"A California driver knew something was wrong when he drove an underage girl to a local hotel and heard her talking to her alleged pimps—and his fast action helped cops rescue her.
A California Uber driver helped rescue a 16-year-old girl from sex trafficking after giving her a ride to a hotel along with two alleged female pimps, police say.
Elk Grove cops arrested three people on Monday after the vigilant cabbie dialed 911 after dropping the group off at a Holiday Inn.
Keith Avila, a married father of one in Sacramento, had just logged in to Uber and was picking up his first passengers for the night: the teenager, whom authorities would later reveal was a runaway, and two older women.
“What gave me chills is, the next day [police] said she was reunited with her family,” Avila, 34, told The Daily Beast. “She was missing. I felt kind of good about that.”
Avila has only been driving Uber for about a month. By day, he’s a photographer specializing in the quinceaƱera, or celebration of a Latina girl’s 15th birthday. In recent weeks, he had photographed a teenager’s party at that Holiday Inn.
Now he was there dropping off a girl of a similar age for criminal activity.
“I take pictures of girls exactly her age,” Avila said. “When I take pictures, everyone’s happy and smiling. To see that, compared to what I saw [the night of the arrests], I knew, ‘OK, there’s something wrong here.’”
After dropping the women off, Avila called police over the suspected child prostitution.
Upon arrival, officers arrested Destiny Pettway, 25, and Maria Westley, 31, who allegedly arranged for the victim to meet a man, ABC10 reported. Cops arrested the women outside the hotel and charged them with pimping and pandering.
Disney Vang, the suspected john, was arrested for unlawful sexual activity with a minor after police located him inside the hotel room with the victim.
The victim, who had been reported as a missing person to a different police department, was transported to an alternative housing location, authorities said.
Avila recorded his reaction to the incident on Facebook Live shortly after giving a statement to police. His video, which had more than 100,000 views as of Wednesday, reads, “I just caught a group Child Sex Trafficking ring!!! No joke!!!”
Uber Driver Saves Girl From Sex Slavery - The Daily Beast
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Loretta Lynch’s Parting Message - The New York Times
“There is nothing foreordained about our march toward a more just and peaceful future,” Ms. Lynch said Monday, speaking to an interfaith group at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center in northern Virginia. “Our centuries-long project of creating a more perfect union was not the product of fate or destiny. It was the result of countless individuals making the choice to stand up, to demand recognition, to refuse to rest until they knew that their children were inheriting a nation that was more tolerant, more inclusive and more equal.”
She delivered a gentler version of that message on Tuesday as she sat with students at New York City’s Harvey Milk High School, which serves mainly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teenagers. She beamed as students described how they had blossomed at the school, which offers a refuge from bullying, scorn and self-doubt.
“You all are the ones who have the courage to walk with us,” Ms. Lynch told the students at the school in Manhattan. “Without people who are willing to stand up and say that they have an issue or a problem or something that has happened to them, we would not be able to move these issues forward.”
Left unsaid, but widely understood, is that the Justice Department under Mr. Trump is likely to abandon groundbreaking civil rights litigation carried out during the Obama administration. Transgender Americans will be especially vulnerable. Both Ms. Lynch and Eric Holder, her predecessor as attorney general, embraced interpretations of civil rights law to extend protections to people facing discrimination for their gender identity. In May, Ms. Lynch delivered an impassioned speech about transgender rights in explaining the Justice Department’s lawsuit to strike down a discriminatory state law in North Carolina. The department has also backed the legal claims of transgender students fighting for the right to use the restroom that matches their gender identity.
“Those cases are still pending, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” Ms. Lynch told me in an interview. As she prepares to clear out her office — which could soon be occupied by Senator Jeff Sessions, a man who 30 years ago was deemed too racist to be confirmed as a federal judge — she is cognizant that other civil rights are under assault. Republican lawmakers around the country have spent the last several years creating new laws and tactics to suppress voting by racial minorities and young voters — many of which Mr. Obama’s Justice Department has fought with some success. During the interview, she appeared to acknowledge that the Justice Department may no longer be on the front lines of beating back this scourge.
