Amerika na ivici propasti?

[Meho Krljic]

After 150 years, the American productivity miracle is over 

[Meho Krljic]

Da li će ih ovo dovesti do propasti ili ne, ne znamo, tek Amerikanci će na novčanicu od dvadeset dolara da stave lik Harriet Tubman, žene rođene u ropstvu koja je kasnije radila na oslobađanju stotina robova. Tumbanova će na aversu novčanice zameniti predsednika Endrua Džeksona koji je, naravno, sam bio robovlasnik.

[Truman]

Svaka čast...

[Meho Krljic]

Evo odmah i jednog mišljenja zašto je to loše:


Dishonoring General Jackson 

In Samuel Eliot Morison's "The Oxford History of the American People," there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman.

"An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom."

Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War — Andrew Jackson.

Slashed by a British officer in the Revolution, and a POW at 14, the orphaned Jackson went west, rose to head up the Tennessee militia, crushed an Indian uprising at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, in the War of 1812, then was ordered to New Orleans to defend the threatened city.

In one of the greatest victories in American history, memorialized in song, Jackson routed a British army and aborted a British scheme to seize New Orleans, close the Mississippi, and split the Union.

In 1818, ordered to clean out renegade Indians rampaging in Georgia, Jackson stormed into Florida, seized and hanged two British agitators, put the Spanish governor on a boat to Cuba, and claimed Florida for the USA.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams closed the deal. Florida was ours, and Jacksonville is among its great cities.

Though he ran first in popular and electoral votes in 1824, Jackson was denied the presidency by the "corrupt bargain" of Adams and Henry Clay, who got secretary of state.

Jackson came back to win the presidency in 1828, recognized the Texas republic of his old subaltern Sam Houston, who had torn it from Mexico, and saw his vice president elected after his two terms.

He ended his life at his beloved Hermitage, pushing for the annexation of Texas and nomination of "dark horse" James K. Polk, who would seize the Southwest and California from Mexico and almost double the size of the Union.

Was Jackson responsible for the Cherokees' "Trail of Tears"?

Yes. And Harry Truman did Hiroshima, and Winston Churchill did Dresden.

Great men are rarely good men, and Jackson was a Scots-Irish duelist, Indian fighter and slave owner. But then, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were slave owners before him.

To remove his portrait from the front of the $20 bill, and replace it with Tubman's, is affirmative action that approaches the absurd.

Whatever one's admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.

Indeed, if the fight against slavery is the greatest cause in our history, why not honor John Brown, hanged for his raid on Harper's Ferry to start a revolution to free the slaves, after he butchered slave owners in "Bleeding Kansas"? John Brown was the real deal.

But replacing Jackson with Tubman is not the only change coming.

The back of the $5 bill will soon feature Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and opera singer Marian Anderson, who performed at the Lincoln Memorial after being kept out of segregated Constitution Hall in 1939.

That act of race discrimination came during the second term of FDR, Eleanor's husband and the liberal icon who named Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court and put 110,000 Japanese into concentration camps.

And, lest we forget, while Abraham Lincoln remains on the front of the $5 bill, the war he launched cost 620,000 dead, and his beliefs in white supremacy and racial separatism were closer to those of David Duke than Dr. King.

   
Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the American economy, will stay on the $10 bill, due in part to the intervention of hip-hop artists from the popular musical, "Hamilton," in New York.

But Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth, who fought for women's suffrage, will be put on the back of the $10. While Anthony and Stanton appear in Morison's history, Sojourner Truth does not.

Added up, while dishonoring Andrew Jackson, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is putting on the U.S. currency six women — three white, three African-American — and King.

No Catholics, no conservatives, no Hispanics, no white males were apparently even considered.

This is affirmative action raised to fanaticism, a celebration of President Obama's views and values, and a recasting of our currency to make Obama's constituents happy at the expense of America's greatest heroes and historic truth. Leftist role models for American kids now take precedence over the history of our Republic in those we honor.

While King already has a holiday and monument in D.C., were the achievements of any of these six women remotely comparable to what the six men honored on our currency — Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, President Grant and Ben Franklin — achieved?

Whatever may be said for Eleanor Roosevelt, compared to her husband, she is an inconsequential figure in American history.

In the dystopian novel, "1984," Winston Smith labors in the Ministry of Truth, dropping down the "memory hole" stories that must be rewritten to re-indoctrinate the party and proles in the new history, as determined by Big Brother. Jack Lew would have fit right in there.

[Meho Krljic]

A, ko o čemu, Amerikanci o klozetima:



Tens of thousands of people are calling for a Target boycott 

More than 182,000 people have signed a pledge to boycott Target after the retailer said it would welcome transgender customers to use any bathroom or fitting room that matches their gender identity.
The boycott pledge was started by the conservative American Family Association (AFA).
"Target's policy is exactly how sexual predators get access to their victims," AFA President Tim Wildmon said in an open letter. "This means a man can simply say he 'feels like a woman today' and enter the women's restroom ... even if young girls or women are already in there."
Wildmon urged people to sign the boycott pledge, claiming the policy "poses a danger to wives and daughters." He also urged people to complain about the policy on Target's Facebook page.
He suggested that Target should install separate unisex bathrooms instead of giving all genders access to facilities designated for women or men.
Target clarified its position on transgender bathrooms in a statement on Tuesday.
"We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity," the retailer said in the statement. "Everyone deserves to feel like they belong. And you'll always be accepted, respected and welcomed at Target."
Target's statement included a redesigned version of its signature bull's-eye logo to include a rainbow.

The move won Target a lot of praise on social media.
"You have, again, shown that your stores are inclusive and meant to be a safe haven, and I intend to repay your loyalty with my own," one customer wrote on Target's Facebook page.
Another customer wrote, "I want to tell you that I will forever be a Target shopper." A third said, "Thank you for always being a place I have felt welcomed."
Not all the feedback was positive, however.
"I am appalled by your decision," wrote one customer. "Shame on you."
Dozens said they would never shop at Target again as a result of the policy.
"Shame on Target," one critic wrote. "Restrooms have placards depicting gender on them for a reason. I will not step foot in another Target."
Target is following in the footsteps of Kroger, which also recently clarified its policy on gender-specific bathrooms.
A Kroger in Athens, Georgia, posted a sign on its bathroom door saying: "We have a UNISEX bathroom because sometimes gender specific toilets put others into uncomfortable situations."
A customer snapped a photo of the sign and posted it to Facebook, where the post went viral.
Companies are starting to weigh in on transgender issues after the governor of North Carolina signed a bill in late March forcing people to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex listed on their birth certificate.
In Minnesota, where Target is headquartered, a Republican state senator proposed a bill that would limit access to restrooms and dressing rooms based on individuals' "biological sex."

[Meho Krljic]

US suicide rate surges, particularly among white people

The suicide rate in the US has surged to its highest level in almost three decades, according to a new report.
The increase is particularly pronounced among middle-age white people who now account for a third of all US suicides.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report did not offer an explanation for the steep rise.
However, other experts have pointed to increased abuse of prescription opiates and the financial downturn that began in 2008 as likely factors.
The report did not break down the suicides by education level or income, but previous studies found rising suicide rates among white people without university degrees.
"This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health," Robert D Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, told the New York Times.
CDC reported on Friday that suicides have increased in the US to a rate of 13 per 100,000 people, the highest since 1986.
Meanwhile, homicides and deaths from ailments like cancer and heart disease have declined.
In the past, suicides have been most common among white people, but the recent increases have been sharp.   Image copyright CDC  The overall suicide rate rose by 24% from 1999 to 2014, according to the CDC. However, the rate increased 43% among white men ages 45 to 64 and 63% for women in the same age-range.
In 2014, more than 14,000 middle-aged white people killed themselves.
That figure is double the combined suicides total for all blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and Alaska Natives.
The suicide rate declined for only two groups: black men and all people over 75.

[eddie coyle]

 


http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2232-my-son-died-at-sandy-hook-conspiracy-nuts-think-im-lying.html

[Meho Krljic]

One Alabama town just took anti-transgender bathroom laws to a new level

[Meho Krljic]

 A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows 

In an apparent rejection of the basic principles of the U.S. economy, a new poll shows that most young people do not support capitalism.
The Harvard University survey, which polled young adults between ages 18 and 29, found that 51 percent of respondents do not support capitalism. Just 42 percent said they support it.
It isn't clear that the young people in the poll would prefer some alternative system, though. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. The survey had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
The results of the survey are difficult to interpret, pollsters noted. Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.
All the same, that a majority of respondents in Harvard University's survey of young adults said they do not support capitalism suggests that today's youngest voters are more focused on the flaws of free markets.
"The word 'capitalism' doesn't mean what it used to," said Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the poll, which was published Monday. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still hasn't completely recovered.
[Bernie Sanders is profoundly changing how millennials think about politics]
A subsequent survey that included people of all ages found that somewhat older Americans also are skeptical of capitalism. Only among respondents at least 50 years old was the majority in support of capitalism.
Although the results are startling, Harvard's questions accord with other recent research on how Americans think about capitalism and socialism. In 2011, for example, the Pew Research Center found that people ages 18 to 29 were frustrated with the free-market system.
In that survey, 46 percent had positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent had negative views — a broader question than what Harvard's pollsters asked, which was whether the respondent supported the system. With regard to socialism, by contrast, 49 percent of the young people in Pew's poll had positive views, and just 43 percent had negative views.
Lustbader, 22, said the darkening mood on capitalism is evident in the way politicians talk about the economy. When Republicans — long the champions of free enterprise — use the word "capitalism" these days, it's often to complain about "crony capitalism," he said.
"You don't hear people on the right defending their economic policies using that word anymore," Lustbader added.
It is an open question whether young people's attitudes on socialism and capitalism show that they are rejecting free markets as a matter of principle or whether those views are simply an expression of broader frustrations with an economy in which household incomes have been declining for 15 years.
On specific questions about how best to organize the economy, for example, young people's views seem conflicted. Just 27 percent believe government should play a large role in regulating the economy, the Harvard poll found, and just 30 percent think the government should play a large role in reducing income inequality. Only 26 percent said government spending is an effective way to increase economic growth
Yet 48 percent agreed that "basic health insurance is a right for all people." And 47 percent agreed with the statement that "Basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that the government should provide to those unable to afford them."


