tagged w/ Hardcore Reality
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An irate off-duty cop went wild and attacked a traffic agent for giving his girlfriend a ticket, but police decided it wasn't a felony - and ended up handcuffing the agent.
"If the NYPD doesn't show respect to us, what will happen with regular civilians?" said Traffic Agent Eric Celemi.
Celemi, 29, says Officer Eladro Mata beat him bloody last month after he ticketed the double-parked car in the Bronx.
Mata has been stripped of his badge and gun, but not charged with a felony, despite a law signed last month by Gov. Paterson that makes assaulting a traffic cop a crime punishable by up to seven years in prison.Shocked and bleeding from the ear, Celemi was jeered by the crowd as an NYPD lieutenant ordered him cuffed.
"I had been writing tickets and people standing on the street were applauding when I got arrested," Celemi said.
NY DAILY NEWSAn irate off-duty cop went wild and attacked a traffic agent for giving his girlfriend... more
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Immigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason
The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.
The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.
"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.
Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.
Source: Washington PostImmigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason
The U.S. government has injected hundreds... more
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Hundreds of Marines were conducting a combat training mission in the Mojave Desert when an air patrol spotted something kicking up dust: A civilian pickup truck speeding across the barren landscape.
Behind the wheel was a suspected scrap metal thief who had been combing the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center for spent brass shell casings. His intrusion onto the base was the 12th time in six months that scavengers had inadvertently halted combat exercises.
Bombing ranges have become prime hunting grounds for so-called "scrappers," who are motivated by soaring commodity prices to take greater risks in their quest for brass, copper and aluminum. The scavenging causes headaches for the military, which cannot patrol every inch of the remote bases where spent ammunition, shrapnel and unexploded ordnance are easy to find.
During a recent patrol at the base, Marines hunted for scrappers in gullies, desert washes and mountain crevices where some thieves had previously hid from helicopters under camouflage netting.
"We've seen all types," Sgt. Timothy Warren said as he scanned the mountains with binoculars, looking for scavengers. "We've even arrested one guy, sent him to jail and then arrested him again a few days before he's even gone to court."
Hundreds of Marines were conducting a combat training mission in the Mojave Desert... more
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Little about the history of the Rocky Flats nuclear trigger plant engenders the trust of Coloradans.
From its secretive Cold War era roots, to suppressed reports about contamination, to a stifled grand jury investigating environmental crimes, there remains a lingering suspicion that we still don't know everything about the former plant.
The U.S. Department of Energy's recently announced plans to digitally copy — then destroy — 500 boxes of records pertaining to the plant will only make matters worse.
The department was painted as a major villain in a class action lawsuit over off-site plutonium contamination from the plant, 16 miles northwest of Denver. Lawyers for the owners of 12,000 properties near the plant, who won a nearly $554 million judgment in 2006, attacked the DOE with allegations the department improperly designated information as classified in order to keep misdeeds and mistakes secret.
That's not the only instance where the public has been left to wonder about what really went on at Rocky Flats.
The nuclear trigger factory may be gone, but its legacy will linger for a long time — and it's important that citizens know as much as possible about its history.
Little about the history of the Rocky Flats nuclear trigger plant engenders the trust... more
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The mother of a girl seriously hurt in an explosion suspected to have been caused by a gang of teenage girls has said that her daughter thought that the home-made explosive was a stink bomb.
Police believe the girls, aged 16 and 17, might have used the internet to make a bomb that killed a neighbour and left Charlotte Anderson, 17, in hospital with serious burns after the blast had destroyed her flat.
Charlotte had found a purple liquid poured through her letterbox. Officers believe she was the target of the attack after a dispute, possibly over a boy.
Family members and her boyfriend were at her bedside last night in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
Charlotte’s mother, Elaine Leonard, said: “She was on the phone to police in the morning. She didn’t know what the purple liquid was - she thought it was a stink bomb - so she just kept spraying perfume on it throughout the day to get rid of the smell.
"She was on the phone to a friend in the evening and the next thing she knows there is a massive explosion.