“The way we achieved voting equality in this country was always from the community level up,” she said. “It was the leaders on the ground who raised these issues, who had people out there on the streets, who had people out registering people to vote.”
It is sobering to hear a departing attorney general implicitly telling vulnerable Americans that the federal government may fail to protect their rights and that they will have to do this work themselves. But any other message would whitewash the painful truth."
Loretta Lynch’s Parting Message - The New York Times
Friday, December 16, 2016
U.S. Faces Tall Hurdles in Detaining or Deterring Russian Hackers - The New York Times
"WASHINGTON — When a suspected Russian cybercriminal named Dmitry Ukrainsky was arrested in a Thai resort town last summer, the American authorities hoped they could whisk him back to New York for trial and put at least a temporary dent in Russia’s arsenal of computer hackers.
But the Russian authorities moved quickly to persuade Thailand not to extradite him, saying that he should be prosecuted at home. American officials knew what that meant. If Mr. Ukrainsky got on a plane to Moscow, they concluded, he would soon be back at work in front of a computer.
“The American authorities continue the unacceptable practice of ‘hunting’ for Russians all over the world, ignoring the norms of international laws and twisting other states’ arms,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The dispute over Mr. Ukrainsky, whose case remains in limbo, highlights the difficulties — and at times impossibilities — that the United States faces in combating Russian hackers, including those behind the recent attacks on the Democratic National Committee. That hack influenced the course, if not the outcome, of a presidential campaign and was the culmination of years of increasingly brazen digital assaults on American infrastructure.
The United States has few options for responding to such hacks. Russia does not extradite its citizens and has shown that it will not easily be deterred through public shaming. At times, the American authorities have enlisted local police officials to arrest suspects when they leave Russia — for vacation in the Maldives, for example. But more often than not, the F.B.I. and Justice Department investigate and compile accusations and evidence against people who will almost certainly never stand trial."
U.S. Faces Tall Hurdles in Detaining or Deterring Russian Hackers - The New York Times
But the Russian authorities moved quickly to persuade Thailand not to extradite him, saying that he should be prosecuted at home. American officials knew what that meant. If Mr. Ukrainsky got on a plane to Moscow, they concluded, he would soon be back at work in front of a computer.
“The American authorities continue the unacceptable practice of ‘hunting’ for Russians all over the world, ignoring the norms of international laws and twisting other states’ arms,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The dispute over Mr. Ukrainsky, whose case remains in limbo, highlights the difficulties — and at times impossibilities — that the United States faces in combating Russian hackers, including those behind the recent attacks on the Democratic National Committee. That hack influenced the course, if not the outcome, of a presidential campaign and was the culmination of years of increasingly brazen digital assaults on American infrastructure.
The United States has few options for responding to such hacks. Russia does not extradite its citizens and has shown that it will not easily be deterred through public shaming. At times, the American authorities have enlisted local police officials to arrest suspects when they leave Russia — for vacation in the Maldives, for example. But more often than not, the F.B.I. and Justice Department investigate and compile accusations and evidence against people who will almost certainly never stand trial."
U.S. Faces Tall Hurdles in Detaining or Deterring Russian Hackers - The New York Times
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Why We Need a National Monument to Reconstruction - The New York Times
"
"Although Americans are already looking ahead to the next presidential administration, President Obama retains the power to shape his legacy and our nation in his remaining weeks in office. He has already used his final months to create several national monuments, and we urge him to create another, one that will speak as much to the nation’s present and future as it does to its past: the first national monument dedicated to Reconstruction — the turbulent, misunderstood era after the Civil War — in Beaufort, S.C., which has one of the country’s highest concentrations of Reconstruction-related sites.
Work on the monument is already underway. Community leaders in Beaufort have submitted a formal request to the National Park Service for a monument that encompasses key sites of emancipation and postwar community-building. In May, two South Carolina representatives — James Clyburn, a Democrat, and Mark Sanford, a Republican — sponsored a resolution to establish a national monument to the Reconstruction era. And last month, a group of 17 historians who have been helping the National Park Service study Reconstruction, as well as the American Historical Association and other professional historical groups, endorsed this effort.