"Young people could be saying that there are problems with capitalism, contradictions," Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, said when asked about the new data. "I certainly don't know what's going through their heads."
John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard, went on to personally interview a small group of young people about their attitudes toward capitalism to try to learn more. They told him that capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.
"They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting."
  The millennial generation is now the largest, most ethnically diverse generation in American history.   

i

Half Of Americans Think Presidential Nominating System 'Rigged' - Poll 

More than half of American voters believe that the system U.S. political parties use to pick their candidates for the White House is "rigged" and more than two-thirds want to see the process changed, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The results echo complaints from Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders that the system is stacked against them in favor of candidates with close ties to their parties – a critique that has triggered a nationwide debate over whether the process is fair.
The United States is one of just a handful of countries that gives regular voters any say in who should make it onto the presidential ballot. But the state-by-state system of primaries, caucuses and conventions is complex. The contests historically were always party events, and while the popular vote has grown in influence since the mid-20th century, the parties still have considerable sway.
One quirk of the U.S. system - and the area where the parties get to flex their muscle - is the use of delegates, party members who are assigned to support contenders at their respective conventions, usually based on voting results. The parties decide how delegates are awarded in each state, with the Republicans and Democrats having different rules.
The delegates' personal opinions can come into play at the party conventions if the race is too close to call - an issue that has become a lightning rod in the current political season.
Another complication is that state governments have different rules about whether voters must be registered as party members to participate. In some states, parties further restrict delegate selection to small committees of party elites, as the Republican Party in Colorado did this year.
'SO FLAWED'
"I'd prefer to see a one-man-one-vote system," said Royce Young, 76, a resident of Society Hill, South Carolina, who supports Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. "The process is so flawed."
Trump has repeatedly railed against the rules, at times calling them undemocratic. After the Colorado Republican Party awarded all its delegates to Ted Cruz, for example, Trump lashed out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, charging "the system is being rigged by party operatives with 'double-agent' delegates who reject the decision of voters."
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has dismissed Trump's complaints as "rhetoric" and said the rules would not be changed before the Republican convention in July.
Trump swept the five Northeastern nominating contests on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The New York billionaire has 950 delegates to 560 for Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, and 153 for Kasich, the Ohio governor, according to the Associated Press. A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to secure the Republican nomination.
On the Democratic side, Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, has taken issue with the party's use of superdelegates, the hundreds of elite party members who can support whomever they like at the convention and who this year overwhelmingly back front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has repeatedly emphasized that she is beating Sanders in both total votes cast and in pledged delegates, those who are bound by the voting results - rendering his complaints about superdelegates moot.
On Tuesday, the former secretary of state won Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut, while Sanders won in Rhode Island. Clinton leads Sanders by 2,141 delegates to 1,321, according to the AP, with 2,383 needed to win the nomination.
Sanders has also criticized party bosses for not holding enough prime-time television debates and said before a string of primaries open only to registered Democrats this month that "independents have lost their right to vote," referring to a voter block that has tended to favor him.
A Democratic National Committee official was not immediately available to comment.
'ARCANE RULES'
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said the U.S. presidential nominating system could probably be improved in a number of areas, but noted that the control wielded by party leadership usually became an issue only during tight races.
"The popular vote overwhelms the rules usually, but in these close elections, everyone pays attention to these arcane rules," he said.
Some 51 percent of likely voters who responded to the April 21-26 online survey said they believed the primary system was "rigged" against some candidates. Some 71 percent of respondents said they would prefer to pick their party's nominee with a direct vote, cutting out the use of delegates as intermediaries.
The results also showed 27 percent of likely voters did not understand how the primary process works and 44 percent did not understand why delegates were involved in the first place. The responses were about the same for Republicans and Democrats.
Overall, nearly half said they would also prefer a single primary day in which all states held their nominating contests together - as opposed to the current system of spreading them out for months.
The poll included 1,582 Americans and had a credibility interval of 2.9 percentage points.

[Dybuk]

Hej, ovako mogu i ja!!!

Kao Delboj: Nastavnik francuskog koji zna da kaže samo "Bonžur"

Jedan profesor francuskog u srednjoj školi u Teksasu trebalo bi da bude otpušten, jer je nedavno otkriveno da je jedino što zna da kaže na tom jeziku – "Bonžur" (Dobar dan).
Albert Mojer "predaje" francuski pet meseci, ali njegovi đaci tvrde da on na tom jeziku ne zna da kaže ništa više od pozdrava.

Čovek pored kog bi i Delboj iz kultne serije "Mućke" izgledao kao vrhunski poznavalac francuskog čak ne razume pitanja svojih đaka i posavetovao ih je da sve odgovore traže na Guglu.

Roditelji su obavešteni o ovom slučaju kada je lokalna televizijska stanica pokrenula istragu i okrivila direktora škole za ovaj propust.

[Meho Krljic]

Medical Errors Are No. 3 Cause Of U.S Deaths, Researchers Say

A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third leading cause of death in the United States — and highlights how shortcomings in tracking vital statistics may hinder research and keep the problem out of the public eye.
The authors, led by Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Martin Makary, call for changes in death certificates to better tabulate fatal lapses in care. In an open letter, they urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to immediately add medical errors to its annual list reporting the top causes of death.
Based on an analysis of prior research, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC's official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths.
Medical mistakes that can lead to death range from surgical complications that go unrecognized to mix-ups with the doses or types of medications patients receive.
But no one knows the exact toll taken by medical errors. In significant part, that's because the coding system used by CDC to record death certificate data doesn't capture things like communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors and poor judgment that cost lives, the study says.
"You have this overappreciation and overestimate of things like cardiovascular disease, and a vast underrecognition of the place of medical care as the cause of death," Makary said in an interview. "That informs all our national health priorities and our research grants."
The analysis was published Tuesday in The BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.
Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch for the CDC, disputed that the agency's coding is the problem. He said complications from medical care are listed on death certificates and that codes do capture them.
The CDC's published mortality statistics, however, count only the "underlying cause of death," defined as the condition that led a person to seek treatment. As a result, even if a doctor does list medical errors on a death certificate, they aren't included in the published totals. Only the underlying condition, such as heart disease or cancer, is counted, even when it isn't fatal.
Anderson said the CDC's approach is consistent with international guidelines, allowing U.S. death statistics to be compared with those of other countries. As such, it would be difficult to change "unless we had a really compelling reason to do so," Anderson said.
The Johns Hopkins authors said the inability to capture the full impact of medical errors results in a lack of public attention and a failure to invest in research. They called for adding a new question to death certificates specifically asking if a preventable complication of care contributed.
"While no method of investigating and documenting preventable harm is perfect," the authors write, "some form of data collection of death due to medical error is needed to address the problem."
Anderson, however, said it's an "uncomfortable situation" for a doctor to report that a patient died from a medical error. Adding a check box to the death certificate won't solve that problem, he said, and a better strategy is to educate doctors about the importance of reporting errors.
"This is a public health issue, and they need to report it for the sake of public health," he said.
Dr. Tejal Gandhi, president of the National Patient Safety Foundation, said her organization refers to patient harm as the third leading cause of death. Better tracking would improve funding and public recognition of the problem, she said.
"If you ask the public about patient safety most people don't really know about it," she said. "If you ask them the top causes of death, most people wouldn't say 'preventable harm.' "
Dr. Eric Thomas, a professor of medicine at the University of Texas Houston Medical School whose research was cited in the Institute of Medicine's landmark To Err is Human report, said existing estimates aren't precise enough to support immediately listing errors as the third leading cause of death.
But collecting better cause-of-death data is a good idea, said Thomas, who agreed that medical errors are underreported.
"If we can clarify for the public and lawmakers how big a problem these errors are," he said, "you would hope it would lead to more resources toward patient safety."

[Aco Popara Zver]

Не желим ни да мислим колико је на Балкану...

[Son of Man]

Pogađate za koga već mesec i kusur dana lobiram po fejsu?

[Meho Krljic]

Ovo ko iz vica, ali se izgleda stvarno dogodilo. Amerika...



American Airlines Passenger Sees Math, Assumes Terrorism

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — An Ivy League professor said his flight was delayed because a fellow passenger thought the math equations he was writing might be a sign he was a terrorist.
American Airlines confirms that the woman expressed suspicions about University of Pennsylvania economics professor Guido Menzio. She said she was too ill to take the Air Wisconsin-operated flight.

Menzio said he was flying from Philadelphia to Syracuse on Thursday night and was solving a differential equation related to a speech he was set to give at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. He said the woman sitting next to him passed a note to a flight attendant and the plane headed back to the gate. Menzio, who is Italian and has curly, dark hair, said the pilot then asked for a word and he was questioned by an official.
"I thought they were trying to get clues about her illness," he told The Associated Press in an email. "Instead, they tell me that the woman was concerned that I was a terrorist because I was writing strage things on a pad of paper."
Menzio said he explained what he had been doing and the flight took off soon afterward. He was treated respectfully throughout, he added. But, he said, he was concerned about a delay that a brief conversation or an Internet search could have resolved.
"Not seeking additional information after reports of 'suspicious activity' ... is going to create a lot of problems, especially as xenophobic attitudes may be emerging," he said.
American spokesman Casey Norton said the Air Wisconsin crew followed protocol to take care of an ill passenger and then to investigate her allegations. Norton wouldn't specify the details of the allegations, but said officials determined them to be non-credible. The woman was rebooked on a later flight.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Meho Krljic]

A baš kad smo pomislili da američki zatvori ne mogu da budu još više dehumanizujući, oni smisle da posete više ne treba da se odvijaju u meatspaceu i umesto toga kreiraju skup i nepouzdan sistem video-četinga. 



The End of Prison Visitation

A new system called "video visitation" is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It's inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence — but god, it makes money.
Losing connection The only way Lauren Johnson could see Ashika Renae Coleman at the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle, Texas, was via video conference from seven miles away in Austin.
Coleman and Johnson had met in 2012 in a rehabilitation program that tries to build trust and community among incarcerated women through theater. Both had been to prison for drug-related offenses.
Johnson got out in 2011. She became an activist helping former convicts like herself re-enter society. Coleman had similarly altruistic ambitions when she was released, and planned to create a sober house for the formerly incarcerated. But after returning to a husband still suffering from addiction, she relapsed and ended up back in Travis County jail on another drug-possession charge.
Johnson logged into the Securus Technologies website — a Skype-like communication system used by the Travis County jail — on her PC laptop. But the video player didn't have the latest version of Java. When Johnson installed it, the system insisted she had not. So Johnson tried another laptop — a MacBook this time. Java was working this time, Flash was not.
Thinking the browser might be the problem, Johnson tried launching the video player in Chrome, then switched to Safari before giving up and using the Securus Android app on her phone.
Finally, Coleman's face appeared on screen — barely. For the entire call, a glitch in the system caused Coleman's image to look like a tangle of window blinds. Johnson wanted to talk to Coleman about her case, but through most of the call, she simply repeated, "Hello — can you hear me now?" Johnson was charged $10 for the video visit, even after cutting it a few minutes short of the 20-minute maximum.


All the while, Coleman waited alone in jail at a computer terminal. She had no other option. To see anyone but a prison guard, the only way was through a video feed.
Travis County ended all in-person visitations in May 2013, leaving video visitation as the exclusive method for people on the outside to communicate with the incarcerated. But Travis County is only on the leading edge of a new technological trend that threatens to abolish in-person visitation across the country. Over 600 prisons in 46 states have some sort of video visitation system, and every year, more of those facilities do away with in-person visitation.
Anticipating the arrival of friends and family, making eye contact, holding a child's hand — these are the experiences and memories that give someone the resilience they need to make it in prison. A visit can alleviate the suffering that comes cold confinement and the brutality of unpredictable violence that erupts between inmates.