"She’s terrified – we’re all terrified.
"The explosion wasn’t over some boy – it had nothing to do with boys.
The mother of a girl seriously hurt in an explosion suspected to have been caused by a... more
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As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care Often Pay a Heavy Cost
Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.
During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" -- even though it had no medical information in it.
Three months later, at 2 in the morning on June 27, 2006, the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had any medical problems.
When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call request. The guard went on a lunch break.
The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then it was too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him.
He soon died.
His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was 34.
The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.
As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care... more
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Dave Fusselman figures he has seen a lot of different items come through his family's third-generation scrap metal business in Moberly, Mo. But an attempted sale last fall broke new ground.
During separate trips, two men tried to sell Fusselman increasingly large amounts of small, copper caps they said came from a derailed train's cargo. On the third try, Fusselman got suspicious and eventually called police.
The copper turned out to be bullet casings from a munitions factory where the two men worked -- enough for 1.5 million rounds of ammunition. One of the men now faces a sentence as severe as 245 years in prison for military-related theft during wartime.
Such incidents have become increasingly common now that the metal is selling at record high prices, driven by worldwide booms in electronics and construction. Thieves from the professional to the bumbling are scaling cellphone towers, ripping off baseball field lights, looting construction sites, tearing out potentially lethal live wires, removing huge spools from utility company grounds, hauling off massive sculptures in the middle of the night and even stealing gravestone plaques.
Dave Fusselman figures he has seen a lot of different items come through his... more
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At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD's highest-ranking uniformed black officer out of his auto while the three-star chief was off-duty and parked in Queens, the Daily News has learned.
"How you can not know or recognize a chief in a department SUV with ID around his neck, I don't know," a police source said.
One officer walked up on each side of the SUV at 57th Ave. and Xenia St. in Corona about 7 p.m. and told the driver to roll down the heavily tinted windows, sources said.
What happened next is in dispute.
In his briefing to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Zeigler said the two cops, who are white, had no legitimate reason to approach his SUV, ranking sources said.
After they ordered him to get out, one officer did not believe the NYPD identification Zeigler gave him.
The cops gave a different account:
At least one cop has been disciplined for ordering the NYPD's highest-ranking... more
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"American Airlines Flight 48 had just taken off from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport at the start of a nine-hour overnight flight to Paris on April 20 when flight attendants heard an alarming noise from the bottom of the plane. According to one source, the sound was of "vibrating, shaking, even some ripping."
Alerted to the noise by flight attendants, the trio of pilots in the cockpit — two of them Miami-based — considered their options. One pilot got on a phone line to the dispatch center at American's headquarters in Dallas and then to the maintenance center in Tulsa.
Though the plane was still a relatively short distance from takeoff, the pilots, with the support of ground technicians, elected to continue the flight.
After the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris, the flight's crew and French airport officials quickly gathered under the airplane to see a frightening scene of exposed machinery and dangling paneling. Some took pictures.
Although the company has made no announcements about the incident, scuttlebutt flew among American Airlines personnel.
"American Airlines Flight 48 had just taken off from Dallas/Fort Worth... more
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The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended yesterday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement.
The facility, located in an industrial park near Dover Air Force Base, has cremated about 200 service members, manager David A. Bose estimated last night. It uses separate crematories a few feet apart to cremate humans and animals, he added, insisting that there had "not been any people gone through the pet crematory."
The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of American service... more
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The US economy has been generating strong economic growth over the past few years as it has come out of recession.
After growing at more than 3% a year in 2004 and 2005, the pace picked up to a blistering 5.6% annual rate in the first quarter of this year - although the pace has since then slipped back to 2.9%.
So far, though, little of that growth has translated into the hands of the average worker, according to new research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
For real household incomes, the median point - the level at which half of households earn more and half less - has actually fallen over the past five years.
That marks a notable contrast with the 1990s, when the economic boom boosted both jobs and incomes.
The US economy has been generating strong economic growth over the past few years as... more
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