This is a crucial time to commemorate Reconstruction. The period after the Civil War created the modern United States: Three constitutional amendments ended slavery, created equal legal protection and birthright citizenship, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting laws. Four million formerly enslaved Americans reconstructed their families and communities, establishing thousands of churches and schools and civic organizations.
Reconstruction was the nation’s first great experiment in biracial democracy, with hundreds of thousands of black men able to vote for the first time, and significant numbers holding elective office. Largely for that reason, Southern planters led coups against local governments that supported Reconstruction, and went on to bar blacks and many poor whites from voting and to construct a system of Jim Crow racial exclusion."
Why We Need a National Monument to Reconstruction - The New York Times
"Although Americans are already looking ahead to the next presidential administration, President Obama retains the power to shape his legacy and our nation in his remaining weeks in office. He has already used his final months to create several national monuments, and we urge him to create another, one that will speak as much to the nation’s present and future as it does to its past: the first national monument dedicated to Reconstruction — the turbulent, misunderstood era after the Civil War — in Beaufort, S.C., which has one of the country’s highest concentrations of Reconstruction-related sites.
Work on the monument is already underway. Community leaders in Beaufort have submitted a formal request to the National Park Service for a monument that encompasses key sites of emancipation and postwar community-building. In May, two South Carolina representatives — James Clyburn, a Democrat, and Mark Sanford, a Republican — sponsored a resolution to establish a national monument to the Reconstruction era. And last month, a group of 17 historians who have been helping the National Park Service study Reconstruction, as well as the American Historical Association and other professional historical groups, endorsed this effort.
This is a crucial time to commemorate Reconstruction. The period after the Civil War created the modern United States: Three constitutional amendments ended slavery, created equal legal protection and birthright citizenship, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting laws. Four million formerly enslaved Americans reconstructed their families and communities, establishing thousands of churches and schools and civic organizations.
Reconstruction was the nation’s first great experiment in biracial democracy, with hundreds of thousands of black men able to vote for the first time, and significant numbers holding elective office. Largely for that reason, Southern planters led coups against local governments that supported Reconstruction, and went on to bar blacks and many poor whites from voting and to construct a system of Jim Crow racial exclusion."
Why We Need a National Monument to Reconstruction - The New York Times
Donald Trump’s New Old Boys’ Club -Trump’s new inner circle is a rogue’s gallery of women-beaters, sexual harassers, men who would do away with equal pay and the pill and the Violence Against Women act. Welcome back to the 1960’s, America. The Daily Beast
"
GROSS
Donald Trump’s New Old Boys’ Club
Trump’s new inner circle is a rogue’s gallery of women-beaters, sexual harassers, men who would do away with equal pay and the pill and the Violence Against Women act. Welcome back to the 1960’s, America.
Erin Gloria Ryan
ERIN GLORIA RYAN
12.14.16 3:03 PM ET
Donald Trump, a man who once owned beauty pageant without a talent or interview portion, has been elected President. He has surrounded himself with people who will enable and reinforce his worldview, because that’s what he’s always done. When the behavior that was acceptable within his self-constructed and insular world—pussy-grabbing, victim-insulting, daughter-caressing—went public, we first reacted with revulsion. Donald Trump is a strange person, who behaves strangely and does strange things. But after awhile, we got used to it. Everything weird about him will soon be normal and, by extension, the way it’s manifested in his cabinet will be. How did this happen so fast?
A year ago, the all-star team of creepy uncles Donald Trump rubs elbows with would have caused an uproar. Women would have taken to the streets to protest their nominations. Men who cared about women would have joined them. Congressional switchboards and email inboxes would have been flooded with constituents voicing their disgust.
But now, it seems like we’re pretending that this is normal, and it’s always been normal. It isn’t, and it hasn’t.""
Donald Trump’s New Old Boys’ Club - The Daily Beast
Russia and the U.S. Election: What We Know and Don’t Know - The New York Times
"Why does the C.I.A. think Russia wanted to help Mr. Trump?