Once people leave prison and return to society, their ability to thrive depends on the support network they left behind when they were incarcerated. In-person visits keep those relationships alive in a way that speaking through a flickering monitor does not.
"It's just too much frustration to come down here, wait for an hour and then only get 25 minutes for a not-so-good call," Coleman said when the connection improved for a moment. "I think the hassle is why people don't visit me as much anymore."
Extorting inmates' families is big business You may have heard of the prison industrial complex, but the companies that provide corrections facilities with their communications technologies are an industrial complex all their own. Three companies dominate the prison comms business: Securus, Telmate and Global Tel Link, also called GTL — the Verizon, AT&T and Sprint of jails.
Long before video visitation existed, prison phone calls were the bread and butter of these companies. With exclusive contracts protecting them from competition, the trio of prison telecom giants ratcheted up the prices until a single phone call could cost upward of $14 a minute.


For the families of the 2.3 million incarcerated Americans nationwide, crippling costs are part and parcel of supporting a loved one in jail. A sweeping survey of families by the Ella Baker Center showed that more than 1 in 3 families goes into debt just to cover the costs of keeping in touch with their loved one. Of everyone pouring money into those systems, 87% are women.
These fees are the linchpin in an elaborate racket between telecommunications providers, prisons and local governments. The business model for the three major prison telecoms is built around long-term contracts that establish them as the sole provider in a given county or state. In order to win these contracts, the major companies promise each county or state "site commissions" — a euphemism for kickbacks. These deals are lucrative: In Los Angeles County, for example, it brings in a baseline, contractual guarantee of $15 million a year. In some counties, this money trickles back down to the prisons.
After decades of abuse, the Federal Communications Commission voted in October to cap phone rates at 11 cents per minute. GTL and Securus filed suit against the FCC. The telecoms argue the FCC has overstepped its legal authority in imposing the rate cap and that the lost revenue will leave the companies unable to fulfill their contractual obligation to pay the counties. The regulations are on hold while the FCC fights for the price caps to take hold.


If the FCC stops the telecoms from gouging families for phone fees, the next frontier is, well, any other service those companies provide. One of those lucrative new products is prison email, in which families are charged for digital "stamps." The other is video visitation.
The FCC is already looking to regulate other kinds of communication, but it could be months, even years, before it gets around to addressing digital communication. So while the FCC lumbers toward capping phone costs, the prison telecoms can get the same money from innocent families using systems the FCC hasn't gotten around to regulating yet.
"This is a fertile ground for abuse, since the FCC is taking modes of communications one by one, rather than [with] comprehensive, all-at-once policy," Aleks Kajstura, legal director of the Prison Policy Institute, told Mic.


Prisons have their own incentive. Officials across the country, including Brandon Wood of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, argue that visitation is a privilege and not a right — and that visitations are a security risk.
But the true incentive is keeping costs low. Video visitation requires fewer full-time prison staff members, so if the private contractors are willing to run the visitation system themselves, it's a pretty sweet deal for counties. Especially when those contractors are paying their way in.
The case for visitation Jorge Renaud is notorious to prison officials in Texas as a troublemaker — not for his three convictions for burglary and robbery, but as a writer and editor of the Echo, Texas' newspaper by and for the incarcerated. During his 27 years in prison, he wrote about everything from gang wars and AIDS to incarcerated mothers and neglectful guards — anti-establishment writing that embarrassed prison officials.
At the time, he took the prison administration to task for preventing some inmates from having physical contact with visitors, forcing them to see their loved ones through a glass panel instead. He studied philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Michel de Montaigne, reading "the Chicano poets" and writing a 2002 book on navigating prison, Behind the Walls: A Guide for Families and Friends of Texas Prison Inmates.
During Renaud's time behind bars, visits from his wife and daughter served as a lifeline while awaiting parole, which finally came in 2008.
"The incredible anticipation and fulfillment of knowing they care enough to come can be the difference between you comporting with the rules, and being more human and aware and knowing the consequences of your actions and being willing to moderate and understand them," he said.
In 2014, Renaud was arrested for drinking and driving, and because he had violated the conditions of his parole, he ended up in jail once more — perhaps briefly, perhaps for the rest of his life.
But this time, no one could visit him. During the time Renaud was free, Travis County had quietly stopped in-person visitation, replacing it with Securus Technologies' video visitation system. His then-girlfriend Jaynna Sims was managing his affairs on the outside, but he could never meet with her, never look her in the eye, never hold her hand.
There were two options for Renaud and Sims to see each other: Sims could come down to the jail twice a week for a 20-minute video session for free. Or she could stay at home, risk it on her own computer and pay $10 for 20 minutes. Paid video visits were, of course, unlimited.
Sims said she racked up hundreds of dollars in fees a month, and when connection would cut out, she'd call up Securus' customer service to complain. It rarely helped; one time, customer service just hung up on her. (We reached out to both Securus and representatives of Securus-owned companies for comment on this story. Securus never responded.)
Anyone with a smartphone knows the road rage-like frustration of trying to speak through a bad connection. Imagine struggling through an expensive conversation in the midst of a crisis, like an accident or medical emergency; imagine being unable to reach the only people providing you a little bit of normalcy.
"There's an incredible despair and anger at this system, this fucking screen in front of you that wavers in and out," Renaud said.


Renaud spent three months in jail before he pled guilty to a diminished charge of reckless driving. Once he got out, Renaud got in touch with Bob Libal and Kymberlie Quong Charles at Austin's Grassroots Leadership, a leading network of advocates in the fight against prison profiteering. He recounted to them his outrage at the profiteering and exploitation — the hopelessness of fighting with faulty technology in order to reach the people he needed most.
So Libal and Quong Charles told Renaud, the notorious prison scribe, to put pen to paper again, and in a few short months, Renaud churned out the earliest damning report of the effects of video visitation systems on jail populations to marshal the local advocates and legislators to restore in-person visitation to Travis County.
County officials across the country claim video visitation is good for security. When Renaud got ahold of prison records, they showed that incidences of inmate-on-inmate violence, disciplinary infractions and possession of contraband all rose after Travis County did away with in-person visitation. Because visitation is so new, these statistics are the earliest indication that the pro-security pitch for video visitation is all snake oil.
But perhaps the strongest case for visitation is that it keeps people out of jail. Prison recidivism goes way down for those who keep up strong family and community ties throughout their incarcerations.


The past decade in research shows consistently that maintaining the relationships the incarcerated will inevitably return to for support once they're released is a powerful agent in keeping them from repeat offenses. One study of over 16,000 incarcerated people found that any visitation at all, even just once, reduced the risk of recidivism by 13% for felony reconvictions.
After the report came out in October 2014, Renaud worked with Quong Charles and Johnson to push for legislation that would make sure every jail in Texas kept some sort of in-person visitation. Working with Dallas Rep. Eric Johnson, they drafted HB 549 (ftp://ftp.legis.state.tx.us/bills/84R/billtext/html/house_bills/HB00500_HB00599/HB00549F.htm), a bill establishing an inmate's right to a bare minimum of two 20-minute visitations per week. Only two months later, the law was introduced in the Texas House of Representatives.
Texas justice When Sarah Eckhardt walked out of a Travis County commissioners' hearing in October 2012, she was grateful that video visitation was on its way to Travis County. A vote was called to decide whether to introduce video visitation to the Travis County Correctional Complex. Eckhart, a county commissioner at the time, thought that if only she'd had video visitation when her nephew was incarcerated in California, she'd be able to visit him any time from Texas.
During the meeting, Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe asked Darren Long, the major of corrections who led the charge to bring video visitation to the jail, if video would serve as a supplement or a substitute to in-person visitation. Long assured there would be no change in policy. The commissioners court voted in favor of the proposal, at ease that in-person visitation was there to stay.
Two years later, in 2014, Eckhardt got a call from Grassroots Leadership's Libal, who told her Travis County had switched over to video visitation entirely. She told him he most certainly was mistaken.
"Go look at the website," Libal said.
She navigated to the prison's visitation policy, which said that the only way to visit someone in jail was through video conference. The prison had done away with in-person visitation a year prior, and had just finalized a new contract with Securus that wasn't up for negotiation until 2015.
She called Long, reminding him he had promised there'd be no change in policy. "Darren, you said nothing was going to change," Eckhardt recalled saying. "He said, 'Well that's true, nothing did change — we'd already made that policy determination.'" In other words, when commissioners had asked for assurance that in-person visitation would remain, Long omitted the key fact that prison officials had already settled on getting rid of in-person visitation.
A native Texan whose father served as a U.S. congressman for 14 years, Eckhardt had just won a landslide election to take on Biscoe's soon-to-be vacant seat, becoming the first woman to serve as Travis County judge.


"I put it on my agenda that if [in-person visitation] wasn't reinstated while it was off the dais, I would make sure it was reinstated once I was back on," she said in her Austin office.
Eckhardt found an ally in Sally Hernandez, a Travis County constable running for sheriff. At the forefront of Hernandez's political platform was progressive reform to the sheriff's office, with the restoration of in-person visitation as a key issue.
"Just doing only video visitations, to me, is inhumane," Hernandez said. "If you're talking about a plea bargain, or you haven't seen your child, it has an emotional impact. It doesn't help an inmate make wise decisions, or have contact and the support of their family."
Hernandez won the Democratic primary in March, pledging to work with Eckhardt to protect the right to in-person visitation. In Austin's electoral history, the Democratic nominee is the typical shoo-in, so it's likely that come next year, Hernandez will be sheriff of Travis County.
The power and politics to govern these contracts will be in the hands of a county judge and, soon, a sheriff who believe in-person visitation is vital.
The gathering storm HB 549 passed in the Texas House and Senate in May 2015. When Gov. Greg Abbott failed to sign or veto the law within the 20-day window set forth in the Texas Constitution, it became law by default, ensuring that people in hundreds of county jails across the state would be entitled to two, live in-person visitations a week.
But Travis County wasn't going to get in-person visitation back.


