Tag: police killings

Philadelphia health commissioner resigns after cremating MOVE bombing remains

Philadelphia’s health commissioner has resigned after admitting he improperly cremated the remains of victims of a 1985 bombing, Mayor Jim Kenney announced Thursday.

Kenney said he was “disturbed” when he learned that the commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, “made a decision to cremate and dispose of” the remains from the bombing ordered by Philadelphia officials 36 years ago of a home whose inhabitants belonged to a revolutionary group called MOVE.

The bombing killed 11 people, including five children, and sparked a fire that spread and destroyed dozens of homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood.

Kenney said in a news conference Thursday that an investigation was underway to find out more about what happened to the remains, adding that they had been described as “bone fragments” and were thought to have been cremated in 2017.

“This action lacked empathy for the victims and their families,” Kenney said, adding that he asked Farley to resign effective immediately. Another official was placed on leave, and Dr. Cheryl Bettigole will serve as acting health commissioner, Kenney said.

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This Is the Number of Innocent People Murdered by Governments. Are You Anti-State Yet?

Let’s start with a number: 262 million. That’s the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed “democide” during the 20th century. “This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century,” he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, the bloodiest body count was run up by totalitarian regimes, though authoritarians were busy stacking up the corpses, too, if in smaller piles. Democracies were also responsible for unjustifiable deaths, especially in subduing resistance in their colonial possessions (think: Belgian Congo) and in indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets during wars (think: Hiroshima), but to a far lesser degree than Communists, Nazis, and overdecorated generalissimos.

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‘I Can’t Breathe’: Cops Taser, Kneel, Stand On Man Until He Dies—Over Opening a Toy in a Store

Lionel Morris, 39, made the poor decision to remove a toy drone from its packaging in a grocery store in an alleged attempt to steal it. These actions most assuredly should have come with some consequences but it should never have been a death sentence. When multiple officers from the Conway Police Department showed up to the call, however, minutes later, Morris’ life would be over.

Body camera and surveillance footage from that fateful day on February 4, 2020 has just been released this week showing this man’s final moments alive. Morris took the last breaths he would ever take with multiple police officer combat boots and a knee on his back.

His last coherent words were “I can’t breathe.”

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