Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African American to lead the nation’s justice system, has announced his resignation—giving a promise to stay on until a successor is found. (He’d kind of hinted this all might happen at some point this year.) Holder’s US Department of Justice has notably taken on the nation’s myriad police agencies over civil rights violations—including Portland’s—bringing lawsuits and negotiating reforms quite often enforced at the hands of federal courts. He attempted to examine racial disparities in incarceration rates. He also tried and failed to have prominent Al-Qaida terror suspects tried in federal court.
It’s not your imagination. A new FBI report confirms that gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach every time you see one of them on the news: Mass shootings in America have risen dramatically over the past decade, with most attacks happening in schools and places of business.
The black Walmart shopper killed by police in Ohio while walking around, talking on his cell phone, and carrying a toy rifle was seen strolling by several customers and not pointing the plastic gun at any of them, according to recently released store surveillance video. That counters 911 chatter that he was. No officer will be charged in the death of John Crawford III.
The California highway patrolman who beat a homeless woman on the side of the road—punching her in the face again and again and again while straddling her—has agreed to resign as part of a rapidly negotiated $1.5 million legal settlement with his victim.
An apology has finally emerged from the chief of police in Ferguson, Missouri, over the August shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown and its aftermath. Unclear if this was mentioned: Despite rules saying all officers who use force must, nearly immediately afterward, fill out a special explanatory report, Officer Darren Wilson never bothered to fill one out.
The Ebola quarantine in Sierra Leone now applies to a staggering 1 million people, or a third of the country’s population. It may not work, when it comes to containing the disease. It may cause mass starvation.
Airstrikes against the Islamic State have increasingly been used against the group’s oil infrastructure—its primary means of funding a formidable army spread over land seized from Iraq and Syria and the proto-Islamist state used to keep a subdued population either happy or in line. A side mission in the Syria bombing, by the way, has killed the leader of another maybe pretty powerful Al-Qaida offshoot, the Khorasan Group.
Why stop at NATO? Ukraine’s president says he wants to get even closer to the European Union. As in, like, becoming a member. But as threats go—he’s clearly provoking the Russians slowly gobbling his country’s eastern fringes—it rings hollow. Because no one in their right mind would willingly adopt the Euro.
Russian citizens are feeling mighty prideful, these days, over their homeland’s Tsarist adventuring. Businesses, on the other hand, are crapping their pants at a return to the crippling isolation of Cold War-style geopolitics.
Good news, poor people! (Which, more and more, is everybody!) Subprime lenders don’t need “repo men” anymore, to hassle you when you miss a car payment. Because these days, the car you rely on to get to your two underpaying jobs while somehow managing a household full of school-age children probably has a remotely activated kill switch. They’ll just turn it off!
She’s a figurehead. But she’s still the queen. And now Britain’s prime minister has to apologize for a wee bit of innuendo in which he accused the queen of “purring” over the failed Scottish independence referendum.
NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS MODERN.