At least 22 of Texas' 254 counties fought and won an exemption to the new rules, claiming that they'd already dedicated significant resources to going full-video. Under the exemption, any county that had "incurred significant design, engineering or construction costs" in switching to video-only visitation by Sept. 1 didn't have to keep in-person visitation. But one thing advocates for in-person visitation had failed to do was narrowly define what "significant cost" meant.
This gave counties months to incur costs that could help an exemption. In San Antonio, for example, the county committed $6 million to a new video visitation center despite the protestations of families and activists, and won an exemption. Without a clear definition, any county that spent more than nothing was able to make a case for an exemption.
Travis County was headed for the same fate as San Antonio, until Judge Sarah Eckhardt was tipped off to a caveat. Travis County hadn't incurred any significant costs at all for setting up video visitation. All of the systems had been paid for by Securus Technologies.
On April 19, in-person visitation was restored to Travis County.
HB 549 established an incarcerated person's right to in-person visits in Texas' county jails — at least for now.
But Doug Smith, a policy analyst with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, is worried that upcoming hearings in the state senate could still jeopardize the bill in the future.
"They'll have a hearing, people will be called to the Capitol and given the opportunity to testify, and the committee would issue recommendations based on what they've heard," Smith said over the phone. "Right now, most counties are safe, but I take nothing for granted."
Other states have begun their battle. In California, where 11 counties have either exclusively switched over to video visitation or are well on the way, state senators have begun work on SB 1157, a bill that would prevent county jails and private institutions from doing away with in-person visits.
But this is the beginning of a tech-driven shift in the way the prison telecoms do business, and none of the other 40 states that have introduced some kind of video visitation has anything as comprehensive as Texas' bill. Securus already has its hands in 3,400 corrections facilities in 48 states, and is constantly renegotiating its contracts.
But Jaynna Sims, who'd supported Jorge Renaud while he was hidden for three months behind video visitation, still knows the trauma inflicted by a system she says "never gives you a break," even with the battle behind her.
"People get out eventually, and they're coming back into the community," Sims said. "If we want to make life as miserable as possible and make sure they don't have growth or healing in jail, we can keep doing what we're doing. But if we don't want them to be worse off when they come back, we have to care about how we treat them in prisons and jails."


That trauma is felt anywhere families are trying to rehabilitate their loved ones — not reaching for hands through prison bars, but with faint voices through fading bars of failing reception, struggling to hold on to the connection.
"The opportunity to sit face to face and just have a personal connection is the one reprieve you get in all of this," Sims said. "But once you take away in-person visitation, you don't have that. It's like the system keeps finding ways to victimize people. And how can that, in any way, heal an individual, or a community?"
Coleman, who Johnson only saw through a glitchy screen, took a deal for two years in prison. She hasn't been assigned to a facility yet, but Johnson promised Coleman she'd drive to visit, either an hour and a half away at Linda Woodman State Jail, or three hours to Lucile Plane in Dayton, Texas. Both facilities, for now, still have in-person visitation.
The above video clipswere taken with permission from the upcoming documentary (In)securus Technology: An Assault on Prisoner Rights, directed by Matthew Gossage for Grassroots Leadership.
Correction: May 6, 2016
A previous version of this story misstated the location of Lucile Plane State Jail. That facility is located in Dayton, Texas.

Na linku ima i videa i grafikona pa koga sve to zanima nek klikne.

[Meho Krljic]

Interesantna situacija:

Researcher arrested after reporting pwnage hole in elections site

Dakle, čovek je čačkao vebsajt koji služi za elektronsko glasanje u okrugu Lee na Floridi, našao SQL slabost koja bi omogućila preuzimanje potpune kontrole nad sajtom i to prijavio nadležnima. Nadležni su onda poslali policiju koja ga je uhapsila i protiv njega je podneta optužnica od strane javnog tužioca za delo protiv imovine.

Sa jedne strane, čovek je klasičan "white hat" haker, dakle, haker koji, istina, upada u sisteme neovlašćeno i čačka ih da pronađe sigurnosne propuste ali onda, kada ih pronađe, ne proizvodi štetu već prijavljuje propuste onima koji bi trebalo da ih isprave.

Sa druge strane, de fakto je u pitanju nelegitimno i nelegalno upadanje u sisteme i bez obzira što nije pričinjena šteta, deluje kao da ima rezona da se taj čovek krivično goni - na kraju krajeva samo zato što vam nisam ništa ukrao iz kuće nakon što sam vam obio bravu i isključio alarm i posle vam napisao pismo da vam je brava loša a alarm jadan, ne znači da nisam počinio delo. Da ne govorimo o presedanu - ne kazniš jednog, eto za njim petorice koji možda isto nemaju nameru da načine ikakvu štetu ali možda baš i nisu tako vešti...

Međutim, sa treće strane, ovde se radi o javnom dobru (prezjumabli proizvedenom od poreza) koje je pripadnik te javnosti testirao da vidi da li zaista i bezbedno služi toj javnosti, utvrdio da ne i onda prijavio gde treba. Tužioci imaju zakonom garantovano pravo da ne pokreću tužbe u slučajevima kada je vidljivo da je delo počinjeno u sklopu aktivnosti usmerene ka opštijem dobru pa ovo deluje kao kratkovida odluka distrikt atrnija.

Interesantna situacija.

[Meho Krljic]

San Andreas fault is about to crack – here's what will happen when it does 

The director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, Thomas Jordan, made an announcement recently that would have sent a chill down the spine of every Californian: that the San Andreas fault appears to be in a critical state and as such, could generate a large earthquake imminently.
Of course, the reiteration of the seismic hazard to Californians will be nothing surprising, but what is new is the warning that the southern portion of the fault "looks like it's locked, loaded and ready to go."
Why is this eminent seismologist making these alarming statements? Well, the fact is that there has not been a major release of stresses in the southern portion of the San Andreas fault system since 1857. In simple terms, the San Andreas is one of many fault systems roughly marking the border between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Both plates are moving in an approximately northerly direction, but the Pacific plate is moving faster than its North American counterpart, meaning that stresses between the plates are constantly building up.

In 1906, some of these stresses were catastrophically released in the San Francisco Bay area in a 7.8 magnitude event and again, in northern California, during the 6.9 magnitude 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Events of these magnitudes, however, have not occurred along the San Andreas fault in the south of the state – the 1994 Northridge event was associated with a nearby, but separate, fault system – leading to the suggestion that one is imminent and, given the amount of stress that might actually have accumulated, when it arrives it will be the "Big One."
How big is 'Big'?
So just how big could this potential earthquake be and is it possible that the destruction demonstrated in the film San Andreas could actually come to fruition?
In short, Californians will be (reasonably) pleased with the answers to these questions. In the film, the San Andreas fault produces an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0. While not unheard of globally, earthquakes of this size are generally confined to regions of the earth where subduction – where one tectonic plate is being forced below another – is happening, for example in Chile and Japan. The tectonic situation in California is different. Here, two plates are sliding past each other.
As such, recent predictions limit the possible maximum earthquake magnitude along the San Andreas fault system to 8.0, although with a 7 percent probability estimate that such an event could occur in Southern California in the next 30 years; over the same period, there is a 75 percent chance of a magnitude 7.0 event. While magnitudes of 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0 might sound negligibly different, the energy that such events would unleash varies significantly, with a magnitude 9.0 event releasing 32 times more energy than a magnitude 8.0 and 1,000 times more energy than a magnitude 7.0.
Obviously, however, be it a 7.0 or an 8.0, damage is inevitable, but the whole sequence of events, as depicted in the film, is unlikely. For example, the San Andreas fault is not beneath the ocean and as such, any slippage along it could not displace water to the extent that a tsunami would be generated. The opening up of a massive chasm is also from the land of fantasy, as the plates are sliding relative to each other, not away from each other.
What is realistic, however, is that a great amount of destruction is likely. While the building codes in California are stringent, recommending retrofitting of seismic protection measures to older buildings and preventing the construction of new buildings near to known fault lines, there is no way to make a building 100 percent safe.
Predicting devastation
In an attempt to understand the effects of a large, southern San Andreas earthquake, the United States Geological survey modelled a 7.8 magnitude event, with slippage of 2-7 metres, to represent the stresses that have built up in the area since the last large event.
From this model, it was found that damage would be most severe to constructions straddling the fault. Fortunately, constructions of this sort are few and far between following the 1972 Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act. What would be affected by this slippage, however, are the 966 roads, 90 fibre optic cables, 39 gas pipes and 141 power line that cross the fault zone.
The total cost of damage to buildings was estimated at $33 billion, with modern buildings faring well but older buildings being particularly susceptible. Fires would rage – as they did following the Northridge earthquake – as gas mains, and water pipes, become severed; in fact, the damage from resulting fires is estimated as more costly than that resulting from the initial shaking.
The overall death toll is estimated at 1,800. And just when things don't look like they can get any worse, the main event will have destabilized the tectonics of the region to such an extent that a series of potentially powerful aftershocks will begin. For example, in 2011, Christchurch, New Zealand was struck by a 6.2 magnitude event and since then the city and surrounding region have experienced more than 10,000 aftershocks.
Fortunately, the film San Andreas is pure fiction, featuring the levels of exaggeration we are all used to from film makers who are, ironically, also based in southern California.
Even so, in all probability, the San Andreas is likely to generate a significant earthquake in the not too distant future. When it arrives, the damage will be significant and southern California will be massively affected. But Californians are no strangers to these events and the infrastructure of the state, in recent times, has been designed with earthquake protection in mind.
Forget tsunamis and deep chasms opening up, but do expect violent shaking, building damage, fires and widespread economic impacts as the region is out of action for potentially a long period of time.


Matthew Blackett is a senior lecturer in physical geography and natural hazards at Coventry University in England.

[Meho Krljic]

  NYC Airports: We Can No Longer Tolerate TSA's 'Inadequacy' 

Travelers -- it's not just you.
Management of the New York City area's three major airports is fed up with long lines at security check points, and they have given the Transportation Security Administration an ultimatum: Either shorten the lines or we'll find someone else to do it.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, tasked with running John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports, is threatening to privatize the process of screening passengers before boarding their flight, according to a document sent from the Port Authority to TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger.
"We can no longer tolerate the continuing inadequacy of the TSA passenger services," the letter obtained by ABC News reads.
According to the Port Authority, the March 15 to April 15 period at JFK saw 253 reported occurrences of 20-plus-minute waits. In 2015, only 10 instances were reported over the same time period.
"The patience of the flying public has reached a breaking point," the letter reads. Passenger wait times have "risen dramatically in recent months, prompting angry complaints from passengers, terminal operators, and airlines alike citing inconvenience, delayed flights, and missed flight connections."
While the Port Authority says it understands the challenges facing TSA, it says it "is exploring the merits" of participating in private screening "to enhance flexibility in the assignments and operating hours of front line screening staff."
They wouldn't be the first.
The busiest airport in the country, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, made a similar threat in February.
There are less than two-dozen airports currently using private screening. Most of these airports are very small. However, there are exceptions.
San Francisco International Airport and Kansas City International Airport both have private firms handling a significant amount of passengers. These firms must meet the same standards and protocols as TSA and pay officers at least what TSA pays.
The airports and firms also must go through a process to get approved.
A TSA spokesperson said the agency is addressing the growing volume of travelers, but that "TSA's primary focus is the current threat environment, as the American transportation system remains a high value target for terrorists."
TSA said it will respond to the Port Authority directly. The agency said there is no noticeable difference in wait times between federalized and non-federalized screening points. The agency encourages travelers to sign up for TSA Pre or other trusted traveler programs like Global Entry and to arrive at airports at least two hours before a domestic flight.

