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Fake News: Spotify Hasn’t Lost $2 Billion Because Of Neil Young

A slew of reports claiming that Spotify has had $2 billion wiped off its market value because of the actions of Neil Young and others in opposing Joe Rogan’s content on the platform are fake news.

Variety and others ran headlines over the weekend like “Spotify Lost More Than $2 Billion in Market Value After Neil Young Pulled His Music Over Joe Rogan’s Podcast.”

As pointed out by many on social media, however, the drop in value of Spotify stock is part of a longer downward trend that started before Neil Young uttered a word about Rogan.

Indeed, Spotify’s stock has actually increased in value since the Neil Young driven backlash.

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Police Chief Gets No Jail, Allowed to Retire, Gets $72k in Benefits After Guilty Plea in Sex Assault Case

Marshfield, WI — In January of last year, Marshfield Police Chief Rick Gramza was arrested and charged with three counts of misconduct in office, disorderly conduct, and fourth-degree sexual assault against a department employee. However, instead of facing a jury of his peers for these accusations, Gramza received tens of thousands of dollars, months of paid vacation, and no jail time.

Last month, Gramza was given a sweetheart plea deal and all of the above charges were reduced to two disorderly conduct charges — on both of which he was immediately found guilty. After paying a measly $661 fine, Gramza will be free and clear.

According to reports, the former chief Gramza is accused of sexually assaulting a department employee on several occasions, as early as 2014 and as late as this past summer.

WSAW reports the Eau Claire detective sergeant investigating the case shared some specific instances the employee told him, including one in 2015, where she says she went into his office to talk about a promotion and then he sexually assaulted her.

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Diversity Training Tells Teachers That Kids Aren’t ‘Racially Innocent’

A number of teachers in the UK have been told that children as young as seven years old are not ‘racially innocent’ during mandatory diversity training.

During classes described as “Racial Literacy 101” sessions, a number of UK-based teachers have been told that kids as young as seven should not be thought of as “racially innocent”.

Brighton and Hove City Council — which has since been accused of “indoctrinating” children —  has said that the classes are “required for all staff” in schools.

According to an exposé by The Telegraph, 300 teachers have undertaken the training so far, which will supposedly inform “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” for school kids.

In documents seen by the publication, the course includes reference to “covert white supremacy” — which is partially defined during the course as denying white privilege — and also claims that young children are often seen as “racially innocent” despite supposed “ample evidence” showing that this is not the case.

“Between the ages of three and five, children learn to attach value to skin colour; white at the top of the hierarchy and black at the bottom,” The Telegraph reports one of the course documents as claiming.

The UK paper also reports that the consultant giving the session described Christianity as influencing the slave trade, and that they claimed that society obsesses over the muscle size of black sportsmen, but not those of their white rivals.

Also noted is that the city council is advertising a “race adviser” job with an advertised salary of £50,000 to £55,000 pro rata for two and a half days a week.

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American Mom, School Teacher Was a Battalion Leader for ISIS, Prosecutors Allege

Federal authorities arrested a former Kansas school teacher and mother of five and charged her with plotting terrorist attacks on American soil, including a shopping mall and a college campus.

Allison Elizabeth Fluke-Ekren, 42, was apprehended in Syria late Thursday, according to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) press release.

Fluke-Ekren began her stint as a terrorist shortly after leaving the U.S. in 2008, according to the DOJ. In a statement released Friday on Fluke-Ekren’s arrest and extradition back to the U.S., the DOJ detailed her intense involvement with the ISIS terrorist group over the course of three years.

Fluke-Ekren allegedly served as a leader of an all-women military battalion of ISIS known as Khatiba Nusayba.

Six eyewitnesses gave detailed accounts to U.S. federal agents of Fluke-Ekren’s alleged terrorist activity starting in 2016, which was about eight years after she moved to the Middle East. One of the witnesses described Fluke-Ehren’s alleged plot to park a vehicle full of explosives in the basement or parking garage level at a U.S. shopping mall and detonate the explosives in the vehicle using a cell phone with a triggering device.

One witness said that the former Kansas school teacher fantasized about large-scale attacks and only considered a location a good one for the attack “if it contained large amounts of congregating people.”

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Stephen Breyer’s Retirement Is Good News for the Fourth Amendment

When President Bill Clinton tapped Stephen Breyer to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, he told the country that Breyer would be a justice who would “strike the right balance between the need for discipline and order, being firm on law enforcement issues but really sticking in there for the Bill of Rights.”

The news of Breyer’s impending retirement at the close of the Supreme Court’s current term gives us an opportunity to weigh Clinton’s words against Breyer’s record. Alas, the former president proved to be only half right. Breyer was certainly “firm” in his deference toward law enforcement. But that same judicial deference often led Breyer to do the opposite of “sticking in there for the Bill of Rights” when major Fourth Amendment cases arrived at SCOTUS.

Take Navarette v. California (2014). At issue was an anonymous and uncorroborated 911 phone call about an allegedly dangerous driver which led the police to make a traffic stop that led to a drug bust. According to the 5–4 majority opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas, “the stop complied with the Fourth Amendment because, under the totality of the circumstances, the officer had reasonable suspicion that the driver was intoxicated.” Law enforcement won big and Breyer signed on.

The deficiencies of that judgment were spelled out in a forceful dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia. “The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail,” wrote Scalia, who was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. “All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, by the police.” That disturbing scenario, Scalia wrote, “is not my concept, and I am sure it would not be the Framers’, of a people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.” Breyer was apparently untroubled by that Fourth Amendment–shredding scenario.

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Ottawa City Councillor requests lawsuit to seize GoFundMe funds raised for Canada’s Freedom Convoy

The public participation in online crowdfunding for public protests related to the Freedom Convoy taking place in Canada continues to be hit with roadblocks and is becoming a further threat to free expression and the right to protest.

After first having GoFundMe temporarily block the release of some of the funds that Canadians have donated to help support the livelihoods of the truckers taking place in the demonstration, GoFundMe began to pay out the funds, with the first payment of $1M in Canadian dollars being released, the campaign organizer tweeted on Friday.

However, the campaign has raised more than $7.3 million in Canadian dollars and those funds could now be at risk of being seized by the local government if some politicians get their way.

Mathieu Fleury, the Ottawa City Councillor of Rideau-Vanier Ward, has today announced his support for the government to launch a legal challenge to seize the remaining GoFundMe donations that had been collected online.

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