choose between being charged with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he has probable cause and being mulcted in damages if he does.”

Although a “good faith” defense was the impetus for qualified immunity, today, officers are entitled to qualified immunity even if they act in bad faith, so long as there is no prior court decision with nearly identical facts. For more than five decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly strengthened qualified immunity’s protections, describing each additional layer of defense in increasingly terrified tones as necessary to protect officers from the unyielding power of civil rights lawsuits.

The first — and arguably most seismic — shift to qualified immunity came in 1982 in a case called Harlow v. Fitzgerald. In Harlow, the Court concluded that officers’ entitlement to qualified immunity should not depend on whether they acted in good faith. In order to prove good faith, officers would have to be deposed — questioned under oath — about their state of mind at the time they violated the Constitution, and a case would go to a jury if an officer’s good faith was in dispute. Justice Powell, who wrote the majority opinion in Harlow, reasoned that requiring officers to participate in discovery and trial in an “insubstantial case” was a burden to the officer, who would need to spend time defending himself instead of doing his job. And the Court feared that this type of distraction would harm not only the officer but also “society as a whole” by discouraging “able citizens from acceptance of public office” and “dampen[ing] the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most irresponsible [public officials], in the unflinching discharge of their duties.” So, to protect officers from having to participate in discovery and trial in “insubstantial cases,” the Court held in Harlow that an officer’s intentions do not matter to the qualified immunity analysis. Instead, officers are entitled to qualified immunity so long as they do not violate what the Court called “clearly established law.”

Keep reading

China successfully tests ‘phantom space strike’ weapon which can overwhelm an enemy’s missile defence systems ahead of a nuclear attack

China has successfully tested a ‘phantom space strike’ – a new tactic to overwhelm and sabotage missile defences by emitting fake target signals from space.

Military engineers announced earlier this month they had completed a computer simulation and achieved positive results.

The tactic is designed to overwhelm the enemy on the basis that there is only so much a missile defence system would be able to cope with.

This can lead to exhaustion of the enemy’s weapon supplies, making it easier to destroy it. 

In the simulation, a ballistic missile was launched against an enemy which had a missile defence system. 

After surpassing the atmosphere, the missile released three spacecrafts containing radio interference equipment which picked up enemy radar network signals and sent back dummy signals, successfully triggering enemy forces to launch an interceptor.

‘Generating phantom tracks in space is extremely difficult,’ the team wrote, according to South China Morning Post.

‘We solved one of the major challenges … with a clever design.’

The team was led by Zhao Yanli, a senior engineer in the People’s Liberation Army Unit 63891 – a military agency based in the central Chinese province of Henan that develops new technologies.

Dummy attacks are often used in combat to exhaust the enemy’s supplies. 

The team said this tactic was not previously feasible in space. Now the positive results of the simulation have given them hope as they move the project onto the next stage to battle any engineering challenges.

Researchers exploited a weak spot in radar stations where signals can become fuzzy and crossed over. 

The spacecrafts’ direction, speed and formation would be decided before the launch and would be based on the information obtained about the enemy’s radar station.

Keep reading

Bad Quotes of Some Bad Presidents

Presidents’ Day is just around the corner. Should we celebrate?

People who love liberty and live in a free society don’t bow down and worship politicians. We understand that politicians wield power, to be sure, but we also know they still put their pants on one leg at a time. As President Reagan once put it, “America is a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”

The best of America’s presidents worked to keep the peace and our liberties. They didn’t view the Constitution as public window-dressing while they undermined it inside the store. The worst ones expanded power in Washington, burdening future generations with dubious programs, bureaucracy, taxes, debt, and foreign adventurism. The truly good ones are few and far between.

So whoever it was who decided we should have a Presidents’ Day in February, I can assure you it wasn’t me. I’d prefer to celebrate an Entrepreneurs’ Day. Or an Inventors’ Day. Or, of course, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. If I had my way, we’d have a Capital Day too.

America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, regarded government employment with a healthy wariness. In a 1799 letter, he warned, “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” Twelve years later in another letter, he said, “I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.”

Presidents’ Day, fortunately, is still welcomed by most Americans more as a day off work than a day to glorify presidents—even Washington and Lincoln, whose birthdays were “consolidated” into the holiday in the first place. But there’s still too much presidential glorifying that goes on for my tastes. In the spirit of Jeffersonian skepticism, my way of noting the holiday this year is to offer five of the many bad things some bad presidents said.

Keep reading

President Biden Makes Surprise Visit To Kyiv, Pledges New Military Aid

President Biden departed from Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, Maryland, early Sunday morning. He stopped at Ramstein Air Base in Germany before making an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Monday morning. The visit comes ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Biden’s visit comes as Russia prepares for a massive spring offensive. Western countries are racing to flood Ukraine with new weaponry, including main battle tanks and armored vehicles. Biden delivered remarks alongside President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv and announced new military aid worth $500 million, according to AP News. The new military aid includes anti-tank missiles, air-surveillance radars, howitzers, shells, ammunition and other support, but no new advanced weaponry.

“I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about US support for Ukraine in the war,” Biden said in joint remarks with Zelenskyy. He said, “I’m here to show our unwavering support for the nation’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.”

Zelenskyy thanked Biden for coming to Kyiv “at a huge moment for Ukraine.” He said he and the US president would hold talks about the war and what’s happening on the frontlines and also “about the people, about Ukrainians, about Americans . . . what we have to do to stop the war, to have success in this war . . . and how to win this year”.

Biden said, “I am meeting with President Zelenskyy and his team for an extended discussion on our support for Ukraine.” He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “dead wrong,” believing he could instantly take Ukraine during the invasion nearly one year ago.

“Over the last year, the United States has built a coalition of nations from the Atlantic to the Pacific to help defend Ukraine with unprecedented military, economic, and humanitarian support – and that support will endure,” he continued.

Biden also said, “We will announce additional sanctions against elites and companies that are trying to evade or backfill Russia’s war machine.”

The president’s social media team was busy tweeting this morning.

Keep reading