[Meho Krljic]

Ima li kraja Obaminom saginjanju!?!??!??!?!

Barack Obama to visit Hiroshima - first US president to do so since 1945 nuclear attack

With less than a year in office, President Barack Obama is continuing to make nothing less than history.
Two months after he became the first sitting US president in a century to visit Cuba, the White House has announced that he will visit Hiroshima, the first American leader to do so since the Japanese city was turned to rubble in 1945 by a US nuclear bomb.
Mr Obama and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will make the May 27 visit "to highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement. It will be Mr Obama's fourth visit to Japan.
When President Obama first visited Japan in November 2009, he said he hoped he would one day visit both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States dropped atomic bombs during the very final days of World War II.
"The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are etched in the minds of the world, and I would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency," Mr Obama said at the time.
At least 140,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, when the city became synonymous with the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon on August 9 1945. Three days later, the US dropped a second atomic device on the city of Nagasaki and within a week Japan had surrendered to Allied forces.

On May 27,

@POTUS will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Here's what the visit means: https://t.co/myP3vgmtwJ pic.twitter.com/vMY7VbCY3z
— Ben Rhodes (@rhodes44) May 10, 2016

Mr Obama's visit will follow that of Secretary of State John Kerry, who was among foreign ministers from G7 nations who took part in a ceremony at a peace park in the city in April. Britain's Philip Hammond also took part in the event.
Mr Kerry said his visit had been a "gut-wrenching" reminder of the need to get rid of nuclear weapons.
"It reminds everybody of the extraordinary complexity of choices in war and of what war does to people, to communities, to countries, to the world," he said.
A White House advisor, Ben Rhodes, wrote on Tuesday that Mr Obama will reflect on took place in the city 70 years ago. He said he would not revisit the use of an atomic bomb but "will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future".
"To be sure, the United States will be eternally proud of our civilian leaders and the men and women of our armed forces who served in World War II for their sacrifice at a time of maximum peril to our country and our world," he said. "Their cause was just, and we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude, which the President will again commemorate shortly after the visit on Memorial Day. This visit will offer an opportunity to honor the memory of all innocents who were lost during the war."
The Associated Press said that the White House has ruled out the possibility that Obama will apologise for the bombing of Hiroshima.
On Tuesday, speaking to reporters in Tokyo, the Japanese Prime Minister said he hoped to turn "this into an opportunity for the US and Japan to together pay tribute to the memories of the victims" of the nuclear bombing.
"President Obama visiting Hiroshima and expressing toward the world the reality of the impact of nuclear radiation will contribute greatly to establishing a world without nuclear arms," he said, according to Reuters.

[lilit]

  NYC Airports: We Can No Longer Tolerate TSA's 'Inadequacy' 

zamalo da prebijem jednog sad na povratku iz usa. JFK airport, TSA (poslednji na gejtu pre aviona..da, da, i to ima) bio na nekim drogama ili alkoholisan ili idiot,  krenuo da maltretira putnike, posebno tipa ispred mene koji je imao neku torbu s lekovima (kao: imas previse torbi i to je to - no solušn).
grešku je napravio kad nam je svima pokupio boarding passes jer se dalo očekivati da neće znati da ih vrati vlasnicima a da ne napravi nijednu grešku.
sačekah da moj završi kod žene koja je već krenula ka avionu i onda dreknuh: - security breach!
bilo je zabavno posle, dala sam ga max na inspiraciji.
dragi austrian airlines i rot zweigelt nakon toga...

[Meho Krljic]

Interesantna statistika, s obzirom da se stalno sluša kako policiju u SAD napadaju i ubijaju osobe ne-kavkaskog porekla: 71% ubica policajaca su indeed kavkaske provinijencije:


KING: White men killed more American police than any other group this year, but conservatives won't address the facts

Would it shock you to learn that the number of police who've been shot and killed in 2016 is up an astounding 59% from where it was this same date last year? Seventeen police officers have already been shot and killed in 2016, by mid-May. Only 10 had suffered that fate by May 10th, 2015.
The drastic increase shocked the hell out of me. While I primarily track, study and report the number of people killed by police, I still follow police fatalities closely. Contrary to popular belief, despising police brutality does not mean I despise police officers. I appreciate all public servants and have both a police officer and a longtime Secret Service member in my family. They are amazing, kind-hearted men who do great work. I also despise gun violence and loathe every single fatality suffered because of it.
Something's afoot, though, on why we're not hearing much about this shocking increase in the number of officers who've been shot and killed so far in 2016. Sadly, I think I have the answer.
Seventy-one percent of police who've been shot and killed this year weren't murdered by black men with cornrows or hoodies. They weren't gunned down by Latino gang members in low-rider drive-bys. Those stereotypes would be too convenient. Instead, 71% of police who've been shot and killed so far in 2016 have been killed by good old-fashioned white men.
KING: White suspect runs from cops without fear of being shot at
Back in February, when police began protesting Beyoncé, I noticed then that 7 out of the 8 officers who had been killed so far were killed by white men. My gut was that most of them weren't Beyoncé fans.


The trend continues. This past weekend police protested a Beyoncé concert in Houston. In the meantime, white men continue to murder police officers all over the country.
In fact, right around the same time police were protesting Beyoncé, a white man, Curtis Ayers, shot and killed Officer Brad Lancaster of Kansas City. Lancaster was a decorated Air Force veteran and a loving father of two.
The last officer before that to be shot and killed was Officer Steven Smith, also a married father of two. Lincoln Rutledge, the white man who killed him, had also burned down his wife's home.
A month before that, Evan Dorsey, a white man who had been in and out of prison since 2008, shot and killed Deputy Carl Koontz, a married father with an 8-month-old baby.


You haven't seen these stories on Fox News or Breitbart because they don't fit their narrative of blaming police violence on the Black Lives Matter movement or President Obama. Because "scary" black faces can't be flashed across their screens, they don't even tell the stories at all — which suggests they don't care so much about police, but about using police deaths like a political football.
You best believe that if a 59% rise in the number of police officers shot and killed in the line of duty could be blamed on immigrants, Mexicans, or black folk, it would be a regular conservative talking point.
Instead, Donald Trump has never mentioned these fallen officers on the campaign trail because it may have very well been his supporters who did the shooting for all he knows.
It appears that blue lives only matter to popular conservatives when they are taken by somebody they can easily demonize. In the meantime, police groups continue to protest a black woman when a black woman hasn't killed an officer in years.

[Meho Krljic]

Američka toaletna saga se nastavlja, dobijajući sve apsurdnije prelive:

Woman Harassed in Bathroom for Appearing Transgender — and She's Not Alone

A woman in a baseball cap who was harassed by a fellow bathroom-goer at a Connecticut Walmart over the weekend, apparently being mistaken for a transgender man, has been getting much media play this week.
Aimee Toms, 22, said in a video she posted to Facebook — already viewed more than 57,000 times — that she was using the bathroom at a Danbury Walmart on Friday when a woman suddenly approached her from behind and yelled, "You are not supposed to be here! You need to leave!" The woman then gave Toms the finger, told her she was "disgusting," and stormed out.
While the details of the situation are disturbing — particularly in light of various transgender "bathroom bills" being debated in North Carolina and beyond — similar episodes are neither rare nor new for women seen as being on the male end of the gender spectrum. And Toms' experience is shining a light on how such confrontations can affect women on the receiving end — as well as how the growing national frenzy around bathroom use is emboldening citizens, more than ever, to become restroom gender vigilantes.
"OK, I get it, the baseball cap, I was wearing just a plain blue T-shirt, she saw me from the back, OK. I can get why at first glance she would mistake me for somebody who's transgender," Toms said in her video. (Although, if she were in fact a transgender male, then she would have been in the correct bathroom, according to transgender bathroom-bill proponents.) And, Toms added, "It really got my gears turning at how amazingly ridiculous this is becoming as an issue."



It can also be a major source of anxiety for tomboys and butch-identified women who, just like transgender people, deal with bathroom vigilantes constantly. A recent Texas situation, in which a man followed a woman into a restroom to make sure she wasn't a man, as well as another scene posted to Facebook (origins unknown) that shows a boyish-looking woman being chased out of a bathroom by security — are just a couple of examples of this issue. More were provided to Yahoo Beauty, in the form of personal stories, in response to an anecdote-seeking Facebook post on Tuesday.
"This whole debate is so misguided," one woman explained in her response. "It's all based on appearances, NOT gender identity. For most of the last decade, I have dreaded using public women's restrooms. I've had women stop me and start telling me I'm in the wrong bathroom. I've seen women come into the restroom, see me, then go back out and re-read the sign on the door to make sure they are in in the right restroom. I am not transgender and this is my reality because I 'look like a man' at first glance... or second glance."
According to Sasha Alexander, a spokesperson for the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a New York City transgender law resource, "There's a very symbolic meaning to entering a public restroom — it's so charged." Restrooms are and have pretty much always been, in fact, ground zero for anxiety, stress, and harassment for transgender people and for anyone not adhering to expected gender norms. That was the focus of an ahead-of-its time 2003 documentary, "Toilet Training," created by the SRLP and filmmaker Tara Mateik, currently in the process of being updated to reflect the current national conversation.
And there's a lot of baggage and symbolism associated with public restrooms — a traditional battleground when it comes to civil rights and segregation. "Part of the issue with public spaces is, in some ways, it's a litmus test for where the country is at with many issues," Alexander tells Yahoo Beauty. "Bathrooms have become a central piece when you talk about gender — partly because of the sexist-vulnerability-of-women piece, and also because people want to make [gender] all about people's parts."
Just a sampling of other anecdotes shared with Yahoo Beauty illustrate that truth:
•"[This happens to me] all day long," noted one woman, of San Francisco. "Once at an airport restroom in San Diego, I was at the sink washing my hands and saw an elderly lady enter. She saw me in the mirror, looked confused, turned around, and walked out. Not one minute later she walked back in and poked me in the chest and said, "I thought I was in the wrong bathroom, but YOU'RE in the wrong bathroom." I would probably have less trouble if I used the bathroom NOT of the gender on my birth certificate."
•"I get a look pretty much every time I use a public restroom — because of how I carry myself, what I'm wearing," said a woman from New York City. "It's slightly annoying, because people just don't look. Usually people are trying to figure it out, or are questioning themselves as to whether or not they are in the right bathroom. One time, at a Connecticut highway rest stop, a male employee tried to stop me on my way in the bathroom, yelling, 'Hey! You can't go in there!' I said, 'I am a woman!' and kept going. He wouldn't let up, so I turned around, lifted my shirt and flashed him."
•"Barely a day goes by that I don't get at least a second look going into the women's room. This is OK with me," explained a mother of two from Sacramento. "I realize that, for a moment, a woman sincerely thinks that a man is walking into the women's room — and as a woman myself, I get that you would cognitively want to sort this out to determine if there was danger, an error, or something else going on. But what has happened several times over the years is a woman does the double take... and, I believe, knows I am a woman, but nonetheless looks me dead in the eye and says, 'Uh, this is the ladies room,' loud enough to be not meant for only me to hear and, I think, therefore, intended to shame."
"Some of this policing is always happening," Alexander notes. "But when you have presidential candidates asking 'are little girls safe?' it becomes very volatile... Part of where we need to see this discussion go is to see everyone accessing bathrooms and public space equally."