• The C.I.A.’s assessment is not public, but is thought to turn on another alleged hack. Russia also hacked data from the Republican National Committee but declined to release whatever it found, intelligence agencies told Congress. That has given credence to theories that Moscow actively favored the party’s candidate.
• Mr. Trump has repeatedly promised to realign the United States with Russia and has praised its president, Vladimir V. Putin. Many in Moscow view Mrs. Clinton as hostile to Russia.
• The evidence in any assessment of Russian government motives is circumstantial, and not all American intelligence agencies share the C.I.A.’s view.
• The timing suggests that, if Moscow decided to help Mr. Trump, it did so only after hacking the servers of both parties’ national committees. Both were infiltrated well before Mr. Trump’s rise.
• Mr. Trump, at a July news conference, publicly urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton’s emails. But this could not have precipitated or encouraged the Russian hacks — they had taken place months earlier.
Did Russia spread pro-Trump fake news?
• Russian state media outlets have favored Mr. Trump and opposed Mrs. Clinton, but their reach in the United States is limited. (Their influence in Europe is much stronger.)
• A firm called PropOrNot claimed that the Russian government had flooded American social media with fake election news. But several independent analysts challenged the report’s methodology, which classified mainstream sites as Russian propaganda and did not demonstrate a link to Moscow.
• Fake news is a growing problem, at times driven by companies in Eastern Europe that write and spread the articles. But those companies appear to be motivated by profit-seeking rather than any political agenda.
What was Russia’s goal in meddling?
• There are two schools of thought: first, that Russia sought to weaken the United States by stirring up uncertainty and miring Mrs. Clinton, who seemed all but certain to win, in scandal; and second, that Russia sought specifically to elevate Mr. Trump to the presidency.
• Those theories are not mutually exclusive. For instance, Moscow may have started with the first goal and then added the second as a hoped-for bonus.
• Russia is waging similar campaigns across Europe, at times through cyberattacks and selective leaks, with the apparent goal of undermining Western unity.
• The Kremlin sees itself as under siege by a hostile West that it perceives as bent on Russia’s destruction. Russian military leaders advocate shadowy “new generation warfare” — through propaganda and cyberattacks, for example — to destabilize adversaries from within.
• Not all misconceptions are directed by Moscow, however. Social media rumors that overstate Russia’s involvement in the United States election risk playing into Moscow’s goal of undermining Americans’ faith in the legitimacy and integrity of their democracy.
Russia and the U.S. Election: What We Know and Don’t Know - The New York Times
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Unarmed 73-year-old man killed by police in Bakersfield, California | US news | The Guardian
"A Bakersfield police officer shot and killed an unarmed 73-year-old man on Monday. Family members said Francisco Serna was suffering from dementia and was shot nine times as he took a walk outside his home in the early hours of the morning.
Bakersfield lies in Kern County, California, where a Guardian investigation last year revealed that law enforcement officers killed more people per capita than any other county in the US. The Bakersfield police department and the Kern County sheriff’s department are the two largest law enforcement agencies in the county."
Unarmed 73-year-old man killed by police in Bakersfield, California | US news | The Guardian
Alexander Hamilton explains the Electoral College: A way of opposing “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” - Salon.com
"It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention. They have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment. And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors. Thus without corrupting the body of the people, the immediate agents in the election will at least enter upon the task free from any sinister bias. Their transient existence, and their detached situation, already taken notice of, afford a satisfactory prospect of their continuing so, to the conclusion of it. The business of corruption, when it is to embrace so considerable a number of men, requires time as well as means. Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives, which though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty."
Alexander Hamilton explains the Electoral College: A way of opposing “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” - Salon.com
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention. They have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment. And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors. Thus without corrupting the body of the people, the immediate agents in the election will at least enter upon the task free from any sinister bias. Their transient existence, and their detached situation, already taken notice of, afford a satisfactory prospect of their continuing so, to the conclusion of it. The business of corruption, when it is to embrace so considerable a number of men, requires time as well as means. Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives, which though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty."
Alexander Hamilton explains the Electoral College: A way of opposing “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” - Salon.com
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