Refrence radi, žena iz naslova teksta izgleda ovako:

[Meho Krljic]

Hiring Hurdle: Finding Workers Who Can Pass a Drug Test

SAVANNAH, Ga. — A few years back, the heavy-equipment manufacturer JCB held a job fair in the glass foyer of its sprawling headquarters near here, but when a throng of prospective employees learned the next step would be drug testing, an alarming thing happened: About half of them left.
That story still circulates within the business community of this historic port city. But the problem has gotten worse.
All over the country, employers say they see a disturbing downside of tighter labor markets as they try to rebuild from the worst recession since the Depression: They are struggling to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test.
That hurdle partly stems from the growing ubiquity of drug testing, at corporations with big human resources departments, in industries like trucking where testing is mandated by federal law for safety reasons, and increasingly at smaller companies.
But data suggest employers' difficulties also reflect an increase in the use of drugs, especially marijuana — employers' main gripe — and also heroin and other opioid drugs much in the news.


Ray Gaster, the owner of lumberyards on both sides of the Georgia-South Carolina border, recently joined friends at a retreat in Alabama to swap business talk. The big topic? Drug tests.
"They were complaining about trying to find drivers, or finding people, who are drug-free and can do some of the jobs that they have," Mr. Gaster said. He shared their concern.
Drug use in the work force "is not a new problem. Back in the '80s, it was pretty bad, and we brought it down," said Calvina L. Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation. But, she added, "we've seen it edging back up some," and increasingly, both employers and industry associations "have expressed exasperation."
Data on the scope of the problem is sketchy because figures on job applicants who test positive for drugs miss the many people who simply skip tests they cannot pass.Nonetheless, in its most recent report, Quest Diagnostics, which has compiled employer-testing data since 1988, documented an increase for a second consecutive year in the percentage of American workers who tested positive for illicit drugs — to 4.7 percent in 2014 from 4.3 percent in 2013. And 2013 was the first year in a decade to show an increase.
John Sambdman, who employs about 100 people in Atlanta at Samson Trailways, which provides transportation for schools, events, tour groups and the military, must test job applicants and, randomly, employees. Many job seekers "just don't bother to show up at the drug-testing place," he complained. Just on Thursday, Mr. Sambdman said, an applicant failed a drug test.


In August, Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia promised to develop a program to help because so many business owners tell him "the No. 1 reason they can't hire enough workers is they can't find enough people to pass a drug test."
That program is still under discussion. When job seekers contact Georgia's Department of Labor, which provides some recruitment services to employers, the state would like to begin testing them for drugs; individuals who test positive could receive drug counseling and ultimately job placement assistance, Mark Butler, the state labor commissioner, said in an interview.
"Obviously, it's not an easy process, and it would be costly," Mr. Butler said. "But you've got to think: What is the reverse of that?" People needed to fill jobs are turned away, and, he added, "it's pretty much a national issue."
In Indiana, Mark Dobson, president of the Economic Development Corporation of Elkhart County, said that when he went to national conferences, the topic was "such a common thread of conversation — whether it's in an area like ours that's really enjoying very low unemployment levels or even areas with more moderate employment bases."
In Colorado, "to find a roofer or a painter that can pass a drug test is unheard-of," said Jesse Russow, owner of Avalanche Roofing & Exteriors, in Colorado Springs. That was true even before Colorado, like a few other states, legalized recreational use of marijuana.
In a sector where employers like himself tend to rely on Latino workers, Mr. Russow tried to diversify three years ago by recruiting white workers, vetting about 80 people. But, he said, "As soon as I say 'criminal background check,' 'drug test,' they're out the door."


While the employers' predicament is worsened by a smaller hiring pool, the drug problem for those that require testing is not as bad as it once was. "If we go back to 1988, the combined U.S. work force positivity was 13.6 percent when drug testing was new," said Dr. Barry Sample, Quest's director of science and technology.
But two consecutive years of increases are worrisome, he said.
A much broader data trove, the federal government's annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health, reported in September that one in 10 Americans ages 12 and older reported in 2014 that they had used illicit drugs within the last month — the largest share since 2001.
Taken together, Dr. Sample said, his data and the government's indicate higher drug use among those who work for employers without a drug-testing program than workers who are tested, though use by the latter increased as well in 2013 and 2014.
Testing dates to the Reagan administration. The 1988 Drug-Free Workplace Act required most employers with federal contracts or grants to test workers. In 1991, Congress responded to a deadly 1987 train crash in which two operators tested positive for marijuana by requiring testing for all "safety sensitive" jobs regulated by the Transportation Department. Those laws became the model for other employers. Some states give businesses a break on workers' compensation insurance if they are certified as drug-free.
Here at the main yard of Gaster Lumber and Hardware, faded certificates and signs ("Drugs Don't Work Here") attest to its certification as a drug-free workplace since 1994.
Mr. Gaster's human resources director, Chuck Keller, said that status reduced workers' compensation payments for its nearly 50 employees by 7.5 percent in Georgia and 5 percent in South Carolina. The savings, about $4,000 this year, offset costs of about $2,500 for laboratory and on-site testing and related requirements.


"We're always short of drivers," Mr. Gaster said, "and drug testing is part of it."
Terry Donaldson, 53, who was tested when he started 20 years ago, supports the policy: "If they want to have a good job, the drugs got to go."
So it was for some of his new co-workers.
Britt Sikes, 38 and a single father to three young girls, lost his teeth to methamphetamine and used marijuana since he was 8 — until three weeks before taking the test for his $13-an-hour job as a Gaster door installer.
"I'm a recovering drug addict myself, and to raise my girls, I had to learn to leave it alone," Mr. Sikes said.
Kevin Canty, 55, said that in his experience, "most people can't pass the drug test because they don't want to pass a drug test."
"They want the job," he added, but "they still want to be in that lifestyle. And they have to choose."
One of the newest hires, Frederick Brown, 34, said, "I come from a society where drugs is common — marijuana, weed, it's common," and people who cannot pass a drug test seek work at McDonald's. Most restaurants do not test. "I asked for this job," Mr. Brown said, calling it a blessing. "I already knew what I had to do — you know what I'm saying?"

[Meho Krljic]

Austin Petersen je kandidat Libertarijanske stranke na ovogodišnjim predsedničkim izborima u SAD. Neki tvrde i da je trolčina. Pre par dana je na, pretpostavljam izbornom skupu izjavio da heroin ipak ne bi trebalo prodavati deci. Prisutni su glasno negodovali. 

[Meho Krljic]

Prvo je bio dotkom mjehur. Sad imamo Jednoroge...


Poučan incident o jednom takvom:

Forbes just cut its estimate of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes's net worth from $4.5 billion to zero

Not long ago, Elizabeth Holmes was regarded as one of the US's most successful female entrepreneurs, with a net worth of $4.5 billion, Forbes estimated.
Today Forbes cut that figure to zero.
Holmes's wealth is entirely wrapped up in her 50% stake in Theranos, the medical testing start-up she founded in 2003. The privately-held company in Palo Alto became a standout for its bold attempts to revolutionize the diagnostic industry—it claimed it could test for 240 diseases from a few drops of blood—and for A-listers like Henry Kissinger and Bill Frist on its advisory board.
Last year, Forbes pegged its value at $9 billion, based on the sale of stakes to investors. Since that lofty estimate, Theranos has been battered by bad news, starting with reports in the Wall Street Journal in October that its tests were inaccurate. That triggered an inquiry from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which proposed banning Holmes from the industry.
Forbes went back to its slide rule and, after talking to venture capitalists and industry experts, recalculated Theranos' value at $900 million, based on its intellectual property and money it has already raised. "At such a low valuation, Holmes's stake is essentially worth nothing," Matt Herper writes.
That's because Theranos's other investors own preferred shares, and since Holmes owns common shares, they would get paid first if the company were forced to liquidate.
Theranos didn't provide a comment to Forbes and has yet to respond to an email from Quartz sent before the start of business hours in California today.
Update: Theranos sent an email with the following statement: "As a privately held company, we declined to share confidential financial information with Forbes. As a result, the article was based exclusively on speculation and press reports."

[Meho Krljic]

Startups can't explain what they do because they're addicted to meaningless jargon 

Internet startup culture has evolved and matured over the past five years, and there's no better example of this than the RISE conference happening this week in Hong Kong. Whereas Silicon Valley was once the sole hub of internet innovation, startups here hail from Bangalore, Singapore, and other cities. The macho bravado many associate with the culture has even dampened somewhat—34% of attendees are women.   
As startup culture has gone global and transcended stereotypes, though, one of its defining traits has stuck around. Startup jargon is alive and well, and it seems to be getting worse.
 
"Content." "Platforms." "Synergy." "End-to-end." "Solutions." It's nearly impossible to find a startup at the conference that doesn't resort to jargon when describing itself.   
These words sound technical and informed. But they mean nothing, and they make it difficult for ordinary people to understand what a company actually does. In an effort to either sound smart and attract investors, or to simply dress up an otherwise boring product, startups that rely too much on jargon end up alienating the users they want to attract. 
  Take Kalpesh Rathod. The 42-year-old Canadian made an app called Cubes. It's kind of cool. But he has trouble explaining what it does without resorting to buzzwords.
 
"We visually organize your email and cloud-based content for ultra fast access," says Kalpesh, reading from his promotional materials. "It's visual storytelling with any type of content."

What is my cloud-based content, exactly? It tells stories? I ask Kalpesh if he can explain this more clearly.   
"We have a library that's just a feed of content. You can search content by type. I have five email accounts and my Dropbox account here. So if I'm looking for a PDF document, here's a stream of all of my PDF documents from these accounts using a visual interface." 
  Translation: Cubes is actually an app that pinpoints anything that's not plain-Jane text in your email or Dropbox accounts (a photograph, an excel file, a YouTube video), takes snapshots of those things, and then bundles them together in a standalone app. The idea is, if you receive a lot of photo attachments via email, for example, it will be easier to find them if they're kept separate from your cluttered inbox.   
Rathod says he's prone to jargon in part because his product is simply hard to explain. Cubes is not quite an email inbox, not quite a Dropbox clone, and not quite a photo library. "It's always hard to get the right verbiage," he tells Quartz. 
Michael Bergmann is another startup founder who can't ditch his addiction to jargon. The 35-year-old German describes his product, Indy Cloud, as a "know-how and synergy platform."

"A synergy platform means that many small businesses are on one platform and together they create value for them, because we can bundle their demand and they get better deals" he says. 
Indy Cloud is really a web app (that's the "cloud" part) that's kind of a Microsoft Excel alternative, designed specifically for small businesses. The software forces users to follow a specific procedure for inputting category names and data, so that tweaking one spreadsheet leads to a corresponding tweak in another. Change Company A's address to 123 Main Street in one spreadsheet, and all other spreadsheets with Company A will update accordingly. 
Bergmann isn't happy describing Indy Cloud as a Microsoft Excel alternative, however. In his view, Indy Cloud "has a database solution." It's also "reactive." Excel is neither of these things.

"I think the most accurate, concise, and jargon free way to describe Indy Cloud is maybe ERP," he says. "We are an enterprise resource planning solution." 
Even companies making simpler products aren't immune. Undone, a Hong Kong startup that makes custom-designed watches, describes itself as a "disruptive consumer brand with state of the art customization technology with original content platform." 
SparkShare, an Australian company that makes a video chat app, describes it as a "video reactions network."

"It's jargon, but it's the only way that we can start out when we explain ourselves," says co-founder Chris Parker. "We could turn the jargon on [even more] and say that we're a 'cloud-based streaming content delivery network,' but we find that it doesn't resonate with people."
 
Startups resort to jargon in order to sound more interesting than they actually are, Casey Lau, a startup event organizer in Hong Kong, said.
 
"The word 'cloud' sounds very expansive and grand," he says. "But if you just said 'We're on the internet,' which is what 'cloud' usually means, then it doesn't sound as exciting."

Kako umetnost ponekad najavljuje stvarnost, Silicon Valley je ovo parodirao još u prvoj sezoni:


http://youtu.be/J-GVd_HLlps

[Meho Krljic]

Džon Oliver je heroj koga Amerika ne zaslužuje ali možda heroj koji je Americi potreban. U sklopu svojih stalnih čačkanja po stvarima koje u Americi nisu na mestu (bar iz perspektive Evropljanina koji tamo pečalbari), došao je i do firmi koje otkupljuju dugove za siću a onda maltertiraju nejač da te dugove vrati u fulu i sa kamatom. Ajde što je o tome snimio prilog kako to već on radi, nego što je ON osnovao firmu za otkup dugova, otkupio za svega šezdeset hiljada dolara dugove 9000 ljudi u vrednosti od skoro petnaest milijuna dolara i onda svima oprostio dugove. Whoa.  Moja pretplata na HBO je zapravo doprinela nečem dobrom? Ko bi to očekivao???


Gardijanov prilog o tome:

John Oliver buys and forgives $15m worth of medical debt

A evo i segmenta iz emisije:


http://youtu.be/hxUAntt1z2c

[Aco Popara Zver]

Што би му било ко поклонио 15 милиона? Вјероватно је 90% ненаплативо. То неки медикл бусплус...

Зато ће Трамп то поправити!

[lilit]

In Trump I trust!
i jedva ga čekam na predsedničkoj poziciji sad kad je Berni desetkovan.

[Meho Krljic]

  Court: No right to carry concealed weapons in public 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Dealing a blow to gun supporters, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Americans do not have a constitutional right to carry concealed weapons in public.
In a dispute that could ultimately wind up before the Supreme Court, a divided 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said local law enforcement officials can place significant restrictions on who is allowed to carry concealed guns.
By a vote of 7-4, the court upheld a California law that says applicants must cite a "good cause" to obtain a concealed-carry permit. Typically, people who are being stalked or threatened, celebrities who fear for their safety, and those who routinely carry large amounts of cash or other valuables are granted permits.
"We hold that the Second Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public," Circuit Judge William A. Fletcher wrote for the majority.
The ruling overturned a 2014 decision by a three-judge panel of the same court that said applicants need only express a desire for personal safety.
In a dissent, Circuit Judge Consuelo M. Callahan said the ruling "obliterates the Second Amendment's right to bear a firearm in some manner in public for self-defense."
Three other federal appeals courts have ruled similarly in the past, upholding California-like restrictions in New York, Maryland and New Jersey. In addition, another federal appeals court struck down Illinois' complete ban on carrying concealed weapons.
The 9th Circuit covers nine Western states, but California and Hawaii are the only ones in which the ruling will have any practical effect. The others do not require permit applicants to cite a "good cause." Anyone in those states with a clean record and no history of mental illness can get a permit.
The National Rifle Association called the ruling "out of touch."
"This decision will leave good people defenseless, as it completely ignores the fact that law-abiding Californians who reside in counties with hostile sheriffs will now have no means to carry a firearm outside the home for personal protection," said NRA legislative chief Chris W. Cox.
Gun control advocates and others hailed the ruling.
"This is a significant victory for public safety and for local jurisdictions that apply sensible policies to protect the public," said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat.
The California case began in 2009, when Edward Peruta filed a legal challenge over the San Diego County sheriff's refusal to issue him a permit. Peruta said at the time he wanted a weapon to protect himself, but the sheriff said he needed a better reason, such as that his occupation exposes him to robbery.
Peruta, who is a videographer known for legally challenging local government restrictions, said he is neither a hunter, collector or target shooter but challenged the law because he believed it violated the Constitution. The NRA joined him in fighting the law.
The San Diego Sheriff's Department said Thursday that since the 9th Circuit tossed out the law two years ago, it has received 2,463 applications from people seeking a concealed-weapon permit without having to show good cause.
Sheriff's lawyer Robert Faigan said the department hasn't processed those applications and will continue to hold on to them while it waits to see what the Supreme Court does.
___
This story has been corrected to show that at least three federal appeals courts — not two — have ruled similarly.

[lilit]

ono kad mi je potrebno opuštanje ili zašto amerika nikad neće propasti (bar dok ne umre chomsky)

! No longer available

[džin tonik]

Ovo je Omar Mateen (29), počinitelj najvećeg masakra u povijesti Amerike

Masakr kakav Amerika ne pamti dogodio se u noći na nedjelju u jednom od najvećih noćnih gay klubova u Orlandu. Počinio ga je Omar Mateen (29), američki državljanin afganistanskog porijekla za kojega FBI sumnja da je možda bio povezan s islamskim ekstremistima.

Njegovi su roditelji rođeni u Afganistanu, a on sam je, kako piše ABC News, neko vrijeme bio pod prismotrom američkih službi iako nikada nije bio pod formalnom istragom.

CBS javlja da je na jednom od popisa sumnjivaca bio proteklih pet godina.

Njegov otac tvrdi da religija nije imala nikakve veze s masakrom, tvrdi da je povod svemu bijes koji je Mateena prije nekoliko mjeseci obuzeo kada je u Miamiju vidio dvojicu muškaraca kako se strastveno ljube nasred ulice.

Prema pisanju Reutersa, među prvima je njegova fotografija osvanula na jednom od profila povezanih s Islamskom državom, no sam ISIS, protiv kojega Amerika vodi rat na području Iraka i Sirije, a koji neprekidno poziva na napad na američke ciljeve, nije službeno preuzeo odgovornost za napad.

U međuvremenu NBC News je, pozivajući se na više izvora u sigurnosnom aparatu, izvijestio da je Mateen neposredno prije početka pucnjave nazvao hitni broj 911 te je izrekao svoju odanost Islamskoj državi. Pritom je navodno spominjao i bombaše iz Bostona, braću Tsarnaev.

Američka policija napad u Orlandu vodi kao teroristički čin.

Kao što smo već izvijestili, policijski časnik koji je radio kao zaštitar u noćnom klubu Pulse razmijenio je vatru s napadačem oko 2 sata ujutro.

Ubrzo se razvila talačka kriza i tri sata kasnije interventna policija je upala u klub i ubila napadača. Prema posljednjim podacima, život je izgubilo najmanje 50 ljudi, a ozlijeđeno ih je više od 50.

[Meho Krljic]

Njegov otac tvrdi da religija nije imala nikakve veze s masakrom, tvrdi da je povod svemu bijes koji je Mateena prije nekoliko mjeseci obuzeo kada je u Miamiju vidio dvojicu muškaraca kako se strastveno ljube nasred ulice.

A Njujork post tvrdi da je njegov otac ludak koji podržava Talibane.

[lilit]

bog te mazo, bila sam tamo

[Аксентије Новаковић]

Где си била? Међу талибанима? 

[džin tonik]

A Njujork post tvrdi da je njegov otac ludak koji podržava Talibane.

svi prodaju rekla-kazala glasine razne, senzacija, kako god, fakat nije bas iz sto bi rekli iz normalne roditeljske kuce. mislim, po nekim civilizacijskim standardima.

bog te mazo, bila sam tamo

isuse kriste, sveta marijo, bar da sam stavio u lilit reagiraj.

[Mark]

Apropo ubistava u gej klubu. Nije mi jasno, kako jedan čovek može da pobije 50 ljudi i da rani još 50 a da ne upotrebi eksploziv. Kako to da se žrtve ne brane, kako nije njih desetoro nagrnulo na ubicu, da ga obore, uzmu mu oružije, pa makar se  neko žrtvovao za ostale? Meni je ovo čisti krimi zaplet na granici SF-a. Nisam teoretičar zavere, ovo mi je neverovatno iz čisto ljudskog aspekta. Ali i logističkog, metodološkog, jer nije ovaj išao ulicom i ubijao nasumice, nego se sve dešavalo u zatvorenom prostoru, gde su ljudi mogli da se sakriju i prepadnu ubicu, da ga sačekaju iza negog ugla i razbiju mu glavu ... Ili su ljudi postali baš takve ovce.

PS
Tramp je u pravu, da je recimo bar neko od žrtava imao oružije, ne bi ubica postigao baš ovoliki skor.

[mac]

Da više ljudi ima oružje onda bi se oružje češće potezalo.

[Aco Popara Zver]

Па и Сандерс подржава керинг да вепн

Само у САД сваки билде може купити базуку преко нета, па би се то могло мало ограничити

[eddie coyle]

We're a happy family, me, mom and daddy...

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/13/orlando-gunmans-father-condemns-atrocity-but-says-punishment-for-gay-people-is-up-to-god

[lilit]

Apropo ubistava u gej klubu. Nije mi jasno, kako jedan čovek može da pobije 50 ljudi i da rani još 50 a da ne upotrebi eksploziv. Kako to da se žrtve ne brane, kako nije njih desetoro nagrnulo na ubicu, da ga obore, uzmu mu oružije, pa makar se  neko žrtvovao za ostale? Meni je ovo čisti krimi zaplet na granici SF-a. Nisam teoretičar zavere, ovo mi je neverovatno iz čisto ljudskog aspekta. Ali i logističkog, metodološkog, jer nije ovaj išao ulicom i ubijao nasumice, nego se sve dešavalo u zatvorenom prostoru, gde su ljudi mogli da se sakriju i prepadnu ubicu, da ga sačekaju iza negog ugla i razbiju mu glavu ... Ili su ljudi postali baš takve ovce.

PS
Tramp je u pravu, da je recimo bar neko od žrtava imao oružije, ne bi ubica postigao baš ovoliki skor.

meni se ne čini da je teško. prostor je ogroman, muzika (pre)glasna, relativno mračno, alkohola previše, ogromna koncentracija ljudi na malom prostoru, ne čuješ ni osobu koja stoji pored tebe, etc.
pretpostavljam da u tom prvom momentu kad je moron zapucao, niko nije ni bio svestan šta se dešava. a onda su verovatno pokušali da se sklone, po principu: neće mene.
i tako dođemo do cifre od 50.

[Biki]

Apropo ubistava u gej klubu. Nije mi jasno, kako jedan čovek može da pobije 50 ljudi i da rani još 50 a da ne upotrebi eksploziv. Kako to da se žrtve ne brane, kako nije njih desetoro nagrnulo na ubicu, da ga obore, uzmu mu oružije, pa makar se  neko žrtvovao za ostale? Meni je ovo čisti krimi zaplet na granici SF-a. Nisam teoretičar zavere, ovo mi je neverovatno iz čisto ljudskog aspekta. Ali i logističkog, metodološkog, jer nije ovaj išao ulicom i ubijao nasumice, nego se sve dešavalo u zatvorenom prostoru, gde su ljudi mogli da se sakriju i prepadnu ubicu, da ga sačekaju iza negog ugla i razbiju mu glavu ... Ili su ljudi postali baš takve ovce.

PS
Tramp je u pravu, da je recimo bar neko od žrtava imao oružije, ne bi ubica postigao baš ovoliki skor.

Zato sto niko nije ocekivao tako nesto. To je LGBT club, ljudi su tamo da bi igrali, proveli se, minding their own bussiness. Mnogi intervjuisani kazu da su na pocetku mislili da je taj zvuk pucnjave deo muzike. Ljudi jednostavno nisu ukapirali sta se desava dok nisu krenuli da padaju pogodjeni mecima.
Tramp nije u pravu nikako. Ne postoji ni jedan normalan razlog da bilo ko osim policie i vojske moze da kupi rafalno oruzje. To je jednostavno van pameti bilo kome prodati. Za samoodbranu je dovoljno imati obican pistolj ako je nekome neophodno.

[Dybuk]

To da je odgovor na masovna ubistva vise oruzja je cista NRA/republikanska propaganda.

logican i razuman rezon je kontrola oruzja, ko moze da kupi, sta i koliko a ne naoruzavanje jos vise ljudi kako bi se broj zrtava vatrenog oruzja smanjio.

[Son of Man]

Neko me pitao juče il' prekjuče (ne znam više ni koji je dan) za ovaj nemili incident na Floridi gde je jaran upuco 50 ljudi? Šta sam odgovorio na prvu loptu? Peder upuco pedere, jel' tako? A vamo ide propaganda kao teroista ovo, ono. A zapravo ključ leži baš u tome da je bio prikriveni gej, jer da je drugačije napao bi običan klub a ne ovaj malo drugojačiji. Dakle iz keca u kec, šteta što nisam uplatio koji dinar na gejliju.

http://www.telegraf.rs/vesti/2194561-bivsa-zena-ubice-iz-orlanda-otkrila-moj-muz-omar-je-bio-gej-ali-to-nije-smeo-da-prizna-foto

[Аксентије Новаковић]

Уцвељени педер побио неуцвељене педере.

И док се педери убивају из љубави и тако тамане међусобно, ми уживамо испред драгстора и пијемо пивџане.

[mac]

Da, kao Dragan Maksimović..

[Son of Man]

Dragan Maksimović je posle tog incidenta izjavio da je on sam pijan isprovocirao tu ekipu koja se skupljala na Zelenjaku. Oni su pevali Radove pesme, a on mi je bahato dobacio da umuknu, i prebili su ga. A jbga sad, svaka tuča je potencijalno ubistvo, sranja se stalno dešavaju. Dešava se i običnim ljudima da udare nekog nezgodno i da ga ubiju. Puni su zatvori takvih - ja svedok. Samo što je u slučaju Maksimovića to u medijima dignuto na viši nivo radi skandaloznosti, pa su plasirali priču da su ga napali jer im je ličio na Roma. Naravno, Maksimović je sve to demantovo, al' niko nije hteo da objavi, možda je izašlo u samo jednim novinama il' tako nešto. U prilog tome ide i činjenica da je Maksimović izričito zahtevao da ih policija ne goni, tako da za to ubistvo niko nije odgovarao. Takva je ljudina bio Maksimović, a ne ko ove drukare što za šamar odma zovu pubove. Alal mu vera i večna slava!

[tomat]

Pa sad, kad jednog čoveka gazi njih nekoliko, onda je potencijalnije ubistvo. Poruku su mogli da mu pošalju jednim šamarom, mada je i to ekstremna reakcija za to što ti je neko rekao da umukneš, makar i bahato.

[Meho Krljic]

Oh...

Dana Giacchetto: Stockbroker To Stars Found Dead

A former stockbroker to the stars, said to have given inspiration to Leonardo DiCaprio for his performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, has been found dead at 53.
Dana Giacchetto, who became famous in the 1990s for providing financial services to a string of celebrities, was discovered face up in his bed on Sunday, foaming at the mouth, according to the New York Daily News.
He was regularly photographed with the likes of DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon at the height of his success.
But, after he was investigated for stealing millions from others in order to prop up the portfolios of some of his famous friends, he was taken to court.
He received a four-and-a-half-year jail sentence in 2001 after pleading guilty to fraud involving $9m (£5.7m) of his clients' money.
In 2014, he was charged again with fraud for using someone else's credit card to buy alcohol, a plane ticket and food, according to court filings.
The Daily News reported that he died after a weekend of partying, during which witnesses said he got into a scuffle with nightclub security guards.
His body was found at home in his Upper West Side apartment in New York City.
The New York Post claimed in late 1999 that Mr Giacchetto was the reason why Winona Ryder split up with Matt Damon after he encouraged her to invest more than $1m with him, some time before he was indicted.
He is understood to have met his celebrity contacts after becoming an investment guru to indie music label Sub Pop records, which had Nirvana and many cult bands in its stable.
According to Vice News, which interviewed him in 2014, Mr Giacchetto kept a suitcase of photos of his time partying with DiCaprio and was still attempting to develop new businesses, such as a luxury food range that allowed people to eat lobster from a can.
He told Vice's reporter that DiCaprio used to stay at his home for months and the pair used to have matching cockatoos.
Years later, Mr Giacchetto reportedly gave DiCaprio inspiration for his role of disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort in 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street.
Photos posted on Vice's website provided by the ex-con also showed him partying with Naomi Campbell, Tobey Maguire and Q-Tip.
He told the news organisation his apartment was also regularly visited by Robert Downey Jr, Michael Stipe, Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morissette, Kate Moss and Janet Jackson before he was arrested.
Describing his time with the stars, Mr Giacchetto said: "It's a really sexy feeling, thinking ... today I can do anything I want. I can go wherever I want and everything's going to be okay and no-one's going to say 'no'."

[Meho Krljic]

What We Know About Man Minnesota Police Killed in Traffic Stop 

More details have emerged about the man who was fatally shot by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop Wednesday night as he sat in a car with a woman and child.
The victim has been identified by family as Philando Castile. He was employed as a nutrition services assistant from November 2002 until being promoted to a nutrition services supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School Aug. 11, 2014, according to the St. Paul Public Schools.
Castile also worked at Arlington High School and Chelsea Heights Elementary School during his employment with the district, the school system said.
The incident in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, appeared to be partly documented in a Facebook Live recording posted by the woman in the car, who identified herself as the man's girlfriend and said her daughter was also in the vehicle.
Police have identified the woman recording the altercation as Diamond Reynolds. In the video, Castile's shirt appears to be soaked in blood. At least one uniformed officer is seen pointing a gun through the driver's side window at Castile and can be heard saying, "I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out."
Speaking to a crowd in front of Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton's residence in St. Paul Wednesday morning, Reynolds said the officer began to shoot after she yelled that Castile was "licensed to carry."
The St. Anthony Police Department said an officer making a traffic stop at 9 p.m. Wednesday. "During the stop, shots were fired," the statement said. "One adult male was taken to the hospital. We have been informed that this individual is deceased."
The department said that no one else was injured and a handgun was recovered from the scene.
The video, posted Wednesday night, appears to show an incident similar to the one police described. It shows Reynolds sitting in a car with Castile, whose shirt appears soaked in blood, saying an officer shot her boyfriend.
"Please, officer, don't tell me that you just did this to him," she says in the video. "You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir."
Reynolds can be heard saying on video that the officer "asked him for license and registration. He told him that it was in his wallet but he had a pistol on him because he's licensed to carry. The officer said, 'Don't move.' As he was putting his hands back up, the officer shot him in the arm four or five times."
In an interview with CNN this morning, the man's mother, Valerie Castile, said that he's "been working since he was 15 years old.
"He's been paying taxes since he was 18 years old," she said. "He's been consistently employed all those years. I just don't understand it ... I'm outraged about the whole situation because he is a really good person. He's laid back. Everybody likes him. He's no thug. He don't run the street. He don't go to bars. He just does none of that."
Nekima Levy-Pounds, the president of the NAACP Minneapolis chapter, confirmed Castile's identity in a tweet early today.
In the CNN interview this morning, Valerie Castile said her son had a concealed weapon permit for Minnesota.
Just hours before he was shot, Valerie Castile said, he was at her house talking with his sister, who also has a permit, about how concealed-carry permit holders must be cautious, especially African-Americans.
"My daughter said, 'You know what? I really don't even want to carry my gun because I'm afraid that they'll shoot me first and then ask questions later,'" Valerie Castile told CNN.
She said she believes her son told the police officer he was licensed to carry a gun.
"I'm sure he did, because that was something we always discussed. Comply," she told CNN this morning. "That's the key thing in order to survive being stopped by the police is to comply. Whatever they ask you to do, do it. Don't say nothing. Just do whatever they want you to do. So what's the difference in complying and you get killed anyway?"

   Two police officers shot at protest in Dallas: local TV 

(Reuters) - Two police officers were shot in Texas on Thursday during a protest against police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, KDFW TV in Dallas reported.
The condition of the officers was not known, the station said.
Broadcaster KABC reported that shots were fired during demonstrations at Belo Garden Park in Dallas. Footage showed a heavy police presence with officers taking cover behind vehicles on the street.
Photos posted on Twitter by the Dallas Police Department showed what appeared to be several hundred people assembled on the steps of a downtown museum, many holding signs as they listened to speakers address the crowd.
In other photos and footage posted on Twitter, a crowd could be seen marching through downtown streets. Police said the crowd, at one point, chanted "Black Lives Matter."
The protests in Dallas came as demonstrations were being held in several U.S. cities over the most recent fatal police shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana.
The police department did not respond to requests for comment and did not update their Twitter account since media reports of gunfire.